policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years. There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a picture as this of Raemaekers men can see it looking out of the eyes. And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit of a sly invalid. G. K. CHESTERTON. [Illustration: MISS CAVELL WILLIAM: "Now you can bring me the American protest."] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- THE HOSTAGES Ay', boy--you may well ask. And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer to the last drop of innocent blood. What have you done? You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organized barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice, have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which the race has been nourished--by which its very soul has been poisoned. Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented, even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied her. Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the Krupps. And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur has settled in baleful desire, has said, "Better to die fighting than fall into the hands of the devil!" And they have fought--valiantly, and saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations, however, they shall rise again, and with honour, when their treacherous torturers have been crushed in their turn. And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities, incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been taken. Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold blood--murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, too, of the most despicable--murder for gain--the gain that should accrue through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest. And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of imitation justice for the--unsuccessful--hoodwinking of a shocked and astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner from a German rifle? Then--"Death to the hostages!--destruction to the village!--a fine of L100,000 on the town!"