The Germans are not an outdoor race; they are not given to playing outdoor sports and abiding by the rules of those sports, as Englishmen and as Americans are. And in war--that biggest of all outdoor games--it stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules, except they be rules of their own making. It may be argued that the French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive sports. But, on the other hand, the Frenchman is essentially romantic and essentially dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory afterward, he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and the generous virtues rather than the cruel and the unkindly ones, because, as we all know, it is easier to dramatise one's good impulses than one's evil ones. Now the German, as has recently been shown, is neither dramatic nor sportsmanlike. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad loser--a most remarkably bad loser. Good sportsmen would not have broken Belgium into bloody bits because Belgium stood between them and their goal; good sportsmen would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "_Gott Strafe England!_" their battle cry; good sportsmen would not have shot Edith Cavell or sunk the _Lusitania_. Good sportsmen would not have packed the helpless men and boys of a conquered and a prostrate land off as captives into an enforced servitude worse than African slavery; would not wantonly have wasted La Fère and Chauny and Ham, and a hundred other French towns, as they did in March and April of this year, for no conceivable reason than that they must surrender these towns back into the hand of the enemy; would not have cut down the little orchard trees nor shovelled dung into the drinking wells; would not, while ostensibly at peace with us, have plotted to destroy our industrial plants and to plant the seeds of sedition among our foreign-born citizens, and to dismember our country, parceling it out between a brown race in Mexico and a yellow race in Japan. Good sports do not do these things, and Germany did all of them. That means something. VIII