A more novel change was the despatch of a British envoy to the Vatican in the person of Sir Henry Howard, whose mission was to last till the end of the war. Its exact scope was not stated; but it seemed probable that the Pope, whose attempt to effect a truce at the front for Christmas had been frustrated by the opposition of Russia, intended in due time to offer his mediation; if so, the mission was easily intelligible. But it caused some misgiving, and not only among extreme Protestants; for it might conceivably be interpreted abroad as implying some sort of recognition of the temporal power of the Papacy. It was commonly felt that one of the conditions of peace, whenever it might come, must be the punishment of the persons responsible for the outrages and breaches of the laws of war committed by German soldiers in Belgium and France. Much evidence of these had been collected and sifted, and on December 16 it was announced that a Committee had been appointed to consider this evidence. It was a very strong one: Viscount Bryce was the Chairman; the other members were Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., Prof. A. L. Fisher, an eminent historian, and Mr. Harold Cox, sometime M.P. for Bath, and editor of the _Edinburgh Review_. Meanwhile it was clear that the end of the war could only be hastened by sending more men into the fighting line; and Mr. Bonar Law again spoke at recruiting demonstrations in his constituency of Bootle on December 21. He said that it had been evident for years that Germany was preparing for war with Great Britain as her final objective; because he knew it, he had said (A.R., 1911, p. 262) in the Commons that he did not believe in inevitable wars; if war came, it would be due to the want of human wisdom, and the best and perhaps the sole guarantee of peace was that one country should realise the strength of the other. He had thought that the rapid growth of Russian resources would deter Germany, but she had struck precisely because of its rapidity. Like Napoleon, she had aroused against herself the moral forces of the world. She had not merely ignored these moral forces, but despised them; hence her mistakes. The coast raid had made the British people realise that they were fighting, not a superman, but a wild beast. He eulogised the British Army; no army equal in size to the new Army had ever been raised by voluntary enlistment, nor could it have been so raised anywhere but in Great Britain. We should get all the men we needed, but, if not, compulsion would be demanded by the nation. The Earl of Derby, who also spoke, remarked that Prince Henry of Prussia, one of the heads of the German Navy, knew that Scarborough was defenceless, having visited it in 1912 as a guest.