Similarly, if his master shall be pleased to honor General Baron von Bissing with the iron cross for his action in the case of Miss Cavell, as the Kaiser honored the Captain of the submarine which destroyed the Lusitania--and what order could be more appropriate in both cases than the cross, which recalls how another innocent victim of judicial tyranny was sacrificed?--then even the Order of the Iron Cross will not save von Bissing from lasting obloquy. I do not question that he acted according to his lights and shared with Dr. Albert Zimmermann great "surprise" that the world should make such a sensation about the murder of one woman. Trajan once said that the possession of absolute power had a tendency to transform even the most humane man into a wild beast, and Judge Black in his great argument in the case of _ex parte_ Milligan recalled the fact that Robespierre in his early life resigned his commission as Judge rather than pronounce the sentence of death, and that Caligula passed as a very amiable young man before he assumed the imperial purple. The story is as old as humanity that the appetite for blood, or at least the habit of murder, "grows by what it feeds upon." The murder of Miss Cavell was one of exceptional brutality and stupidity. It never occurred to her judges that her murder would add an army corps to the forces of the Allies and that every English soldier will fight more bravely because of her shining example. So little was this appreciated either in Brussels or Berlin that the German Foreign Office, in its official apology for the crime, issued over the signature of Herr Doctor Albert Zimmermann, Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs, expresses its surprise _that the shooting of an Englishwoman and the condemnation of several women in Brussels for treason have caused a sensation._ What extraordinary moral naivete! How could they appreciate that after the firing squad had done its work and the body of the woman had been given hasty burial the victim's virtues would "plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of her taking off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind." This happened with incredible rapidity, and the Kaiser made haste to respite the eight other intended victims--two of them being also women--and the Berlin Foreign Office also issued to the world its defense of its action.