Apart from the brutality of the whole incident there is one circumstance that makes it of peculiar interest to the American people and which gives to it the character of rank ingratitude. Our representative, as above stated, did advise the German officials that a little delay was asked by our Legation _as a slight return for the innumerable acts of kindness which our Legation had done for German soldiers and interned prisoners in the earlier days of the war before the German invasion had swept over the land_. The charge of ingratitude may rest soundly upon far greater and broader grounds. This great nation had contributed in money and merchandise a sum estimated at many millions for the relief of the people in Belgium. In so doing it did to the German nation an inestimable service, for when Germany conquered Belgium the duty and burden rested upon it to support its population to the extent that it might become necessary. The burden of supporting 8,000,000 civilians was no light one, especially as there existed in Germany a scarcity of food. As bread tickets were then being issued in Germany to its people, the supplies would have been substantially less if a portion of its food products had been required for the civilian population of Belgium, for obviously the German nation could not permit a people, whom it had so ruthlessly trampled under foot, to starve to death. Every dollar that was raised in America for the Belgian people, therefore, operated to relieve Germany from a heavy burden. Moreover, when the war broke out, Germany needed some friendly nation to take over the care of its nationals in the hostile countries, and in England, France, Belgium, and Russia the interests of German citizens were assumed by the American Government as a courtesy to Germany, and no one can question how faithfully in the last fourteen months Page in London, Sharp in Paris, and Whitlock in Brussels have labored to alleviate the inevitable suffering to German prisoners or interned civilians. In view of these services, it surely was not much for the American Minister to ask that a little delay should be granted to a woman whose error, if any, had arisen from impulses of humanity and from considerations of patriotism. To spare her life a little longer could not have done the German cause any possible harm, for she was in their custody and beyond the power of rendering any help to her compatriots. To condemn any human being, even if he were the vilest criminal, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and execute him at 2 a.m., was an act of barbarism for which no possible condemnation is adequate. Under these circumstances, it would be incredible, if the facts were not beyond dispute, that the request of the United States for a little delay was not only brutally refused, _but that our Legation was deliberately misled and deceived until the death sentence had been inflicted_.