That her case had its claims not only to magnanimity, but even to military justice, is shown by the haste with which, in the teeth of every protest, the unfortunate woman was hurried to her end. Sentenced at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, she was executed nine hours later. Of what was General Baron von Bissing afraid? She was in his custody. Her power to help her country--save by dying--was forever at an end. The hot haste of her execution and the duplicity and secrecy which attended it betray an unmistakable fear that if her life had been spared until the world could have known of her death sentence, public opinion would have prevented this cruel and cowardly deed. The labored apology of Dr. Zimmermann and the swift action of the Kaiser in pardoning those who were condemned with Miss Cavell indicate that the Prussian officials have heard the beating of the wings of those avenging angels of history who, like the Eumenides of classic mythology, are the avengers of the innocent and the oppressed. "_Greatness_," wrote Aeschylus, "_is no defense from utter destruction when a man insolently spurns the mighty altar of justice_." This is as true to-day as when it was written more than two thousand years ago. It is but a classic echo of the old Hebraic moral axiom that "the Lord God of recompenses shall surely requite." The most powerful and self-willed ruler of modern times learned this lesson to his cost. Probably no two instances contributed so powerfully to the ultimate downfall of Napoleon as his ruthless assassination under the forms of military law of the Duke d'Enghien and the equally brutal murder of the German bookseller, Palm. The one aroused the undying enmity of Russia, and the blood that was shed in the moat of Vincennes was washed out in the icy waters of the Beresina. The fate of the poor German bookseller, whom Napoleon caused to be shot because his writing menaced the security of French occupation, developed as no other event the dormant spirit of German nationality, and the Nuremberg bookseller, shot precisely as was Miss Cavell, was finally avenged when Bluecher gave Napoleon the _coup de grace_ at Waterloo. No one more clearly felt the invisible presence of his Nemesis than did Napoleon. All his life, and even in his confinement at St. Helena, he was ceaselessly attempting to justify to the moral conscience of the world his ruthless assassination of the last Prince of the house of Conde. The terrible judgment of history was never better expressed than by Lamartine in the following language: