Take one such sovereign idea, that of the enemy nation as a person: the conception of it as a completely responsible corporate body. Some offence is committed by a German: 'Germany' did it, Germany including all Germans. To punish any German is to inflict satisfactory punishment for the offence, to avenge it. The idea, when we examine it, is found to be extremely abstract, with but the faintest relation to human realities. 'They drowned my brother,' said an Allied airman, when asked his feelings on a reprisal bombing raid over German cities. Thus, because a sailor from Hamburg drowns an Englishman in the North Sea, an old woman in a garret in Freiburg, or some children, who have but dimly heard of the war, and could not even remotely be held responsible for it, or have prevented it, are killed with a clear conscience because they are German. We cannot understand the Chinese, who punish one member of a family for another's fault, yet that is very much more rational than the conception which we accept as the most natural thing in the world. It is never questioned, indeed, until it is applied to ourselves. When the acts of British troops in Ireland or India, having an extraordinary resemblance to German acts in Belgium, are taken by certain American newspapers as showing that 'Britain,' (_i.e._ British people) is a bloodthirsty monster who delights in the killing of unarmed priests or peasants, we know that somehow the foreign critic has got it all wrong. We should realise that for some Irishman or Indian to dismember a charwoman or decapitate a little girl in Somersetshire, because of the crime of some Black and Tan in Cork, or English General at Amritsar, would be unadulterated savagery, a sort of dementia. In any case the poor folk in Somerset were not responsible; millions of English folk are not. They are only dimly aware of what goes on in India or Ireland, and are not really able in all matters, by any means, to control their government--any more than the Americans are able to control theirs. Yet the idea of responsibility attaching to a whole group, as justification for retaliation, is a very ancient idea, savage, almost animal in its origin. And anything can make a collectivity. To one small religious sect in a village it is a rival sect who are the enemies of the human race; in the mind of the tortured negro in the Congo any man, woman, or child of the white world could fairly be punished for the pains that he has suffered.[87] The conception has doubtless arisen out of something protective, some instinct useful, indispensable to the race; as have so many of the instincts which, applied unadapted to altered conditions, become socially destructive. Here then is evidence of a great danger, which can, in some measure, be avoided on one condition: that the truth about the enemy collectively is told in such a way as to be a reminder to us not to slip into injustices that, barbarous in themselves, drag us back into barbarism.