It is possible that Sinn Fein has now taken to heart this counsel as to the use that may be made of cruelties committed by the enemy in war. Now there is no reason to doubt the truth of atrocities, whether they concern the horrible ill-treatment of prisoners in war-time of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes, or the burning alive of negro women in peace time in Texas and Alabama, or the flogging of women in India, or reprisals by British soldiers in Ireland, or by Red Russians against White and White against Red. Every story may be true. And if each side told the whole truth, instead of a part of it, these atrocities would help us towards an understanding of this complex nature of ours. But we never do tell the whole truth. Always in war-time does each side leave out two things essential to the truth: the good done by the enemy and the evil done by ourselves. If that elementary condition of truth were fulfilled, these pictures of cruelty, bestiality, obscenity, rape, sadism, sheer ferocity, might possibly tell us this: 'There is the primeval tiger in us; man's history--and especially the history of his wars--is full of these warnings of the depths to which he can descend. Those ten thousand men and women of pure English stock gloating over the helpless prisoners whom they are slowly roasting alive, are not normally savages.[89] Most of them are kindly and decent folk. These stories of the September massacres of the Terror no more prove French nature to be depraved than the history of the Inquisition, or of Ireland or India, proves Spanish or British nature to be depraved.' But the truth is never so told. It was not so told during the War. Day after day, month after month, we got these selected stories. In the Press, in the cinemas, in Church services, they were related to us. The message the atrocity carried was not: here is a picture of what human nature is capable of; let us be on our guard that nothing similar marks our history. That was neither the intention nor the result of propaganda. It said in effect and was intended to say:-- 'This lecherous brute abusing a woman is a picture of Germany. All Germans are like that; and no people but Germans are like that. That sort of thing never happens in other armies; cruelty, vengeance, and blood-lust are unknown in the Allied forces. That is why we are at war. Remember this at the peace table.' That falsehood was conveyed by what the Press and the cinema systematically left out. While they told us of every vile thing done by the enemy, they told us of not one act of kindness or mercy among all those hundred million during the years of war.