The suppression of everything good of the enemy was paralleled by the suppression of everything evil done by our side. You may search Press and cinemas in vain for one single story of brutality committed by Serbian, Rumanian, Greek, Italian, French, or Russian--until the last in time became an enemy. Then suddenly our papers were full of Russian atrocities. At first these were Bolshevik atrocities only, and of the 'White' troops we heard no evil. Then when later the self-same Russian troops that had fought on our side during the War fought Poland, our papers were full of the atrocities inflicted on Poles. By the daily presentation during years of a picture which makes the enemy so entirely bad as not to be human at all, and ourselves entirely good, the whole nature of the problem is changed. Admit these premises, and policies like those proposed by Mr Wells become sheer rubbish. They are based on the assumption that Germans are accessible to ordinary human influences like other human beings. But every day for years we have been denying that premise. If the daily presentation of the facts is a true presentation, the _New York Tribune_ is right:-- 'We shall not get permanent peace by treating the Hun as if he were not a Hun. One might just as well attempt to cure a man-eating tiger of his hankering for human flesh by soft words as to break the German of his historic habits by equally futile kind words. The way to treat a German, while Germans follow their present methods, is as a common peril to all civilised mankind. Since the German employs the method of the wild beast he must be treated as beyond the appeal of generous or kind methods. When one is generous to a German, he plans to take advantage of that generosity to rob or murder; this is his international history, never more conspicuously illustrated than here in America. Kindness he interprets as fear, regard for international law as proof of decadence; agitation for disarmament has been for him the final evidence of the degeneracy of his neighbours.'[90] That conclusion is inevitable if the facts are really as presented by the _Daily Mail_ for four years. The problem of peace in that case is not one of finding a means of dealing, by the discipline of a common code or tradition, with common shortcomings--violences, hates, cupidities, blindnesses. The problem is not of that nature at all. We don't have these defects; they are German defects. For five years we have indoctrinated the people with a case, which if true, renders only one policy in Europe admissible; either the ruthless extermination of these monsters, who are not human beings at all; or their permanent subjugation, the conversion of Germany into a sort of world lunatic asylum.