... 'a slave from birth, with no rights as a free man, owing allegiance to a militaristic Government to whom he looks for his very life; crushed by taxation to keep up the military machine; ill-nourished, ignorant, prone to crime in greater measure than the peasants of any other country--as the German statistics of crime show--a degraded peasant, a wretched future, and a loathesome past--these are the inheritances to which the German peasant is born. What type of nature can develop in such conditions? But one--the _brute_. And the four years' commerce of this War has shown the German from prince to peasant as offspring of the one family--the _brute_ family.' ... [64] The following--which appeared in _The Times_ of April 17, 1915--is merely a type of at least thirty or forty similar reports published by the German Army Headquarters: 'In yesterday's clear weather the airmen were very active. Enemy airmen bombarded places behind our positions. Freiburg was again visited, and several civilians, the majority being children, were killed and wounded.' A few days later the Paris _Temps_ (April 22, 1915) reproduced the German accounts of French air-raids where bombs were dropped on Kandern, Loerrach, Mulheim, Habsheim, Wiesenthal, Tüblingen, Mannheim. These raids were carried out by squads of airmen, and the bombs were thrown particularly at railway stations and factories. Previous to this, British and French airmen had been particularly active in Belgium, dropping bombs on Zeebrugge, Bruges, Middlekirke, and other towns. One German official report tells how a bomb fell on to a loaded street car, killing many women and children. Another (dated September 7, 1915) contains the following: 'In the course of an enemy aeroplane attack on Lichtervelde, north of Roulers in Flanders, seven Belgian inhabitants were killed and two injured.' A despatch from Zürich, dated Sept. 24, 1915, says: 'At yesterday's meeting of the Stuttgart City Council, the Mayor and Councillors protested vigorously against the recent French raid upon an undefended city. Burgomaster Lautenschlager asserted that an enemy that attacked harmless civilians was fighting a lost cause.' [65] March 27th, 1919. [66] In Drinkwater's play, _Abraham Lincoln_, the fire-eating wife of the war-profiteer, who had been violently abusing an old Quaker lady, is thus addressed by Lincoln:--