To-day it is hard to make any German bureaucrat believe that it is not possible to make neutrals think black is white if only enough money be spent. The fact that German black is very very black does not deter the industrious secret fund distributors. Newspapers are bought, agitators are subsidised, a false public opinion is artificially created--and the principal end is always to help those who made the war in Germany and those who keep it going to calm the masses in repeating what neutral papers and neutral led captains say. A nation which has to depend upon such means of drugging itself into acquiescence has little to hope for. In Italy, in Roumania, the scattering of German gold has availed nothing--but while there remains a neutral State there will German secret funds be scattered. And with it all, the bellowing, blustering German propagandist, thumping any neutral table and endeavouring to make people believe that all men are as he is, knows well that he only gets a hearing, even from the lowest elements of any nation, because behind him is his colleague with the money-bag--Raemaekers has expressed in the money-bag holder all the true inwardness of the German system of propaganda. ALFRED STEAD [Illustration: THE GERMAN PROPAGANDIST “I assure you, my friends, that anyone who does not love us, whatever his nationality, has assuredly been bought over by the enemy.”] Jackals in the Political Field “When the tiger,” says the naturalist, “has killed some large animal, such as a buffalo which he cannot consume at one time, the jackals collect round the carcase at a respectful distance and wait patiently until the tiger moves off. Then they rush from all directions, carousing upon the slaughtered buffalo, each anxious to eat as much as it can contain in the shortest time.” The human jackal is one of the most squalid and sordid creatures and features of war. We saw him in Dublin the other day emerging from his slum den to loot Sackville Street. Every battlefield feeds its carrion beasts and birds. This picture of Belgium and its jackals is doubtless only too true. Mr. Raemaekers and the Dutch have better means of knowing than we. The jackal, says the same naturalist, belongs to the _Canidæ_, the “dog tribe.” The scientific name of the true dog is _Canis familiaris_, “the household dog.” The jackal is _Canis aureus_, the “gold dog.” The epithet describes no doubt his colour. The human _Canis aureus_ perhaps deserves his title on not less obvious grounds. “The continent of Europe,” the naturalist goes on, “is free from the jackal.” It was supposed till yesterday to be free from the lion and tiger. But in the prehistoric times of the cave man, geologists say, there was both in England and Europe the great “sabre-tooth” tiger. Kipling, who knows everything about beasts, knows him and puts him into his “Story of Ung”: “The sabre-tooth tiger dragging a man to his lair.”