It contains also the answer which this artist of a foreign and neutral country makes to the charges of drunkenness that were a year ago hurled against the British workman. He was said to be endangering the country by his self-indulgence. While there are exceptions, unfortunately, to the picture that Raemaekers here shows us, there need be no hesitation in believing that the workman’s attitude, as the artist sees it, is the attitude of the overwhelming majority. It is not often that a higher compliment has been paid to the workman than in this cartoon. It is the ideal truth; and the more widely it is seen and appreciated, the more it will make the ideal into the actual truth. It does not enter into the artist’s purpose to show the serious loss caused by the alcoholism of even a small minority, but this point of view must not be forgotten in real life. Copies of this cartoon should be widely spread through the country. WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY [Illustration: ALCOHOLISM--BRITONS NEVER WILL BE SLAVES] Political and Economic Rapprochement A German business firm never lets go of a customer once it seizes him. Of course that is an extreme statement, for customers die or change their country, or even revolt against the importunities of the German bagman. Still, it may be taken as a fact that Germany exhibits a pertinacity in trade that rivals her pertinacity in war. Now Foreign Trade in the conception of Germany does not mean, though it includes, the selling of goods; it means the destruction of all other than German interests. Politics and economics are convertible terms in the mind of the Fatherland. To absorb and make German the world--that is the idea woven in invisible thread in the fabrics she sells, written in invisible ink in her contracts, stamped in invisible letters on her metal goods. Before the war she was fast reducing great free nations to economic serfdom, so that to buy a rat-trap they had to turn to Germany, who sold them, with a certain grim humour, even the very guns to fight her in, what she considered to be, an already won war. She paralysed England, Russia, and France economically and politically, just as a snake paralyses its victims, and she was about to swallow them one after the other, and would have swallowed them only that she opened her mouth too soon. Consider then the fate of a little nation entering into a political and economic rapprochement with this cormorant people who have so nearly devoured England: The fate of the rabbit in the jaws that could swallow an ox. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE [Illustration: A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RAPPROCHEMENT GERMANY: “You must cut your throat with this knife, otherwise I shall have to use force to you.”] Why They Were Taken