To suspect such a national weakness is surely to arm against it and see that our contribution to the Peace Conference shall not stultify our contribution to the War. The Germans have been kite-flying for six months, to see which way the wind blows; and when the steady hurricane broke the strings and flung the kites headlong to earth, those who sent them up were sufficiently proclaimed by their haste to disclaim. But when the actual conditions are created and the new “Scrap of Paper” comes to light, since German honour is dead and her oath in her own sight worthless, let it be worthless in our sight also, and let the terms of peace preclude her power to perjure herself again. Make her honest by depriving her of the strength to be dishonest. There is only one thing on earth the German will ever respect, and that is superior force. May Berlin, therefore, see an army of occupation; and may “peace” be a word banished from every Allied tongue until that preliminary condition of peace is accomplished, and Germany sees other armies than her own. Reason has been denied speech in this war; but if she is similarly banished from the company of the peace-makers, then woe betide the constitution of the thing they will create, for a “stable peace” must be the very last desire of those now doomed to defeat. EDEN PHILLPOTTS [Illustration: A STABLE PEACE THE KAISER: “And remember, if they do not accept, I deny altogether.”] Some “neutrals,” and even some of the people here in England, still doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full must visualise the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the faces behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing, vengeful women of the picture--and must visualise, too, the men thrust back another way, to wait _their_ fate at the hands of these apostles of a civilisation of force.