An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"--for the sake of terrorizing hostile peoples--and humanitarianism is condemned as "sentimentalism and flabby emotion." There we have the gist of the whole affair--what makes the Frenchman instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character. It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken orgies in châteaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism. The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon, terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the long count against Germany. Assume the vital major premise and the rest follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a natural fund of brutality. * * * * * "In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates humanity. All these are changing ideas."