That was the positive side of the newspaper evil in Switzerland, over which France and England had, of course, no control. The negative side, which they might have controlled, which was indeed of their own making, was that the true news, which should have acted as a corrective to the false, hardly existed at all on the question of the atrocities in Belgium, because there were no correspondents in Belgium to give it. If the Swiss had known then, as they know now, though many of them still do not choose to believe it, the real truth about Belgium, there is no doubt at all that the greater part of the old pro-German feeling would have perished at the beginning. It throve only on lies and the concealment and ignorance of the truth. That is a fact which can be very simply proved. As soon as the Swiss knew, because they saw it for themselves with their own eyes, something of the way in which Germany has made war, the revulsion against her and therefore in our favour began. It happened in this way. From the ruined villages of Lorraine and the other occupied provinces the Germans carried away to Germany at the beginning of the war a large number of what they called “hostages” and the French “_internés_,” old men and women and children, mainly of the poorest classes. They had committed no military or political crime, they had only lost their homes and their possessions and most of their relatives, and they could under no conceivable circumstances affect one way or the other Germany’s chances of winning or losing the war. For months, wretchedly clad and fed, they were kept in prison-camps in the fatherland. Then by the good offices of the compassionate Swiss and partly probably because the Germans were beginning to find them a nuisance and to wonder why they had ever taken them away from France, they were sent back in relays of three or four hundred at a time to their own country by way of Switzerland. At the same time the far smaller number of _internés_ whom the French had detained in France or taken from Alsace in retaliation were sent back in exchange. I never myself saw any of the _internés_ from France on their way back to Germany. But the Swiss, who worked untiringly day after day and month after month to show practical sympathy to all these unfortunates on their way through their country, constantly saw both the French and the Germans, and the effect on their judgment of the German nation, even against their own natural inclinations, showed very decidedly which nation had treated worst these innocent victims of the war. I never met a Swiss man or woman, German-Swiss, or French-Swiss, who had seen the French _internés_ on their way back to France—not to their homes, for their homes in most cases no longer exist—who was not intensely shocked and indignant at the state in which they were and the sufferings which they had undergone, and from the date at which they first began to see