their fists at them, and abusing them with angry cries. The situation was becoming awkward, when the mayor arrived. M. Benoit had just seen his poor wife placed in her coffin. He had no longer a home. His house was a mass of smoking ashes. He was ruined. His heart was broken. He drew near the scene. The prisoners thought that their last hour had come, and turned livid with terror. But M. Benoit is a Mayor of France. He knows the traditions of our country. He respects the law. He forced a way through the crowd. With a single gesture he called for silence. He reminded them that these men were prisoners, that prisoners were protected by international agreements, and that no one had a right to lay a finger on them—no, not even on them. He put himself in front of them. He made a rampart for them with his body. He declared that while he lived not a hair of the head of one of these prisoners of war should be touched. And the peasants, mastered by their sense of duty, stifled their cries of anger, unclenched their fists, and respectfully moved away and went into their houses. The Bavarian assassins were decorated by the Kaiser, for their crimes, with the Iron Cross. The French Government at my request granted to M. Benoit the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and a few days later I presented it to him with my own hands. Those are the principles with which, on one side and the other, we began the war, and these two incidents, taken at random from a hundred of the same kind, seem to me to show accurately the difference between the two methods, the difference between the Civilization on which Thomas Mann heaps his contempt, jeering at its “reason, its gentleness, and its emancipation,” and the Kultur which, according to him, is “above morality, reason, and science,” the Kultur which he hails as “die Subliemerung des Dämonischen.” * * * * * Have these principles been modified? Those of the Germans, no; our own, yes. The Germans have systematically continued the practical application of their gentlemanly instincts. After the crimes of Lorraine and Belgium came the unpardonable outrage of the _Lusitania_, followed by others so numerous and so varied that I must give up the idea of finding room for them in this letter; a whole volume would not be long enough to give a full list of them. If the principles of the Boches have remained the same and have incited them every day to the commission of fresh outrages, ours—I say it frankly—have changed. We want three things—to-day reprisals of defence—to-morrow compensations—finally, to save the future, punishment.