boards of the floor.” In letters, by word of mouth, with our own eyes, M. Lamure and I heard and saw over and over again similar stories and similar sights. I did not see the scene which was described to a French officer by an old maidservant in a house near Lunéville, where a party of German officers, some of them stark-naked except for their helmets, some of them dressed in the nightgowns and undergarments of the ladies of the house, danced with one another in a drunken carouse, and defiled the beds and the other linen which they left in the drawers of the clothes-chests; I quote it because the French officer who had it from the heart-broken old family servant who saw it happen seems to me to be an absolutely reliable witness. But there is a deeper reason than that for repeating it. It is typical of the extraordinary vein of bestiality which even before the war was known to run through certain strata—and certain of the higher strata—of German society. We are always asking and wondering who is going to win the war—even, in some of our darker hours, the most optimistic of us. The answer is written in these ravaged villages and towns of Lorraine and other parts of France. When to the mere wanton destructiveness of war is added the particular form of bestiality of which disgusting traces have been found by the French in many houses which had escaped the flames, it is practically certain that the roots of it must lie deep down in a bed of rottenness digged and prepared long before the war began. A nation, the cultivated circles of which are to any serious extent tainted with the unnatural vice of which this filthiness is a sure sign—even if its existence and its toleration had not already been notorious in Germany—is intrinsically corrupt and has in its organization the seeds of death, no matter how highly it may have developed its Kultur and commerce and physical and military science. Germany has grown with extraordinary rapidity and to extraordinary proportions in an extraordinarily short period of time, like a rank weed, forced in an ultra-scientific hothouse. Outwardly her structure is in many respects a marvel and even a thing of beauty. But with this canker at the core she cannot be a healthy organization. You cannot gather figs of thistles. The war has brought the canker (which is in the whole body, though it does not poison the whole of it) to the surface. Perhaps the war, which Germany has brought on herself, is the surgeon’s knife that will finally eradicate it, as it must without doubt excise other tumours from the bodies of all the nations engaged in it. But the difference between Germany and the others is that they have entered upon the war with cleaner hands and cleaner minds, and that cleanness, because the world is continually being purified, is going to win in the long run. For even if it were the other way, if Germany were going to win this particular war, which is, after all, only a moment in the