This case, with its startling blend of melodrama and pruriency, wounded and injured in greater or lesser degree everyone whose name the learned judge tolerantly allowed to be mentioned. That, perhaps, was the fortune of law as administered, with all the responsibility and decorum attaching to his great office, by Mr. Justice Darling. What was said really does not matter so much as that thousands of people believed it to be true. By this test, if it were indeed ever needed, a big part of the British public shewed itself to be as ignorant, suspicious, cruel and base-minded as any big part of any other public, including that which had persecuted Dreyfus--to the righteous indignation of the equitable English. And, though perhaps the ignorance and suspicion, the base-mindedness and cruelty were the after-result of fear, from which the Englishman suffers as much as any one else, the public temper at the time of the Pemberton-Billing trial--not wholly unlike the temper of a mob in a southern state when a negro is being lynched--survived when fear had been laid to rest: ignorance and suspicion, fear, revenge and greed provided the atmosphere of the conference in which the statesmen of the world met together to contrive a peace which should end war. It was in the power of the prime minister to allay these evil passions or to stimulate them. With the unbounded prestige that attaches to the head of any government still in office at the end of a long war, he could have united all parties in his struggle for a great and durable peace not less certainly than he had united them in his prosecution of the war; as they had responded to every demand in war, so they would have made every sacrifice for peace; as he had curbed their impatience and lightened their despondency, so he could check their greed and set an ideal before their eyes. Mr. Lloyd George saw the light and turned his back upon it. With all an old demagogue's art in playing on popular passion, he outbid the wildest and outdid the most sanguinary: the cry for indemnities and the howl for revenge were drowned in his own shouted promise that England should have her fill of blood and gold if she would but return him to power. It is at least arguable that Germany in defeat should have paid not less than she would have exacted, in victory, from another power; one school considers that to leave the ex-Kaiser and his associates unpunished is to condone the atrocities for which they were responsible and to make these the permissible minimum in any future war. No armistice terms would be complete unless they made provision for bringing the war-criminals to book. Equally, no armistice terms deserve serious attention if they promise that which their signatories know to be incapable of fulfilment. Mr. Lloyd George's offence against the people of his own and of all future generations lay in his giving pledges which could not be redeemed.