The civil and military population of Germany has not made even a coward's show of repentance by choosing scape-goats for the burden of its sins; and repentance has not been forced upon it from without. In the general election of 1918, Mr. Lloyd George promised that the war criminals should be brought to trial; in 1921 we are still waiting to see them punished. Already the Kaiser has one party claiming indulgence for him as the creature of his own general staff, while another would leave him unpunished and even untried for fear that apparent persecution might make a martyr of him. But was not the Kaiser _Kriegsherr_? Is not the _Kriegsherr_ responsible for his own war-book? Is it not an offence against humanity and even against the laws of nations to use a human screen when advancing through hostile country? On that count alone he should be hanged. The fear of making martyrs is based on the misunderstanding of a single historical example: Louis Napoleon fostered the Bonapartist legend a quarter of a century after his uncle's death as a romantic appeal against the unromantic dreariness of the Orleanist rule; it is forgotten that the "martyrdom" of Napoleon I. bore no fruit until the French, with their paradoxical blended love of logic and sentiment, found themselves more than twenty years later under a government which satisfied neither craving; it is forgotten that Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the brave," was executed in a way which shewed that French chivalry was dead, yet no one called him martyr. The former German emperor, ruling by right divine, strutting and phrase-making by the affliction of congenital insanity, may be excused as the Emperor of the Sahara was excused, or confined with his fellows in a criminal-lunatic asylum; if he assert his sanity, then his place is on a cart and his fate a noosed rope. Yet one more party, its sentiment stirred by the sight of Count Hohenzollern chopping trees in a Dutch park, pleads that in his downfall he is paying longer and heavier penalty than that of instant and painless death; it may be suggested that inglorious exile is a blessing unexpected and undeserved of the degenerate who flitted across the frontier when the country that he had misruled was in its death agony. The pantaloon of Europe gave up his mumming when the game grew dangerous; with it he gave up his last opportunity of ascending from the ridiculous to the sublime.