Evidences of the acute and widespread anti-German feeling, the result
of the sinking of the • Lusitania ' and the employ- ment of poison-gas in Flanders, have accumulated throughout the week. On the more legitimate expressions of this feeling, as shown in the action of the London and Manchester Royal Exchanges, the Baltic, and other similar institutions, we need not dwell, but the rioting in London and the provinces, where hundreds of shops—bakers', butchers', and jewellers'—kept by Germans have been wrecked and looted and many decent foreigners roughly handled in spite of the protection of the police and the soldiers, calls for the sternest reprobation. No fewer than four hundred and fifty persons were charged at the London Police Courts on Thursday, and in Liverpool it is estimated that the damage will cost the ratepayers £40,000. In some London districts the demonstrations were simply an excuse for theft. So indiscriminate was the onslaught that we read that in one district the clergymen were doing their best to protect the Russians. The best commentary on the disgraceful East End excesses is that of the recruiting sergeant outside the West India Docks who asked the assembled crowds "not to riot but to enlist."
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