Trinity College, Dublin, having appealed to the University of Gottingen,
and other learned bodies, to get up a monster protest against the destruction of the various scientific and artistic treasures in Paris by bombardment, Dr. Dove, the Rector of Gottingen, in the name of the University, has sent a very wonderful reply, in which be states that Germans only wish to head the peaceful energy and science of the world, but that disturbed in this task by an attack on their honour and "moral self-consciousness," they are now fighting for "the peace of the world and the morals of humanity, for those would be destroyed if the idea of requiting justice could be destroyed from the con- sciousness of peoples. That the world retains the belief in this justice, it owes, next to God's grace, to the German people." "When Europe had not the moral courage to prevent a wanton breach of the peace, this people, awaiting the righteous judgment in the thunder of battles, put its existence at stake. It has sent out the intellectual flower of its youth to the sacred struggle, which a great English historian has justly described as the struggle of the Archangel against Belial." (Who is the great English historian, by the way ? And did he describe the war since Sedan, the war for the right to conquer and oppress Alsace and Lorraine, in these remarkable terms?) Dr. Dove appears to be wickedly fanatical, if he thinks that Germany is to be solemnly justified by God for burning, slaying, and plundering in a country willing to submit and atone for the wrong it had done, and thus burning and slaying only for the sake of an oppressive territorial conquest.
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