[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—A few days ago, in the House of Commons, a man of some courage asked a question of the "conscientious objector to warfare." Unfortunately, owing perhaps to our national polite- ness, the question was indirect enough for your correspondent in last week's issue comfortably to evade. We—the women of England, who have read with shuddering horror the accounts of the gross and indecent treatment of Belgian and French girls by German soldiers—ask that same question more directly. We hold our lives as lightly as many of our brave defenders hold theirs, but the nightmare horror of what an invasion of England by the Germans would mean to us must be faced by every woman who values her honour far more than life. We ask of the " conscientious objector to man-killing" whether he would stand by and see us—his mother, his sister, his sweetheart, or even merely his fellow-countrywomen—wantonly outraged, when he had the power to keep the gross offender away from the door. And that question must be answered. In Belgium no doors were to be locked, not even a bedroom door ! And our children—little girls /Ind schoolgirls—would he stay his hand and let these innocents be worse than slaughtered in his presence ? Surely God Himself would despise the man who, sheltering behind the letter of his Commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder," would allow the woman He gave him to be worse than murdered by another.—I am, Sir, &c.,
AN ENGLISHWOMAN BY THE GRACE OF GOD.
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