GERMAN "FRIGHTFULNESS." [To TEE EDITOR or THE " SPEOTATOR!') Siu, — The
widespread German argument in favour of their mode of warfare is that war is war, and of necessity must be frightful. This seems to be unanswerable as an argument,
yet the average man and woman is conscious that for all that it is not a justification. They cannot help feeling that
Germany is not playing fair. She is using all the advantages of civilization to wage war in a barbarous fashion. In the last two hundred years men have built up, painfully and yet successfully, au international comity. We have international finance and international trade. We have an international culture and international methods of travelling, and we have become tolerant of each other's religious, political, and even artistic opinions. Germany has utilized these blessings systematically and intelligently in order to undo the entire international schema of living. Two hundred years ago Germany could not have borrowed money from the French people in order to help her pay an army with which to conquer that people. She would have had to get the money front her own merchants and peasants. Two hundred years ago Germany could nut have bought from other countries whatever she needed to supply her earlier deficiencies in production. She would have been dependent upon a slowly growing domestic manufacture. Two hundred years ago Germany could not have filled England and Belgium with her spies. The spies would have bad scant opportunity to learn the English and Flemish speech, or to get into those countries; and both England and Belgium would have looked askance at any stranger, and kept a sharp watch upon him, and killed him (barbarously) on suspicion even. Two hundred years ago Germans could not have travelled easily and freely all over the world; no one could. Two hundred years ago books and papers and information with regard to every nation and invention and industry were not to be had. They were not extant. The people who could read them did not exist. All these things have been achieved in times of peace by men working together as brothers. For forty years Germany has made herself strong because of this brotherhood—because of a state of affairs which was not conceivable even in the days of the Huns. Then when "the day" came she turned and inaugurated methods of warfare which the world has always thought peculiar to barbarous times, but which in barbarous times found very definite physical and spiritual limitations. This is why many of us feel that Germany is a greater criminal in war than the world has ever known. Mankind has a healthy aversion to seething the kid in its mother's
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