being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the
Kaiser must be sent to Devil's Island because St. Helena is too good for
him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the
dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.
Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the
risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them
to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they
may presently join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling
to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement
comes. But they will not count for much then. Most of them will be
heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of
blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and
most of those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.


*The Commercial Attitude.*

Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections. First,
our commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business,
and that rancour is childish, but cannot see why we should not make the
Germans pay damages and supply us with some capital to set the City
going again, forgetting that when France did that after 1871 for Berlin,
Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a colossal
financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital
from his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of
less vital classes. Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this
kind of looting. Prussian generals, like Napoleon's marshals, have
always been shameless brigands, keeping up the seventeenth and
eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain from