in piracy against her, stealing her ships and selling them in our prize
courts, instead of honestly detaining them until the war is over and
keeping a strict account of them. When gentlemen rise in the House of
Commons and say that they owe Germans money and do not intend to pay it,
one must face the fact that there will be a strong popular demand for
plunder. War, after all, is simply a letting loose of organized murder,
theft, and piracy on a foe; and I have no doubt the average Englishman
will say to me what Falstaff said to Pistol concerning his share in the
price of the stolen fan: "Reason, you rogue, reason: do you think I'll
endanger my soul _gratis_?" To which I reply, "If you can't resist the
booty, take it frankly, and know yourself for half patriot, half
brigand; but don't talk nonsense about disablement. Cromwell tried it in
Ireland. He had better have tried Home Rule. And what Cromwell could not
do to Ireland we cannot do to Germany."


*The Sensible People.*

Finally we come to the only body of opinion in which there is any hope
of civilization: the opinion of the people who are bent, not on
gallantry nor revenge nor plunder nor pride nor panic nor glory nor any
of the invidiousnesses of patriotism, but on the problem of how to so
redraw the map of Europe and reform its political constitutions that
this abominable crime and atrocious nuisance, a European war, shall not
easily occur again. The map is very important; for the open sores which
have at last suppurated and burst after having made the world uneasy for
years, were produced by altering the colour of Alsace and Lorraine and
of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the map. And the new map must be settled,
not by conquest, but by consent of the people immediately concerned. One
of the broken treaties of Europe which has been mentioned less