Soldiers of ours--many soldiers, I am sorry to say--have come back from
Coblenz and other places in the black spot, saying that they found the
inhabitants of the black spot kind and agreeable. They give this reason
for liking the Germans better than they do the English. They found the
Germans agreeable, the English not agreeable. Well, this amounts to
something as far as it goes: but how far does it go, and how much does it
amount to? Have you ever seen an automobile painted up to look like new,
and it broke down before it had run ten miles, and you found its insides
were wrong? Would you buy an automobile on the strength of the paint?
England often needs paint, but her insides are all right. If our soldiers
look no deeper than the paint, if our voters look no further than the
paint, if our democracy never looks at anything but the paint, God help
our democracy! Of course the Germans were agreeable to our soldiers after
the armistice!

Agreeable Germany!--who sank the Lusitania; who sank five thousand
British merchant ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men, women, and
children, all murdered at sea, without a chance for their lives; who
fired on boat-loads of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine and
laughed at the drowning passengers of the torpedoed Falaba.

Disagreeable England!--who sank five hundred German ships without
permitting a single life to be lost, who never fired a shot until
provision had been made for the safety of passengers and crews.

Agreeable Germany!--who, as she retreated, poisoned wells and gassed the
citizens from whose village she was running away; who wrecked the
churches and the homes of the helpless living, and bombed the tombs of
the helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking
their boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving the