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 Do not tell me in protest that I am making out the German soldier as a brute, free from all the great ordinary universal instincts of the father. Such a charge would be wicked and insane. The horrors of this War have been touched with instances of the wistful tenderness with which the German soldier has taken the little children of his enemy on his knee, and pressed them to his lips and to his eyes, hungry, perchance, with his memories of like children left in his desolate and weeping home, far away in a German street or far-off village. But what I do contend is that the gospel of war, the gospel that war is a high, a noble, an inspiring, an elevating thing, which the Prussian militarist philosophy teaches, must be judged by its fruits; must be judged by its inevitable results. The smooth and suave language of the soldier in his barrack-room, or the professor in his study hall, or the parson in his pulpit, must be brought down to their final test by what their principles carry with them in the concrete. It is not the wretched and enslaved instrument of this hideous gospel that I blame; it is the men who have preached and made this gospel—it is your Treitschkes, your Nietzsches, your Bernhardis, your Drysanders, your Kaisers, your Bismarcks. Before the great Court of Humanity, I indict these men as preaching the gospel of the devil; and them I hold responsible for the hell which this gospel has created; I bring as tragic witnesses in this great Court against them, not merely every soldier who has fallen, but every woman that has been murdered and violated, and every child that has been mutilated or massacred.

These, then, are the first counts in my indictment of the devilish system of philosophy and of action against which our forces are fighting. Let me go to the other counts. Nature, as I have said, by diversity of climate, soil, colour, blood, has insisted that the world shall be divided into different communities, which we term nations. It is no accident of history that some of these nations are large, some of them small. You are violating not merely a law of man, but a law of nature, when you make war on the small nation and refuse to acknowledge its rights and its liberties; but in the German gospel there is no law of nature or of man, which has any existence outside the German will and the German necessity. Again, the language of pseudo-science and of false history is brought in to justify these doctrines. Again, it is an insane as well as a wicked gospel. "The Will to Power"; "World