Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/30

 German people, with a calm conscience, would kneel and pray:
 * "Hallowed be Thy name,
 * Thy kingdom come,
 * Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

 "WE SHALL NEVER MASSACRE BELGIAN WOMEN" O of the writers who performed the same kind of moral somersault was Gerhart Hauptmann, author of a Socialist drama called "The Weavers," and, rumour says, protege (what frightful irony!) of the Crown Prince. Hauptmann knew well (none better) that a vast proportion of the human family live perpetually on the borderland of want, and that of all who suffer by war the poor suffer most. Yet he wrote (and a degenerate son of the great Norwegian liberator, Björnsen, published) a letter, in which, after telling the poor of his people that "heaven alone knew" why their enemies were assailing them, he called on them (in effect) to avenge unnameable atrocities, which he alleged, without a particle of proof, had been committed on innocent Germans living abroad, and then said, in allusion to Mr. Maeterlinck, "I can assure him that, although 'barbarous Germans,' we shall never be so cowardly as to massacre or martyr the Belgian women and children."  26