Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/261

 attacks on purely military and naval establishments, any other damage being incidental and not designed. Till the end of the war the average ignorant peasant and mechanic will have heard no other story than that the Lusitania was a war-ship treacherously disguised. One has only to read the German White Book on Belgium, as translated by Professor Morgan, to understand the sort of scientific denigration of that little people that has been invoked to justify so much of the tale of Louvain and Aerschot and the rest as has been allowed to penetrate to the masses. Penny editions of the Bryce Report do not circulate under either Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns. If fragments of the truth do find a surreptitious way in, the police are there to see that natural indignation shall not express itself. We gather from Liebknecht that the official shepherding of opinion in this regard goes as far as penal servitude and even capital punishment. The actual state of mind of a democratic remnant that may exist is, therefore, to us a clasped and sealed book.

But we do know by the mere inner light of our own principles a great deal that is relevant. The decree of democracy to a whole nation, however bedevilled and misled, can never be one of unconditional destruction. It is not our message to the Germans. So long as their populations identify themselves with the policy of their present miscreant governments they must share their fate.