men have given every possible proof of their sincerity. Some have heard sentence of death pronounced upon them unshaken; some have been, as is now admitted, subjected to illegal forms of torture; all are in prison and many have been subjected to repeated terms of imprisonment.

Mrs. Hobhouse's little pamphlet consists of a brief statement of the nature of the law, its administration and general application to this little band of peace advocates, to which is added a brief account of the character and suffering of a number of individuals. Most of these individuals were men devoted to public work, many are Quakers, whose attitude to war was no new thing but perfectly well known. Take the case of Mr. Maurice Rowntree. He is a Quaker, a son of a man universally loved and respected in the North of England. He was at work at a settlement in Leeds, one of the band engaged in the attempt to solve the acuter problems of poverty. But the local tribunal refused to consider his work of national importance, and the Appeal Tribunal dismissed his case in spite of protest from two of its members, who testified to the value of his work. He served 112 days of hard labor in Wormwood Scrubs, and is now serving a second sentence of two years' hard labor. His statement at the police court does not show any kind of self-will or spiritual pride:

He thought that he was called upon, with what effort and strength he had, to work with a view to a different order of life, and a different way of settling disputes altogether. In doing that he felt it became of international importance, affecting every nation, and first of all his own. It seemed to him tremendously tragic that the great heroism, which he honored with all his heart, was devoted to work for destruction. He felt it was the

logical outcome of a system of life which had been prevalent in every nation. He held in detestation the infamous actions of Germany. He wished them to be quite clear about that. But he thought that really war would never bring peace, except the peace of death.

What is the treatment to which Mr. Rowntree and others like him are subjected? Two years' hard labor is one of the severest sentences known to the law. For the first twenty-eight days the prisoner is kept in solitude, seeing no one but the warder and (occasionally) the chaplain. For the first fourteen days he has to sleep without a mattress, unless the medical officer orders otherwise. After this he has some association with others, but, according to Mrs. Hobhouse, the whole time, including exercise and chapel as well as work in association, often does not exceed two hours daily. Conversation with other prisoners is forbidden, except that long-sentence prisoners may earn the privilege of talking for a limited time on certain days. A prisoner may not write or receive any letters, or receive a visit, for two months. After this letters or visits may occur monthly. The visits take place in the presence of a warder, the visitors being separated by a thick grille. The prisoner is not allowed pencil or paper. If his relatives are seriously ill he cannot see them; even if his wife is dying he is not allowed to visit her. Some prisoners are refusing work in prison on conscientious grounds, and then may be ordered close confinement, which involves deprivation of the mattress; in fact, usually the stripping of all a ticles, including the printed regulations and the prisoner's stool. Clifford Allen writes:

Mr.

One hundred and ninety days of stitching, each of twenty-three hours' and fifty minutes' silence. I think

the greatest torture of enforced and perpetual silence is the never ceasing consciousness of thinking in which it results. You cannot stop thinking for an instant. . . . I think of the very knots in the boards each time I scrub them, until I could scratch them out of the floor to rid myself of their arrogant insistence upon themselves.

Looking out of the window is a punishable offense. In some cases there are details of squalor and filth to be added to these sufferings. One prisoner declares that he never had rice without finding some disagreeable evidence of its having had mice in it. In some cases there has been severe suffering from cold. It is not surprising that there have been instances of mental breakdown. Of her own son Mrs. Hobhouse writes:

As a mother of sons in France who are daily risking their lives, subjected to the horrors and discomforts of the trenches, I feel less distress at their fate, fighting as they are their country's battles, with the approval of their fellows, than I do for that other son undergoing for his faith a disgraceful sentence in a felon's cell, truly "rejected and despised" of men. She adds: "It is just because our cause is a good one, because our sons are fighting against an evil domination, that we as a nation should be free from tyranny and oppression."

There is no logic in all this persecution. There is no social gain from it. All put together it does not help us to win a single trench from the Germans or to save one English soldier a day of suffering. On the contrary, it weakens The Manchester Guardian.

the confidence and will of the country. Professor Murray, one of the stoutest and most valued literary supporters of the war, writes in his eloquent introduction:

The worst point of the whole miserable business is not the addition of a little more unnecessary suffering and a little more meaningless injustice to the oceans of suffering and injustice already caused by the war. It is that the great majority of ordinary decent people who have come into personal contact with the treatment of objectors by the tribunals and the War Office find themselves angered and embittered against the Government of their country at a time when it needs all their support. However wrongheaded, conceited, self-righteous, and unpatriotic, and all the rest of it the objectors may originally have seemed to us, the long and fruitless and illegal persecution of these men leaves on the coldest observer an impression of some moral heroism on the side of the culprits and some moral and intellectual vileness on the side of their oppressors.

This is a moderate and considered statement which anticipates the inevitable condemnation of posterity. Whatever the issue of the war, this persecution, violating the spirit of Parliament itself, of an arbitrarily selected number of upright men will remain an indelible blot of infamy on the tribunals which condemn them, the War Office which has persecuted them, the Government that sanctions the persecution, and the nation which allows the Government to wreak its foolish will upon them.

H.

Our first feeling on reading President Wilson's fine and eloquent answer to the Vatican Peace proposals was

that this was what the Pope should have written. It is easy to understand, and up to a point to appreciate, the

He

motives which caused the Pope to balance his arguments in an attempt to make them attractive to both sides. He felt himself to be in the position of an arbitrator who is trying to coax the parties into court by hinting to both sides that they have a good chance of a favorable judgment. But that is not Mr. Wilson's way, and we could wish it had not been the Pope's. Mr. Wilson's manifesto to the world, for such it is, is inspired by a splendid scorn of the brutality, the guile, and the domineering spirit of those who would make themselves the superlords of the world. He cannot stoop to impartiality towards crime. flagellates meanness, trickery, bad faith, and inhumanity, and he does it all the more powerfully because he never strains his language, but clothes facts in phrases of a simple austerity, though of extreme appropriateness. He has something of the righteous, yet salutary and reformative, anger of some of the Hebrew prophets-not those who pronounced nothing but woe, but those who saw salvation shining at the end of long vistas of suffering. But this is only another way of saying that Mr. Wilson's Note is in the direct succession of the pronouncements of American policy made by Lincoln.

We are delighted to have Mr. Wilson's invaluable support for the argument that what the Germans are playing for is an armistice during which they could recover their strength and make ready to spring again. For this an armistice is the exact prospect in Mr. Wilson's mind, though he does not in precise language attribute what may be called "the policy of the armistice" to the German Government. M. Chéradame, well-known French writer who has devoted his life to studying Germany, warned us early in the war that if Germany found herself in a fix she

the

would try to coax the Allies into an armistice by fair and flattering language, and would then declare negotiations off as soon as the occasion served her. That the Central Powers would be able to make much better use of an armistice than the Allies is obvious. However detestable a complete central control may be for ordinary purposes of life and government, it has a very distinct value for the direction of a war. Our own Alliance, composed of much more various elements, would not be able to concentrate its purpose again so quickly, particularly after negotiations which had been designed to divide our thoughts as to our essential aims in the

war.

Mr. Wilson foresees that if negotiations with Germany on the Vatican conditions ended in a recuperation of German strength and a renewal of German policy, it would be necessary to create a permanent hostile combination of the nations against the German people. We take this to mean that Mr. Wilson is not in favor of creating any League of Nations till Germany can be included in it. We should prefer ourselves to state the matter rather differently. It seems to us that the Allies at present form a League of Nations whose one object is the peace of the world. All the schemes for a League of Nations postulate authority for the League to use force against a nation which tries to disturb the peace. The Allies are in practice exerting that authority now, and if ever the Central Powers showed a thorough change of heart and a desire for a quiet development of civilization-a desire equal to that which certainly inspires the Allies-nothing would be more agreeable than that Germany should be welcomed into the League. The path along which circumstances are compelling us to travel seems to offer a more promising journey than is

offered by those more highly abstract schemes that depend upon the enormous assumption that good faith necessarily exists in the Governments of all nations. Surely a test of good faith should be satisfied before the candidature of any nation for membership of a League is considered.

All through his Note Mr. Wilson is careful to distinguish between the German Government and the German people. It is true that he accuses the German people of having entered with zest upon the criminal adventures dictated to them by their Government, but his belief that there is still a very appreciable difference between the guilt of the people and the guilt of the Government is evident. It is this belief that gives to his Note its peculiar character of being at once a manifesto to the world and a special appeal to the German people to repudiate their rulers. "We cannot, he says, "take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guarantee of anything that is to endure unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the German people themselves as the other peoples of the world would be justified in accepting." In other words, Mr. Wilson suggests that there should be no peace with the Kaiser unless the people of Germany, by some recognized means of popular expression, guarantee that the word of the Kaiser is genuine. That brings us rather nearer to the point where the Kaiser might be eliminated altogether by the Allies. We have always felt that perhaps the simplest and safest plan would be to inform the German people that we would not make peace under any conditions with their present rulers, just as Bismarck, when outside Paris, refused to treat with Gambetta, but insisted on the French people creating a special Assembly for the purpose of negotiating peace. The Spectator.

It is interesting to notice that Mr. Wilson seems to stand apart from the Allies in what we take to be an implicit disapproval of he Paris resolutions. "Responsible statesmen," he says, "must now everywhere see, if they never saw before, that no peace can rest securely upon political or economic restrictions meant to benefit some nations and cripple or embarrass others." Again, on the same lines he says: "Punitive damages, the dismemberment of Empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive Economic Leagues, we deem inex pedient and in the end worse than futile." We imagine that where the rights of distinct groups of people or races, such as the South Slavs, are concerned, Mr. Wilson would consider that those rights have precedence over the right of the Austrian Empire not to be dismembered. But in a formal document like this American answer to the Pope it is not, of course, possible to insert innumerable safeguarding clauses and parenthetical reservations. It is rather a general statement of American resolution to fight on, however long the war may last, till democracy has established itself as the principle for all civilized nations, and the foreign and disturbing element of autocracy has been removed as not only a nuisance but a terrible danger. In the true manner of Lincoln, Mr. Wilson balances his hatred of war against the German people and his trust in democracy as being the only safeguard of the world, and he sums up fearlessly and with a clear conscience in favor of what seems to him much the greater cause. Just so did Lincoln strike a balance when he said: "Was it possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb."

"And what," I said, "did you do during the Great War, Francesca?"

"In the first place I fine you a sum not exceeding one hundred pounds for asking me such a question. In the second place I retort upon you by telling you that one of the things you're going to do during the Great War is to give up marmalade."

"What! Give up the thing which lends to breakfast its one and only distinction? Never."

"That," she said, "sounds very brave; but what are you going to do if there isn't any marmalade to be obtained for love or money?"

"Mine," I said, "has always been the sort you get for money. I have not hitherto met the amatory variety; but if it's really marmalade I'm prepared to have a go at it."

"And that," she said, "is very kind of you, but it's quite useless. For the moment there's no marmalade of any kind to be had."

"None of the dark-brown variety?" No.

"Or the sort that looks like golden jelly?"

"Not a scrap."

"Or the old-fashioned but admirable kind? The excellent substitute for butter at breakfast?"

"That must go like the rest. It has been a substitute for the last time."

"Impossible," I said. "Everything is now a substitute for something else. Marmalade started being a substitute long ago, and it isn't fair to stop it and let the other things go on."

"Well," she said, "what are you going to do about it? If you can't get Seville oranges how are you going to get Seville orange marmalade?”

"Oh, that's it, is it?"

"Yes, that's it, more or less. And now let's have your remedy."

"You needn't think," I said, "that I'm going to take it lying down. I shall go up to London and defy Lord Rhondda to his face. I shall write pro-marmalade letters to various newspapers. I shall form a Marmalade League, with branches in all the constituencies so as to bring political pressure to bear. I shall head a deputation to the Prime Minister. I shall get Mr. King or Mr. Hogge or Mr. Pringle, or all three of them, to ask questions in the House of Commons. In short, I shall exhaust all the usual devices for giving the Government a thoroughly uncomfortable time."

"In short you will do your patriotic best to help your country through its difficulties and to put the interest of the nation above your own convenience."

"Francesca," I said, "you must not be too serious. I was but attempting a jest."

"This is no time for jests. I can't bear even to think of your joining the Brigade of Grousers who are always girding at the Government. I won't stand your being a girder. So make up your mind to that."

"Very well," I said, "I will endeavor not to be a girder; but you simply must get me a pot or two of marmalade."

"And allow the Kaiser to win the war? Not if I know it. Besides, I don't like marmalade."

"There you are," I said. "You don't like marmalade-few women do-and so you're going to make a virtue for yourself by forcing me to give it up. My dear, you've given the whole show away."

"Don't juggle with words," she said, speaking with a dreadful calm. "I may be able to get a pot or two-say at the outside a dozen pots. Well, if I manage it I will inform you-"

"Yes," I said eagerly.