"spoiling the
ship for a ha'pennyworth of tar," and before a firm and coherent policy
on England's part, Sinn Fein will fade like a poisonous mist.

Chapter XVII: Paint

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 old people to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon
England slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or
injured seven hundred and fifty-seven children, and made in all a list
of four thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, bombed by her airmen;
whose trained nurses met our wounded and captured men at the railroad
trains and held out cups of water for them to see, and then poured them
on the ground or spat in