er treaty rights violated by
one of these powers on the cynical plea that there is no right or wrong
as against national interest, that necessity obeys no law, and treaties
are "scraps of paper." This is not matter for inquiry or judicial
decision at some later date. It has been frankly avowed by the German
Government from the outset of this war.

[Footnote 1: Theodore Roosevelt.]

Again, this admitted wrong is not the sudden and unavoidable outcome of
events unforeseen and uncontrollable. It has been deliberately planned
years ahead, with elaborate preparation of railway and other facilities,
and with every invention and contrivance, to rush in irresistible
forces; to subvert and destroy the independent State that Germany was
herself pledged to defend.

Thirdly, this policy of absolute annihilation of Belgium, of its right
to live its own life, its right even to preserve those monuments of its
noble and beautiful history which had become treasured heirlooms of the
whole world, has been carried out with a ruthless barbarity to the
people, and especially the non-combatants, for which it is hard to find
a parallel in the worst incidents of the Thirty Years' War or of the
devastation of the Palatinate. To bring the actual guilt home to those
who actually did or ordered these deeds to be done in individual cases
is one thing. The broad fact that these barbarous deeds were done stands
manifest and insistent, and demands such instant action as can be taken
by a great and responsible people.

And, lastly, there is the undisguised adoption of the policy of
terrorizing non-combatants to submission by such acts as forcing women
and children to walk before the advancing enemy, the wholesale burning
of houses, shooting of hostages and other non-combatants, and the
dropping of bombs from aeroplanes not on forts or troops, but on places
where women and children can be killed or injured.

And all this tragic sweeping away of such good things as had been won
with worldwide consent, at the instance of the Czar in initiating The
Hague policy, has gone on, so far as it could go on, with equal horror,
throughout Northern France. Rheims and Senlis have suffered the fate of
Louvain and Termonde and Malines, and Paris has had her quota of women
and children wantonly slain by bombs, exactly like Antwerp.

The Threat to England.

And America knows, as we here in England know, from the open menace of
the German press, writing of Englan