e nerves and mind, makes it
impossible. But that is not true of all or most cruelty. Most cruelty
has something else in it, something more than the clumsy plunging into
experience of the hobbledehoy; it is vindictive or indignant; it is
never tranquil and sensuous; it draws its incentive, however crippled
and monstrous the justification may be, from something punitive in man's
instinct, something therefore that implies a sense, however misguided,
of righteousness and vindication. That factor is present even in spite;
when some vile or atrocious thing is done out of envy or malice, that
envy and malice has in it always--_always?_ Yes, always--a genuine
condemnation of the hated thing as an unrighteous thing, as an unjust
usurpation, as an inexcusable privilege, as a sinful overconfidence.
Those men in the airship?--he was coming to that. He found himself
asking himself whether it was possible for a human being to do any cruel
act without an excuse--or, at least, without the feeling of
excusability. And in the case of these Germans and the outrages they had
committed and the retaliations they had provoked, he perceived that
always there was the element of a perceptible if inadequate
justification. Just as there would be if presently he were to maltreat a
fallen German airman. There was anger in their vileness. These Germans
were an unsubtle people, a people in the worst and best sense of the
words, plain and honest; they were prone to moral indignation; and moral
indignation is the mother of most of the cruelty in the world. They
perceived the indolence of the English and Russians, they perceived
their disregard of science and system, they could not perceive the
longer reach of these greater races, and it seemed to them that the
mission of Germany was to chastise and correct this laxity. Surely, they
had argued, God was not on the side of those who kept an untilled field.
So they had butchered these old ladies and slaughtered these children
just to show us the consequences:

"All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
All along of doing things rather more or less."

The very justification our English poet has found for a thousand
overbearing actions in the East! "Forget not order and the real," that
was the underlying message of bomb and gas and submarine. After all,
what right had we English _not_ to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to
bring down that Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively? Had we not
undertaken Empi