t the war has made about six German widows for
every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that
family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. They,
like our own suffering women, are the victims of a barbarous ideal of
national glory, and a worse than barbarous perversion of patriotism,
which in our opponents has become a kind of moral insanity.

These pictures will remain long after the war-passion has subsided. They
will do their part in preventing a recrudescence of it. Who that has
ever clamoured for war can face the unspoken reproach in these pitiful
eyes? Who can think unmoved of the happy romance of wedded love, so
early and so sadly terminated?

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

[Illustration: THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM]

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THE HARVEST IS RIPE

The artist spreads before you a view such as you would have on the great
wheat-growing plains of Hungary, or on the level plateau of Asiatic
Turkey--the vast, unending, monotonous, undivided field of corn. In the
background the view is interrupted by two villages from which great
clouds of flame and smoke are rising--they are both on fire--and as you
look closer at the harvest you see that, instead of wheat, it consists
of endless regiments of marching soldiers.

"The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few": here is only one,
but he is quite sufficient--"the reaper whose name is Death," a skeleton
over whose bones the peasant's dress--a shirt and a pair of ragged
trousers--hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are turned well
up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two holds of the
huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.

This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry,
its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development of
war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of
slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When
one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate
that in the first seventeen months of the war Germany alone lost over a
million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not
exaggerated. It is the bare truth.

The ease with which the giant figure of Death mows down the harvest of
tiny men corresponds, in fact, to the million of German dead, probably