military
training in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on
behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act
on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the
Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their
being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict
would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of
the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were
gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,
pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of
war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly;
and its law was set aside for Lynch law.

The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest
Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a
gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was
shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off
no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed.
The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M.
Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that
the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun
with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.

The Long Arm of War

The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the
battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India.
But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence,
reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever
would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire,
and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders,
where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another
as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it
after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for
relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for so many
centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had l