ong ceased to be
more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected
to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in
cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst
bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel
on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly
full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and
mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a
good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America
where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went
beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive
illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me
to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do
that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,
with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as
unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying
the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether
our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on
young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were
being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England,
and the more private records of the methods by which the American
War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the
possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.

The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty

Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war
maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of
liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under
which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by
simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without
any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence.
Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased
by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity
of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory
laws were suspended, and men