n a man insolently spurns the mighty altar of justice_."

This is as true to-day as when it was written more than two thousand
years ago. It is but a classic echo of the old Hebraic moral axiom that
"the Lord God of recompenses shall surely requite."

The most powerful and self-willed ruler of modern times learned this
lesson to his cost. Probably no two instances contributed so powerfully
to the ultimate downfall of Napoleon as his ruthless assassination under
the forms of military law of the Duke d'Enghien and the equally brutal
murder of the German bookseller, Palm. The one aroused the undying
enmity of Russia, and the blood that was shed in the moat of Vincennes
was washed out in the icy waters of the Beresina. The fate of the poor
German bookseller, whom Napoleon caused to be shot because his writing
menaced the security of French occupation, developed as no other event
the dormant spirit of German nationality, and the Nuremberg bookseller,
shot precisely as was Miss Cavell, was finally avenged when Bluecher gave
Napoleon the _coup de grace_ at Waterloo. No one more clearly felt the
invisible presence of his Nemesis than did Napoleon. All his life, and
even in his confinement at St. Helena, he was ceaselessly attempting to
justify to the moral conscience of the world his ruthless assassination
of the last Prince of the house of Conde. The terrible judgment of
history was never better expressed than by Lamartine in the following
language:

"A cold curiosity carries the visitor to the battlefields of
Marengo, Austerlitz, Wagram, Leipsic, Waterloo; he wanders over
them with dry eyes, but one is shown at a corner of the wall near
the foundations of Vincennes, at the bottom of a ditch, a spot
covered with nettles and weeds. He says, 'There it is!' He utters a
cry and carries away with him undying pity for the victim and an
implacable resentment against the assassin. This resentment is
vengeance for the past and a lesson for the future. _Let the
ambitious, whether soldiers, tribunes, or kings, remember that if
they have hirelings to do their will, and flatterers to excuse
them while they reign, there yet comes afterward a human conscience
to judge them and pity to hate them. The murderer has but one hour;
the victim has eternity._"

At the outbreak of the war Miss Cavell was living with her aged mother
in England. Constrained by a noble and imperious sen