onths Page in
London, Sharp in Paris, and Whitlock in Brussels have labored to
alleviate the inevitable suffering to German prisoners or interned
civilians.

In view of these services, it surely was not much for the American
Minister to ask that a little delay should be granted to a woman whose
error, if any, had arisen from impulses of humanity and from
considerations of patriotism. To spare her life a little longer could
not have done the German cause any possible harm, for she was in their
custody and beyond the power of rendering any help to her compatriots.
To condemn any human being, even if he were the vilest criminal, at 5
o'clock in the afternoon and execute him at 2 a.m., was an act of
barbarism for which no possible condemnation is adequate.

Under these circumstances, it would be incredible, if the facts were not
beyond dispute, that the request of the United States for a little
delay was not only brutally refused, _but that our Legation was
deliberately misled and deceived until the death sentence had been
inflicted_.

This makes the fate of Miss Cavell our affair as much as that of the
Lusitania. And yet we have the already familiar semi-official assurance
from Washington that while our officials "unofficially deplore the act,
officially they can do nothing." Concurrently we are told in the
President's Thanksgiving proclamation that we should be thankful because
we have "been able to assert our rights and the rights of mankind," and
that this "has been a year of special blessing for us," for, so the
proclamation adds, "we have prospered while other nations were at war."

I venture to say in all reverence that the God of nations will be better
pleased on the coming Thanksgiving Day--which also should be one of
penitence and humiliation--if we do a little more _in fact_ and less in
words to safeguard the rights of humanity. Our initial blunder was in
turning away the Belgian Commissioners, when they first presented the
wrongs of their crucified nation, with icy phrases as to a mysterious
day of reckoning in the indefinite future. An act of justice now will be
worth a thousand future "accountings" after the long agony of the world
is over. "Now is the accepted time, this the day of salvation."

_Let our nation begin with the case of Edith Cavell, and demand of
Germany the dismissal of the officers who flouted, deceived, and mocked
the representative of the United States. That concerns our honor as a
nat