t any
report however authentic which ventures to suggest that the Germans are
as human as ourselves. There was, for instance, a Canadian woman, Dr.
Scarlett-Synge, who under the aegis of her medical diploma, returned
from Serbia through Germany, and discovered that some of the German
internment camps are not as bad as they are commonly believed to be.
Whatever her qualifications and opportunities for forming a correct
opinion, and they happen to have been particularly good, there is no
doubt that this woman's report was of the highest interest. Yet not a
single daily paper in England would consider its publication, on the
ground presumably that it might reduce the national inflammation and
thereby "prejudice recruiting." As if true patriotism, sane and lovely,
had anything to do with the pathological condition of hatred.
"Recruiting be damned," says the patriotic philosopher, "_odium nunquam
potest esse bonum_."[76] The method of distortion is also abundantly
used by journalists of both parties. German hatred of England has often
been stoked up by isolated mistranslations of sentences from _The
Times_, and English and French journalists have not been slow in
following the German example. It is said that after the fall of Antwerp
the _Koelnische Zeitung_ announced that "as soon as the fall of Antwerp
was known the church bells in Germany were rung," a harmless message
which was successively distorted by the _Matin_, the _Daily Mail_, and
the _Corriere della Sera_, until it finally reappeared in the _Matin_ in
the following form: "According to the information of the _Corriere della
Sera_ from London and Cologne it is confirmed that the barbaric
conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their
heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living
clappers to the bells with their heads downwards."[77]

The Manufacture of Hatred is unfortunately become a part of the
Nationalist Movement in nearly all modern European States. The spurious
Nationalism which is the result not of race but of education, depends
for its existence almost entirely on so-called ethnological propaganda
and continues to thrive by the cultivation of two propositions, neither
of which is true: that all the members of one national group are
racially different from all the members of the neighbouring group; and
that this racial difference naturally and necessarily and properly
implies the mutual hatred of the two nations.