! We do not have to work in daily fear lest we should have
to return to an empty house whence wife or daughter have been dragged
by brutal hands! _For three years_ the people of London and Paris and
thousands of other cities have never known but that at any moment their
house might be brought down in ruins about their ears, entombing all
that they hold dear! _For three years_ the men of northern France and
Belgium have never known but that while they were working, under
compulsion, against the life of their own blood and country in a German
munition factory, some soldiers might not be calling at their homes to
take the woman that they love God alone knows where! These very things
have happened to tens of thousands. Week after week the human hawks
come over London, and ever the toll of civilians and women and babies
done to death grows larger! One hundred thousand young girls were
taken from Lille and other cities away from knowledge or protection of
their kin, and until recently we had no news of any of them, but some
have been thrown into Switzerland, of no further use to Germany; used
up like sucked lemons, they are cast aside for the Swiss to feed.
Germany has in her maw to-day more than ten millions of slaves.

In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of
girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not
hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me:
"There is a baby coming; it is a boche; when it is born I will cut its
throat!" A woman showed me on an estaminet floor the blood-stains of
her own baby butchered before her eyes. These were French women, not
ours. But what if they had been? Your sister! Your mother! Your
wife! And they might have been but for the accident of geography.
Would you then have felt as bitter as these people? Or would you still
have kindly feelings to Germany and not want to "humiliate her." There
may be beings who could see daughter violated or brother mutilated
without taking personal vengeance, but such should not be permitted to
breathe the air with MEN.

The only people who have a right to say what punishment shall be meted
out to Germany for her misdeeds, are the women of France, of Belgium,
of Poland, of Serbia, of Rumania, of Italy, who have suffered these
things; and if any one, King or President, Parliament or Pope, dares
stand between these people and their just wrath they deserve to be
pilloried in