ing
text] "Scoundrel: you can never replace **[missing text] Louvain
library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and it follows logically that you
shall empty your pockets into ours." Much better say: "God forgive us
all!" If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder,
at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and our
souls by giving it fine names.

*Our Annihilationists.*

Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany "bled
to the white," dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it
again. Well, that is quite simple, if you are Militarist enough to do
it. Loading Germany with debt will not do it. Towing her fleet into
Portsmouth or sinking it will not do it. Annexing provinces and colonies
will not do it. The effective method is far shorter and more practical.
What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her
overwhelmingly superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost
to the gates of Paris. The organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch
howitzer helped; but it was the multitudinous _Kanonenfutter_ that
nearly snowed us under. The British soldier at Cambrai and Le Cateau
killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and his hand was
paralyzed with slayer's cramp; but still they came and came.

*Why Not Kill the German Women?*

Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. Those Germans who took
but an instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for
three-quarters of a year to breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the
slaughter. All we have to do is to kill, say, 75 per cent, of all the
women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her fleet and her
money, and say "Much good may they do you." Why not, if you are really
going in to be what you, never having read "this Neech they talk of,"
call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of
our newspapers complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on
field hospitals and Red Cross Ambulances. These same newspapers fill
their columns with exultant accounts of how our wounded think nothing of
modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in a week, which I
take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the wounded
that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: "stone
dead hath no fellow" is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the
killing of prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is no