character,
and any one who imagines that Mr. Shaw is a strenuous campaigner for
Home Rule is greatly mistaken. If in the years preceding the war the
Horne Rule cause had depended upon Mr. Shaw's activities, it would have
been in a bad way. It is now, when a foreign enemy menaces our nation as
a whole, that Mr. Shaw manifests this enhanced interest in Home Rule.

The suffragettes, who have fought and suffered for their cause as no
living man reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for
his, have during the present crisis subordinated their claim to the
urgent claims of national honor and safety. So Mr. Shaw, whose
campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never in any place
more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely to refrain from his
frivolous, inconsistent, destructive, and unprofitable criticism of our
country.

As for the question of lynching, Mr. Shaw is, the American public may be
assured, in no danger whatever of being lynched. He is in far more
danger of having the Iron Cross conferred upon him by the Kaiser in
recognition of his attempt to supplement the activities of the official
German Press Bureau. But if he were a German subject, writing on certain
points of German policy as he does upon certain points of British
policy, his fate can well be imagined. The only retribution that will
come upon this man, who exploits the freedom of speech and pen that
England gives him, is that his words lose now and henceforth the weight
they used to have. Oh, the conceit of the man, who in this dark hour,
when the English are dying on the battlefield, writes of "taking the
conceit out of England" by a stroke of his inconsequent pen!

*Admits England's Cause Is Just.*

But with all his will to "take the conceit" out of this England, so
fiercely menaced, her sons killed, her daughters widowed--yet needing,
so he thinks, his castigation into the bargain--the critic is
constrained to admit that our country is playing the part of "the
responsible policeman of the West" and that "for England to have
refrained from hurling herself into the fray, horse, foot, and
artillery, was impossible from every point of view." Then why preface
these statements by a series of attacks upon the country which is
admitted to be justly fighting in a just cause?

The sole importance of Mr. Shaw's criticism comes from this. He
unwarrantably indorses statements made by Germany in her attempt to put
the Allies in the wro