ses himself on
the ground that it is the only way he knows of explaining his opinions.

Times of stress and struggle, whether individual or national, afford men
and women other methods of expressing their views, and a large number of
our citizens are, very creditably, taking the present opportunity to act
instead of shout. There are the young fellows who in their thousands are
pressing around the door of the recruiting offices. They are throwing
up, many of them, good jobs for the privilege of drilling for the next
six months for eight hours a day. Their reward will be certain hardship,
their share of sickness and wounds, the probability of lying ten deep in
a forgotten grave, their chance of glory a name printed in small type
among a thousand others on a War Office report.

There are the mothers and wives and children who are encouraging them to
go; to whom their going means semi-starvation. The old, bent crones
whose feeble hands will have to grasp again the hoe and the scrubbing
brush. The young women who know only too well what is before them--the
selling of the home just got together; first the easy chair and the
mirror, and then the bed and the mattress; the weary tramping of the
streets, looking for work. The children awestruck and wondering.

There are the men who are quietly going on with their work, doing their
best with straitened means to keep their business going; giving
employment; getting ready to meet the income tax collector, who next
year one is inclined to expect will be demanding anything from half a
crown to five shillings in the pound. There are others. But there is a
certain noisy and, to me, particularly offensive man (and with him, I am
sorry to say, one or two women) very much to the fore just now with
whose services the country could very well dispense. He is the man who
does his fighting with his mouth. Unable for reasons of his own to get
at the foe in the field, he thirsts for the blood of the unfortunate
unarmed and helpless Germans that the fortunes of war have left stranded
in England. He writes to the paper thoughtfully suggesting plans that
have occurred to him for making their existence more miserable than it
must be. He generally concludes his letter with a short homily directed
against the Prussian Military Staff for their lack of the higher
Christian principles.

He has spies on the brain. Two quite harmless English citizens have
already been shot in consequence of the funk this