CERTAIN publications in neutral countries, notably in America, have given room in their pages during the course of the war to little sketches—obviously part of the German system of propaganda—designed to show that the Allied estimate of German barbarities is at the very least a huge exaggeration, and is possibly altogether fabricated. The term “undue sentimentality” is frequently used; travelers in the occupied territories are represented as seeing the inhabitants quite contented under German rule and surprised at the mention of atrocities. Their conquerors are quite good people, necessarily subjecting them to strict discipline, but in no way unjust. There may have been atrocities somewhere, at some time, but these travellers cannot get any reliable accounts of them.

Many of the papers that publish this sort of thing are probably quite ignorant of its source; others, of course, do so with full knowledge of the merits of the case and of the reason for its publication. Evidence collected on oath from sufferers is ignored, and so cleverly are these little sketches done that one is inclined to believe the German is not so black as he has been painted.

But not one of these sketches ever ventures near the subject of the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Scarborough bombardment, or Louvain—or any other of those horrors that are established beyond question in the minds of men. And wherever these German efforts at lulling the world’s conscience by sophistries appear, there should this cartoon appear also, as a corrective. Throughout half the world these murdered children lie under earth and water, and to forget them in the day when Germany fears to add more to their number would be to share this modern Herod’s infamy.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.