THE Kaiser said “his heart bled” when the Allies raided Carlsruhe from the air. The hemorrhage was not serious, but it had a value as tending to show that the heart was there. Or was it that the Allies had performed the classic feat of drawing blood from a stone? It was more than his own airmen could do when they killed children and women in London and Paris.

Perhaps some day a poet will arise who will be able to write for us the epic of the Morning Paper during this war. It used to lie under doors till wanted, and then Father had it, and Mother didn’t want it till after lunch, and George got it after Father, and Arthur must therefore buy an “evening” paper at the station where he caught the 9:19 to the City. And it really didn’t matter much, after all, except that it was something to talk about, and the Other Side was taking the country to the dogs (a trip on which it has been entering any time these last five hundred years), and one must know the latest entries for the Thousand Guineas, anyway, and yesterday’s goals.

And now! “Hasn’t the paper come yet? Where’s the paper? Is there any news? What are We doing? Have the French advanced? What about Verdun? Why’s the paper late? How’s Russia this morning? Read it out, Father, or else order a copy each!” The holy, classical, breakfast gloom of the British family is shattered by machine-gun fire of questions, of anxiety, of hope, of anguish, of pride, of horror, of hope again. Those folded sheets of printing, less clear than it used to be, on paper less good than it was, have even eclipsed that domestic Mercury, the postman! Letters lie unopened till the news has been scanned. That alone represents a revolution in British family life, and the same thing obtains in all the Allied western countries.

And what it represents is the change of focus in our minds. We are all living more or less intensely in an impersonal and selfless atmosphere, where what others are doing matters more than what our friends are doing, and where we are blatantly, flagrantly, despite all our national traditions, sure of an Ideal. We can even talk about it! I believe this cartoon by Raemaekers has a special appeal to the British for this reason; that the morning paper has come to mean so much to us, and now rouses in us such large, splendid feelings, such a magnificence of pain, such a glory of anxiety, such a pride of suffering—has made possible to us expression of so much which we thought it right and decent to hide in our hearts before—that this spectacle of the Kaiser and his dame gloating over innocent deaths has a force and a drive which the British are bound to recognize in a special degree. And the faces of the maniac and his senile wife, glowering at their “good news,” cannot help but recall to us Father’s look when he read that we had taken La Boisselle, Mother’s face when she heard that casualties were “comparatively” light. The paper is something more than paper and ink nowadays.

H. PEARL ADAM.