The Committee of Enquiry, like another Portia, clothed in the ermine-trimmed robe of Justice and the Law, has unlocked with the key of Truth the door of the closed chamber. The key lies behind her inscribed in Dutch with the name that tells its nature. The Committee then pulls back the curtain, and reveals the horrors that are behind it. Before the curtain is fully drawn back, Enquiry sinks almost in collapse at the terrible sight that is disclosed. There hang to pegs on the wall the bodies of Bluebeard's victims, a woman, an old man, a priest, two boys, and a girl still half hidden behind the curtain. The blood that has trickled from them coagulates in pools on the ground.

Bluebeard himself comes suddenly: he hurries down the steps brandishing his curved sword, a big, burly figure, with square, thick beard, and streaming whiskers, wearing a Prussian helmet, his mouth open to utter a roar of rage and fury. The hatred and scorn with which the artist inspires his pictures of Prussia are inexhaustible in their variety: Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the incarnation of "frightfulness." I can imagine the feelings with which all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. "For every cartoon of Raemaekers," said a German newspaper, "the payment will be exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up." To this painter the Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what nobility of nature means. He can practise on and take advantage of the vices and weaknesses of his enemies; he can buy the services of many among them, and have all the worser people in his fee as his servants and agents; but he is always foiled, because he forgets that some men cannot be bought, and that these men will steel their fellow-countrymen's minds to resist tyranny to the last. The mass of men can be led either to evil or to good.

The Prussian military system assumes the former as certain, and is well skilled in the way. But there is the latter way, too, which Prussia never knew and never takes into account as a possibility; and men as a whole prefer the way to good before the way to evil, when both are fully explained and made clear. This saves men, and ruins Prussia.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.