most famous remedies of modern science for venereal disease have been discovered by German savants. In the years 1903-1905, 30 per cent. of the recruits from Hamburg, and 41.3 per cent. of the recruits from Berlin, were found to be infected. Further details on this unpleasant subject will be found in a recently published work by H. de Halsalle entitled "Degenerate Germany," from which many of the statements in this article are derived. The picture there drawn of the immoral condition of Germany can only be described as appalling. "Vice," said Burke, writing of the French Court before the Revolution, "lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." in Germany, on the other hand, has added to itself tenfold ugliness by its peculiar German trait of grossness.

Vice

In a country in which vice is thus rampant and unashamed, it is not surprising to find that crime prevails to an equal extent. There is always a difficulty in comparing the statistics of one country with those of another owing to differences in nomenclature and classification, but there can be no doubt that, after making all allowances, the amount of crime recorded in the returns of the German Empire is portentous. The population of Germany, according to the Census of 1910, was a little under 65 millions, while that of England and Wales was 36 millions in 1911. England and Wales thus have a population somewhat more than half that of Germany. The following figures show the offences against property in the two countries :

The most startling feature of these statistics is the amazing amount of fraud, embezzlement and forgery which appears to be committed in Germany. It is difficult to believe that the outwardly reputable German nation can have compiled such a record of crime in one year although the statistics seem to be perfectly clear; but whatever room for confusion there may be in the classification of some of these offences under their respective headings, there can be no getting away from the damning aggregate of this class, of crime. The official statistics of crime against property in England and Wales are beyond doubt or question and show the following total results :

Total of indictable offences against | 61,463.
Property.. J

Even if we add the 14,921 cases of petty damage to property, which includes injury to flowers, fruit, etc., the grand total for England and Wales is 76,384, whereas the German figures total to 315,483, or just five times as great, though the German population is less than double that of England and Wales.

Perhaps we can now understand the shameless lying of German official authorities. The explicit,

[Most of these (16,192) were petty offences tried by Courts of Summary Jurisdiction. There were 439 indictable offences of this class.]

official denial of the losses (since admitted to have occurred) in the late naval battle may be put down to military exigencies. The personal assurance which the German Ambassador in Brussels, Herr von Below-Saleske, gave to the Belgian Minister on the morning of 2nd August 1914, thirty-six hours before German troops invaded the country, that "Belgium had nothing to fear from Germany" may be ascribed to the exuberance of diplomacy. But what are we to make of the deliberate lies which have been circulated by Germans throughout the War, such for instance as the letter written by Count Falkerstein, the Officer Commanding on the Nyassaland Frontier, to a Native Chief in which he said that the French had been completely cleared out of Morocco and that "the askaris of holy war are in the Punjab and in India." Such forgeries of news receive a new setting when we find that there were 12,446 cases of forgery in Germany in one year.

But it is when we come to offences against the person, and especially to offences against women, that the statistics relating to Germany at peace begin to throw the most illuminating light on Germany at war. A writer well qualified to speak has remarked that if a man does a brutal or bestial act when drunk, you may be perfectly certain that he would do the same when sober if he dared. That a similar conclusion is true of the soldier intoxicated by the strong wine of war may be inferred from the criminal statistics of Germany. If the German soldiery in Belgium plundered, raped and murdered, such acts were not the fruits of sudden and overwhelming excitement. They were the natural outcome of the German nature, when the restraints of law were removed. That this is proved by the character of the crime which marked modern Germany in peace, will clearly appear from the following statistics comparing the yearly average crimes over a period of ten years in

Comment on these figures would be superfluous. They speak for themselves. There are only two points in connection with them which may be

insisted on. The first is that whereas crime in Great Britain shows a steady tendency to diminish, in Germany it is increasing to an alarming extent. The second is that while in Great Britain the commission of crimes of violence by juveniles is entirely negligible, in Germany it presents the most serious features. In 1912, the following offences were committed by boys between the ages of 12 and 18::Murders and manslaughters Inflicting bodily injuries. Rapes and indecent assaults Damage to property

Arson

107

8,987

952

2,938 148

If these are the deeds of the younger generation in Germany, we can easily judge of the homes in which these boys are reared.

We have all read the claims of the German people to impose their Kultur on the rest of the * Includes that of infants aged one year and under.

Of these 57,841 were dealt with by Courts of Summary Jurisdiction and were therefore minor offences,

world. We have most of us seen the extraordinary claims which they put forward to superior virtue. The facts drawn from the' published statistics of the German Empire show what those claims are worth and what that Kultur is like. It is characterized by gross immorality, widespread prostitution, constant assaults on women and children, fraud, forgery and violence. These are the manifestations of German civilization in peace. We know what they have donc in war. These criminals belong to the same race as the men who raped 15 or 20 women in open day in the Place de l'Universitè at Liège with their officers looking on, who bayoneted and shot women and children at Malines, Hofstade and

many other Belgian towns, who poisoned the wells in South Africa, who introduced poisonous gas into modern warfare, who sank without warning the Lusitania and many other ships containing women, children and non-combatants, who bombarded open and defenceless towns, killing the civil population, who murdered the wounded and starved prisoners. Well might Lord Rosebery describe these people as "cruel, treacherous, predatory." The people of India should have no illusions about the character of the race which is striving in this war to destroy the British Empire and to substitute German rule for it.

HE war fever continues. It rages with

unabated fury and the worst crisis does not seem to have been passed. Experts in charts and graphs, on the strength of "ups and downs" in statiscal curves, now familiar in all departments of human knowledge and capable of telling all stories at the teller's pleasure, hold out questionable consolations regarding the duration of similar ailments of the body politic on previous occasions. The Russo-Japanese fever lasted for a certain number of years, the Boer fever lasted for a certain other number of years and certain other fevers, since acurate recording came into vogue, are declared to have lasted for certain other

numbers of years. "There is no reason, therefore," says the cynically optimistic physician, "for getting impatient or depressed because of the acuteness of distressing symptoms or of their duration." Like all malignant fevers this one

must run out its legitimate (illegitimate?) course we are told and by plentiful cupping the requisite exhaustion must be secured to avoid a fatal relapse or a still more fatal repetition. Cold and questionable as this consolation may be, it is about the only working material to go upon for the present, and sufferers have to grin and bear and contain their souls in patience. Not only to wait patiently, but to prepare doggedly to fight each symptom, as it gets acute, is the surest and the shortest way to a fight to the finish. This is the real innerness, the "dominating note 'of the Allies' counsels, in spite of politic and expedient peace talks in "Sounding Exchanges of America and Switzerland. No League to "Enforce Peace," no platitudinous "pedastal-talk" of the Ford Car pace will change things.

Literature or such remnants of it as are still

vouchsafed to humanity has been thoroughly permeated and diffusely colored by war during the last twenty-three months. Not newspaper literature and magazine literature alone but such also as claims to be literature proper has been sharing the attendant process of degeneration, and Hindenberg's march to London" is by no means an exceptional manifestation of the jocosely morbid taste unaccountably prevailing far and wide. War fever and the craving for apposite war literature go together, and it could hardly be otherwise when fireside and roadside talks and countryside gossip are all full of war. Not merely within the immediate "spheres of action " or of "spheres of influence "in the war zone proper-is this the but in the wider world far, even in remote regions, where the visible and tangible emblems of civilization are the least in vogue, has the reaction spread. This is bound to be the case if, and so long as, literature happens to be the natural reflection of human thought, feeling, craving, suffering and ideation. Careful guardians like Mr. Natesan, who has undertaken this series with his usual public spirit, can help in keeping things within bounds.

case;

Few animals other than man war upon one another and it is not the "crow" alone that

refuses to eat a crow, as a Bengali adage has it. Man not only glories in warring against man but rejoices in poetic and graphic records of his brutality and his iniquity, not so much for the benefit and training of his peers for the time being, as by way of building up future "heroe-worship " and for proper "humanising "humanising" of his admiring after-comer. With war grows the demand for war literature and with the one unabated, the other has to keep pace.

From war manuals to war novels of the "A Scrap of Paper " kind, it is not a far cry and both seem to afford questionable mental food. In captured war manuals have been found thrilling theories and injunctions that no penny howler

could ever hope to beat. How new provinces have to be Germanized, literally and physically, is enunciated in sickening and loathsome details that have to be "religiously" followed to the letter by the human automaton in "Blucher Boots," gas goggles and steel helmets that has no soul to call its own. Abnormal monstrosities are never Nature's favourites, and the most cautious and long spun calculations have fortunately the uncanny nack of being baffled at unpromised Verduns and without warning. That is the safe deus Ex Mechani plot is baffled a

guard the saving grace-the by which the scoundrel of the the right time. That has been ever so from th times of Hiranyakasipu and Ravana and Kamsa an Herod. That will be so again, and anon too.

"To Paris "-" to Calais -"to Kandahar""to Karachi," have proved to be cries easier to growl in the gutteral than to give effect to. That twenty years of solid, stolid, silent and sneaking preparations have gone practically for nothing an have not yet prevailed against frank and admitte unpreparedness is eloquent and characteristic testi mony of the innate grit, doggedness and tenacit of the Anglo-Saxon race that are proof agains all ultimate disaster. Such patent unpreparedne for gratituitous rapine and man-killing on colossal and world-staggering scale does (may according to some) discredit to head, but does abundant credit to heart of the nation concerned. And after all th it is that tells. While they and their allie hitherto separated by diversity of complicated i terests, were nearly taken aback and by hurri preparation have succeeded for twenty-three mont in more than keeping watch and ward, many hundred miles from their legitimate bases ar their sources of supply, along the Western, the Ne Eastern and Mid-Eastern and in the Far Easter frontiers, spread over many thousands of mile ministers of munition, of air, of food and recruitment have sprung into existence, mag

cally as it were, and put right defects that never betokened lack of manhood. Lord Roberts warned and the Nation in full consciousness of possible dangers let the warning go unheeded; for it did not think and believe all that was said of the wily foe. But it has amply recovered its pace and cleverly engineered pinpricks at Singapore, at Hongkong, at Colombo, at Benares, at Lahore and at Dublin that disappeared with detection on the double quick, but proved the true British metal.

And rarely was the metal more cruelly tried than when the Hampshire that had 80 distinguished itself in the memorable water-rout of the enemy a few short hours before, went down with the enemy's terror, a disaster that would have crushed the spirit out of another people. But recruiting and organisation are going on just as if Lord Kitchener had never lived and been the "only General." Ever alone and detatched by himself, a mystery like the Sphinx that he must often have communed with in the moonlight deserts that he ruled and freshened. Lord

Kitchener just dipped like some glorious orb into the great Blue, seemingly before his appointed time, but with singular majesty and fulness of color with which no disease, wound, nursing and sympathy could have been possibly in keeping. If no wife or son mourned his loss, the Sun shone bright for twenty-four hours over world-wide memorial services in his honor. Those there are that half believe he is not dead but will some day make а dramatic revisitation of his field of work. Whether anything half as weird happens or not, Lord Kitchener is not dead, in that his spirit survives and animates for the confusion and overthrow of the enemy of man's progress, civilisation, nay entity.

And what is the field of operation of the German and the Austrian and the Turk?

In contiguous countries of the size of pocket handkerchiefs (compared to those that have to

guard themselves against Hunnish inroads, with frontiers several thousand miles long) where a network of long devised and finely organized railways, tapping all their bases and sources of supplies, the enemy are making use of the same units at different and distant points, which gives an altogether false idea of their strength and resources. What goes on in the green room is invisible and this, for the time being, gives a fine stage effect to the performances such as those of General "Von'O'Clock”—the General who like a clever music hall-Artiste, having done his turn at a distant Hall, began his antics at another Hall with clockwork regularity at one o'clock. Such charlatanism cannot last long and the famous army of the Merry Knight of Windsor, famous for his fat gallantry and his fatter beer-pot, is bound to show itself in its true colour and strength the moment the drapery is torn asunder. The recent Shakespeare Tercentary has been making German Savants claim Immortal William as one of their very own," exiled, alas, from his own unappreciative country." Falstaffian war and social ethics that the Vaterland has plentifully absorbed of late will probably prove this title to the satisfaction of the Berliner, who is daily fed up with indigestible black bread of the new war pattern. Now that the great master-minds that knew the true "Fancy's child" have disappeared for good from their midst, this must be the remnant of their solace.

66

Carefully manipulated army and civil statistics, intended to blind the unwary, have not long been of avail. In the words of the King's glorious and stirring message out not long ago, His Majesty's subjects have displayed splendid patriotism and selfsacrifice in raising by voluntary enlistment since the commencement of the war, no less than 5,041,000 men, an effort far more surpassing than that of any other nation in similar circumstances recorded in history. By way of additional sacrifice "every able-bodied man between the ages of eighteen and forty-one" will now be called upon