to the whole world and having opened the campaign against us with a falsehood, England will tell your countrymen that the German troops burned down Belgian villages and cities, but will pass over in silence the fact that Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of defenceless wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out and, after having at first shown friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with concealed weapons.

CUT SOLDIERS' THROATS

"Belgian women cut the throats of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were sleeping. England also will say nothing of the dumdum bullets which are being used by the English and French, despite all conventions and their hypocritical proclamations of humanity, which can be seen here in their original packing as they were found on French and English prisoners of war.

"The Emperor has authorized me to say all this and to state that he has full confidence in the sense of justice of the American people which will not allow itself to be deceived through the war of falsehoods which our enemies are conducting against us." The statement of the Chancellor closes as follows: "Every one who has lived in Germany since the outbreak of the war has been able to witness the great moral uprising of all Germans, who, pressed hard on all sides, cheerfully take the field for the

defence of their rights and their existence; every one knows that this people is not capable of any unnecessary cruelty or of any brutality. We will win, thanks to the great moral strength which our just cause gives to our troops, and in the end the greatest falsehood will be able to obscure our victories as little as they do our rights."

It will be observed that the destruction of the University of Louvain has never been justified. Louvain is a small town and one would think that any "sniping" could have been dealt with without destroying manuscripts and architecture, by shooting as many civilians as was necessary. To turn machine guns against ancient University buildings was the act of wild beasts. As a matter of fact no one knows exactly what happened at Louvain, save that the Germans burned all of it except the Town Hall. Whether or not they did it "with aching hearts" is really not known. In connection with the discussion of sniping about which Germany has such strong and such virtuous feelings, it is worth while to study the German theories of sniping which apply when Germany is invaded.

The following is a Special Cable to the New York Times:

Amsterdam, November 15 (Dispatch to the London Standard).-An interesting German mili

tary proclamation has been circulated in those parts of the Eastern Prussian provinces now being invaded for the second time by the Russian Army. It contains the following passage:

"When the enemy crosses the frontiers of Imperial Germany there ensues a struggle of national defence in which all methods are permissible. It is the duty of every man capable of bearing arms to stem the invasion and harass the enemy till he retires. The whole population must take up arms to keep the enemy always in a state of unrest, to seize his ammunition, to stop his food supplies, to capture his scouts, to destroy by any means whatsoever his ambulance and field hospitals, and to shoot him down during the night.

"The men of the Landsturm who perform such duties should not wear uniforms, because by retaining their civilian dress they are less conspicuous and thus are in a better position to attack the enemy unawares."

Another poet, Wolfkehl, raised his voice in answer to Rolland. The following is from the New York Times, October 14th:

A reply to the letter of complaint written by Romain Rolland, the French novelist, to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German playwright, but couched in far more solemn terms than the angry answer made by Hauptmann himself, is that of Karl Wolfkehl, the poet, which appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung of September 12th. Herr Wolfkehl does not boast, as did Hauptmann, of the rash glories of

war; but in reply to Rolland's charges of German destructiveness in Belgium, sees in them a terrible purge of Europe, and asserts that Germany is not merely fighting France for its own protection, but is really fighting for the protection of Europe against Muscovite hordes. He says, in part:

"Such a fate is this war. No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right. Do you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for the last half of a generation, to choke us? Do you not know how often this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said: 'Wilhelm will not make war?' That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is known to the whole world."

THE WAR "CAME FROM GOD"

"But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate. I will betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour of Europe:

"This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it but it came from God. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity and its

virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it flew through the year-before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book of necessity and of triumph.

"The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are unprecedented and new. None of us-do you hear, Rolland?-none of us Germans to-day would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and framework; even so we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained by ruins, even as we are pained by them -you, too, do not know it.

"To-day it is a question of the life or death of the European Soul. Do you not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of gravediggers; and then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully confessed act of self-defence on the part of the Germans, the temporary occupa