LIBERATED LILLE.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sns,—I venture to think that the following extract frets% a letter written by a well-known French journalist and novelist, himself a son of Lille but absent from his native town during her four years of agony and humiliation, deserves a larger audience than the benevolent old Englishman to whom it was addressed. The writer had just returned from a brief visit to liberated, starving, battered, but deliriously happy Lille :- "Pendant qua j'6tale lit-bas ma femme aseistait 8 la fête qui a on lieu diinanche is Paris. Elle m'a dit: Quand les Anglais ont defi14, ce fut une temptite d'applaudissements oomme jamais je n'en avail entendu. On leur criait "Lillel Lille! "'. . . . memo, qui suss arriv6 dans la vine deux jours apses l'entrEss de vos troupes,je puha vows dire oeei. Je portals l'uniforme anglais, comma tons les correspondents de guerre; et les petits ,enfants de Lille, me prenant pour un de vos oompatriotes, venaient toms me baiser in main, silenoieusement, male avec les yetis iota) de joie et de reconnaissance! "
Then follows a brief, a studiously matter-of-fact statement of the miseries which provoked this odd, touching, half-amusing salons. sion of joyful gratitude. "Je supplie les Anglais," the writer adds, "de ne jamais oublier ces infamies. Mais merci pour ce gulls ont fait, meroi du fond du emus."
We must not be betrayed into an imitation of German brutality and vindictiveness. But the office of our responsible rulers must needs be that of judges of wilful and wicked wrong done to harm. less and helpless populations. The Judge who shirks a painful _duty wrongs both the criminal and his victims. We need not be vindictive, but it behoves us to be firmly and steadfastly just,. since, so far as human fallibility can see, it is only condign punish- ment that can prevent a repetition of the horrors of the past
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