A CONVERTED PACIFICIST.
[To rue Burros or ma "Seeerwroa."] Sta,—I have been trying to grasp the Pacificist theory at the present juncture of affairs. I was a Pacificist once and am ,a sort of Pacifieist now. We urn all Pacifieists just as we are all miser- able sinners, but there are differences of degree. And though we may all make •the confession on Sundays, you would feel hurt, Sir, and you, dear reader, if you were lumped for purposes of moral classification with Nero, Crippen, Charles Peace, the Borgias, and other extreme samples of the class. The Germans practise such bestial wickedness en moose that even nausea palls. " Where is your proof " says the Pacificist. One shows him sworn testimony to the murderous firing on sailors in open boats, photographs of the roofs of Red Cross hospitals which their aero- planes knowingly bombed. "These are a few isolated cases," says he. You produce sheafs of evidence, catalogues of crime and out- rage, German admissions and German boasts. He replies: "The Germans honestly think the sailors are hiding revolvers in their lifebelts, they honestly think the hospitals are used for secret ammunition dumps. All people at war are credulous and nervous. Consider how the Russian ships behaved in the dark off the Dogger Bank "; and he recommends that the fighting should be called off, the Germane asked to table their demands, and after a reason- able deal, with the signatures of both parties appended, he predicts a lengthy era of quiet living and mutual goodwill. It seems to me his own estimate of the German character should destroy those hopes. So many treaties have been scrapped in this war that the Germans would be moreatervous than ever of a situation based on treaties. Their nervousness would stimulate preparation and culminate once again in the " policy of pounce." Nothing would ever calm their nerves after what has been gone through except universal annexation or a "universal disarmament "—of all other nations than themselves, though either of these precautions would soon involve both. This has been the tendency and, on a small scale as yet, the result of every nervous fit of theirs since the time of Frederick " the Great." Nothing will soothe their morbid terrors but triumphant victory. Yes, one other sedative exists, pace the Pacificist, which, fortunately, it is in our power to apply, and that is overwhelming defeat. One of the curious and paradoxical by-products of this war ie the clear establishment of the fact that the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, when their infirmity is attributable to a derangement of the nerves, can be cured and made useful citizens by a sudden and overpowering
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