Soldiers of ours--many soldiers, I am sorry to say--have come back from Coblenz and other places in the black spot, saying that they found the inhabitants of the black spot kind and agreeable. They give this reason for liking the Germans better than they do the English. They found the Germans agreeable, the English not agreeable. Well, this amounts to something as far as it goes: but how far does it go, and how much does it amount to? Have you ever seen an automobile painted up to look like new, and it broke down before it had run ten miles, and you found its insides were wrong? Would you buy an automobile on the strength of the paint? England often needs paint, but her insides are all right. If our soldiers look no deeper than the paint, if our voters look no further than the paint, if our democracy never looks at anything but the paint, God help our democracy! Of course the Germans were agreeable to our soldiers after the armistice!

Agreeable Germany!--who sank the Lusitania; who sank five thousand British merchant ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men, women, and children, all murdered at sea, without a chance for their lives; who fired on boat-loads of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine and laughed at the drowning passengers of the torpedoed Falaba.

Disagreeable England!--who sank five hundred German ships without permitting a single life to be lost, who never fired a shot until provision had been made for the safety of passengers and crews.

Agreeable Germany!--who, as she retreated, poisoned wells and gassed the citizens from whose village she was running away; who wrecked the churches and the homes of the helpless living, and bombed the tombs of the helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking their boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving the old people to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon England slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or injured seven hundred and fifty-seven children, and made in all a list of four thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, bombed by her airmen; whose trained nurses met our wounded and captured men at the railroad trains and held out cups of water for them to see, and then poured them on the ground or spat in them.

Disagreeable England!--whose colonies rushed to help her: Canada, who within eight weeks after war had been declared, came with a voluntary army of thirty-three thousand men; who stood her ground against that first meeting with the poison gas and saved not only the day, but possibly the whole cause; who by 1917 had sent over four hundred thousand men to help disagreeable England; who gave her wealth, her food, her substance; who poured every symbol of aid and love into disagreeable England's lap to help her beat agreeable Germany. Thus did all England's colonies offer and bring both themselves and their resources, from the smallest to the greatest; little Newfoundland, whose regiment gave such heroic account of itself at Gallipoli; Australia who came ............