The World On Fire

pocrisy and humbug. Diplomacy is of necessity all this; but at least let us mitigate the crime by confession! Human nature is never so bad when it is not shack- led by the morality of emasculate idealists. Does any person who knows the Far East believe even in an opium dream that Japan had any quarrel with Germany, or any care for her alliance with England? Kaio-Chau was an easy enough prey; well, then, snatch it, and chance the wrath of schoolmarmed America and the egregious Wilson. But for God's sake, and by the navel of Daibutsu, and the twelve banners of the twelve sects of Buddha, let us spew out the twaddle about honor, and justice, and oppressed China, and the sanc- tity of alliance! The English are ever on the look-out for atrocities. Bulgarian atrocities, Armenian atrocities, Tripolitan atrocities, Congo atrocities, and now German atrocities. One notices that the atrocity of the atrocitators varies with their political objectionability. The parable of the mote and the beam was made for England, surely. And it is England that can produce a firm of piano manufacturers to start a boycott of German pianos — their own pianos being all German but the cases! — and a boycott of German music. And it is England that can show a composer who writes to the papers that he will now "try harder than he ever tried before" to beat Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Straus and Wagner! In the meantime he will refrain from the wicked and unpa- triotic luxury of Vienna steak! And since Kant thought two and two make four, for all true Englishmen they must make five in future. Have Englishmen forgotten their own Royal family? “The very dogs in England's court They bark and howl in German.”