mercy seasons justice.  Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation:  we do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.

That speech rises above the strife of nations; it belongs to humanity.  But an Englishman wrote it; and the author, we may be sure, if he ever met with the doctrine that a man who is called on to help his own people is in duty bound to set aside the claims of humanity, and to stop his ears to the call of mercy, knew that the doctrine is an invention of the devil, stupid and angry, as the devil commonly is.  There are hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who, though they could not have written the speech, yet know all that it teaches, and act on the knowledge.  It is part of the creed of the Navy.  We can speak more confidently than we could have spoken three or four years ago.  We know that not the extremest pressure of circumstance could ever bring the people of England to forget all the natural pieties, to permit official duties to annul private charities, and to join in the frenzied dance of hate and lust which leads to the mouth of the pit.

Yet Germany, where all this seems to have happened, was not very long ago a country where it was easy to find humanity, and simplicity, and kindness.  It was a country of quiet industry and content, the home of fairy stories, which Shakespeare himself would have loved.  The Germans of our day have made a religion of war and terror, and have used commerce as a means for the treacherous destruction of the independence and freedom of others.  They were not always like that.  In the fifteenth century they spread the art of printing through Europe, for the service of man, by the method of peaceful penetration.  My friend Mr. John Sampson recently expressed to me a hope that our air-forces would not bomb Mainz, ‘for Mainz’, he said, ’is a sacred place to the bibliographer’.  According to a statement published in Cologne in 1499, ’the highly valuable art of printing was invented first of all in Germany at Mainz on the Rhine.  And it is a great honour to the German nation that such ingenious men are to be found among them....And in the year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they began to print, and the first book they printed was the Bible in Latin:  it was printed in a large character, resembling the types with which the present mass-books are printed.’  Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions his own name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon of the Catholicon, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city:  ’With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants and oft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this admirable book, the Catholicon, was finished in the year of the incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a town of the famous German nation, which God in his clemency, by granting to it this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the other nations of the world.’