What success is possible for those who thus openly outrage humanity remains to be seen; but they cannot be allowed the advantage of any doubt as to what they are about.  Those who fight for them will fight for “the devil and all his works”; and those who fight against them will be fighting in the holy cause of humanity and the law of love.  If the advocacy of their bad principles and their diabolical conduct do not set the whole world against them, then the world is worse than I think.  My belief is that there are yet millions of their own countrymen who have not bowed the knee to Satan, and who will be as much shocked as we are; and that this internal moral disruption will much hamper them.  This morning I have a legal notice sent me from a German resident in England announcing that he has changed his name, for shame (I suppose) of his Fatherland.

All their apology throughout has been a clumsy tissue of self-contradictory lies, and their occasional hypocrisy has been hastily pretended and ill-conceived.  The particular contention against us—­that we were betraying the cause of civilization by supporting the barbarous Slav—­does not come very convincingly from them if their apostle is Nietzsche, while the Russian prophet is Tolstoy.

The infernal machine which has been scientifically preparing for the last twenty-five years is now on its wild career like one of Mr. Wells’s inventions, and wherever it goes it will leave desolation behind it and put all material progress back for at least half a century.  There was never anything in the world worthier of extermination, and it is the plain duty of all civilized nations to unite to drive it back into its home and exterminate it there.  I am, &c.,

ROBERT BRIDGES.

Sept. 1.

English Artists’ Protest

Art lovers in Great Britain have drawn up a protest against the vandalism of German soldiers.  Copies of this protest have been sent to the Comte de Lalaing, Belgian Minister in London; the American Ambassador, with a humble request that it may be forwarded to the President of the United States; and Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Art Adviser to the Belgian Government.  Those who have signed include well-known collectors, Trustees of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Galleries of Scotland; the Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum; the Directors of the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland; the Keepers of the Wallace Collection and the National Gallery of British Art; Keepers in the British Museum; the Joint Honorary Secretaries of the National Art Collections Fund, and many critics and others prominent in the art world.

The whole civilized world has witnessed with horror the terrible effects of modern warfare on helpless inhabitants of Belgium and France, and on ancient buildings and other works of art which are the abiding monuments of the piety and culture of their ancestors.