The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1915. GERMANY'S CRIMINALITY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVII, Issue 23, 27 May 1915, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1915. GERMANY'S CRIMINALITY.

The discussion concerning the extraordinary utterance of the headmaster of a great English public school cm. (inlies in the Home journals, and very generally his attitude is condemned. The happenings of later days mint almost have made even such a ra:ld and forgiving gentleman as the dominie referred to, change his mind. In any case the English Tress would make his ears tingle. After speaking with unqualified condemnation of the attitude of "dealing gently" with the outlaw enemy, one well-known commercial paper says no one would surely argue that the cause of the Teutonic nation in the war is made any the better because the Allies have completely frustrated the plans of a blood-thirsty clique. But apparently, without really realising what they are doing, some do go to what is practically the same length. Some people are actually urging us to extend sympathy, to act gently, to speak softly, not because they think Germany had the faintest shadows of right in going to war, but simply because Germany has heen baulked in carrying out successfully a war of territorial aggrandisement and monetary gain. Proceeding on this line the paper referred to says:— "We know full well that few things are more loathsome than the worship of mere success, but the worship of ill-success particularly on the part of a gang of free-hooters, and to which this kind of feeling virtually comes, is really more loathsome and certainly most unreasonable and uncalled for. Success certainly does not imply moral right, but it is seldom gained without the possession of qualities which are in themselves, irrespectively of the use made of them, entitled to respect. But ill-success may, in a moral point of view, be simply the just chastisement of wrong; it may, in a view of cause and effect, be the result of carelessness or the verdict of the Divine Power. Whatever the Allies ultimately decide to do to Germany and the misguided Dual Monarchy, in their war of defence, will he mild in the extreme sense of the word compared with what the wily Teuton intended to exact in his war of spoliation. II Germany or the Kaiser was in the wrong at the beginning of the war they are equally in the wrong now, and their immoral and savage ideas regarding the conduct of warfare must preclude them from sympathy, apart, of course, from what a lew mutton heads amongst us may think to the contrary. They must not have the slightest sympathy shown them, simply because they suffer the necessary results of ill-success in a struggle which they wittingly provoked. To argue otherwise is really the same thing as to argue that a criminal becomes less ol a criminal because uihas the misfortune to be round out ami punished. We should rightly sympathise with the worst criminal if he were put to death with any needless aggravations of torture or mockery, but ho is not a rightful object of sympathy when he was simply hanged in due course ol the law."