Dee. 11.
In a recent article in the "Nineteenth Century" a well known writer, Mr. Ellis Barker, expressed the following opinion. "The brunt of the war," he wrote, "falls on the German people. Their sufferings will be terrible especially when the Russian hosts are in their midst; and they will deserve our sympathy, for they are guiltless of the war. They were forced and driven into it. They were and are still deceived by their Government controlled Press. All who wish to treat Germany justly should carefully differentiate between the Governing classes and the masses of the people." Any opinion which bears the impress of broadminded reflexion makes an _immediate appeal and when there is added to it, as there is in this case, an obviously genuine sympathy the appeal is doubly strong. Mr. Barker's view is one which everybody would like to take and which a great many people are actually taking. Britons as a race are not imaginative but they are intensely sentimental—using the—word without the mawkish meaning 80 frequently attached to it; and as there existed no hatred of Germans as a whole before the war began, an opportunity to forgive them as a whole, and to fasten responsibility for the war on @ certain section, is readily welcomed. he picture of a whole nation suffering acutely compels pity, an emotion nec: s-sarily the more active for being so closely associated with all the chivalrous feelings which war vivifies and sets in motion. Justice, however, is not emotional and the appeal which Mr. Barker, like many other writers, is making for it can only be responded to after analysis and argument. Mr. Barker would clear the German nation of all _responsibility for the war. Is it possible to do this?
Such questions are occasionally best approached by being brought home. If Great
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.