To the Editor of the Norta-Carina Darty New:
Sin,—With reference to Mr. H. G. Wells's remarks (quoted your: leader to-day) on what he thinks j the people in England ald do in case of a German invasion, Wells is represented as saying We are going to fight. If we cannot fight with rit we shall fight with shotguns, and if we cannot fight accord-Germans for the restraint of British ing to Rules of War apparently made by military experts, we will fight accord to our inner light, Many men and not a few women will turn out to shoot Germans. There will be no preventing them after the Belgian stories. If the experta \pt any pedantic interference we will shoot the experts.
Has the imaginative Mr. Wells gone quite mad? It is not to be wondered at that something has cracked in a brain that has been over-taxed in so ingeniously workout the detail of the "War of the and such highly imaginaious in what he now says, and do you think that the publication of such ideas as this can any good Whit qualifications or right has Mr. Wells, or any other fiction writer, to advance such absurd ideas?
In the event of a German invasion the military experts"—I take it it he means army officers—naturally would want to have an organized force with an organized plan to meet an organized invader. They would not be encumbered with an unorgatiized mob of men armed with shotguns. But Mr. Wells says, in effect "No. We, the people, will do as we please. We will shoot our leaders and meet the Germans with an unorganized mob without leaders." Does not that sound very much like mutiny, if not civil wart And isn't that just the sort of opposition that the Germans would hope to find?
It would seem that way to a neutral. Don't you think it would be better were writers like Mr.
Wells to leave the subject entirely alone? Asa citizen of a neutral country I would suggest that your views on this matter would be of interest to more than a few of your readers.
And,—I spoke of mutiny. What do you think of the probability that the war may be ended, in far less than the three years estimated by Kitchener, by the people themsel-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.