Treatment The fact that enemy aliens (most Of Aliens themselves) have been treated iens of them the enemy's victims
with remarkable generosity in this country since the war started is well known, observes the "Economist." So few Germans and Austtians have been interned and so many have been allowed to go back to their daily business that the extremest vigilance is imperative. But there are no grounds at all for the recent fantastic reports intended, it would seem, to inflame tempers and set on foot a spy scare; that 10,000 aliens were at large and unaccounted for; that the tribunals set up to examine aliens exempted them from internment or restraint for the slenderest reasons and without proper investigation; and that the police were vastly alarmed about this "laxity" and the dangers that might ensue. Scotland Yard has been constrained to deny these reports in toto and it is the greatest pity that they were ever set abroad. There may be times to come when the casualties and destruction of war will turn tempers irrationally and without discrimination against aliens. It is our duty now as a democratic people to guard against this very human falling-away and not to anticipate it. Some risk must indeed have been incurred by our liberal policy—though it should be remembered that our alien policy before this war was already intended to weed out friends from likely foes. But, after all, it is precisely this quality of mercy that marks us off from Nazi-dom. Perhaps this is why the quite reasonable fear that mercy, may sometimes soften into dangerous sentimentality has recently taken such sensational and unpardonable shape.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.