THE KING’S BUSINESS 559 legislation in the limitation of this destructive ebusiness. This great nation has been piteously helpless in the encircling and strangling arms of this octopus, but a day of reckoning must surely come. If England and her allies are defeated, and there seems at the present time more likelihood of such defeat than was dreamed possible a few months agb> her defeat in the ultimate analysis will be due to the baneful influence of strong drink upon her workingmeh and soldiers; England, if defeated, will be defeated more by English cupidity (the cupidity of those engaged in the liquor traffic) than by German valor. If England and her allies are successful, their success will be greatly retarded by the same baneful influence of strong drink upon her workingmen and soldiers. Many thousands of lives will be lost that ¡night otherwise have been saved. Indeed many thousands of lives have already been lost. Some day all England will awaken to the appalling vastness of the losses and injuries inflicted upon her by this infernal liquor business and will arise in her wrath and crush it. And the names of the men that have forced the liquor traffic upon her, no matter how many nor how great titles they may bear, will be handed down to England’s perpetual coritempt and loathing. school system has been regarded by many as the most nearly perfect of any school system in the world. Education has been practically universal. The last word on any subject of scientific, literary, or philosophical discussion, has been what the German specialist has ;said. But Germany stands out today in the general judgment of mankind, as haying surrendered itself to the most [ awful barbarism, inhumanity and cruelty, known in modern times. The sinking of the Lusitania, involving the slaughter of mapy more than a thousand people, one hundred and .fifty of whom were babies, and hundreds of whom were women, has appalled the .world. This deed was .absolutely without warrant, and contrary to all the recognized laws of war. The cruelty and cowardice and inhumanity of the act is absolutely without par allel -in the modern history of civilized nations, and it is an illustration of the absolute impotency of a culture that leaves out God and Christianity to civil ize or humanize her people. For years we have been saying that all that was needed to lift a nation up, was education and culture. Germany has had both education and culture, as perhaps no other nation in the world, and, instead of being lifted up by the education and culture, they have sunken to the level of the savage American Indian in his worst days. Will the world take the lesson to heart ? Coming almost immediately after the undisputed story of the ruthless slaughter o l defenseless men, and weak and helpless women and children on the Lusitania, we have the report of the commission, on German atrocities in Belgium and France. The things therein recorded are so awful tljat they seem incredible, but the chairman of the committee making the report was Viscount Bryce, one of the most careful, judicial and fair-minded of modern historians. Yet, even so, one would'hesitate to believe this awful story,' were it not that the inhumanity displayed in the sinking of the Lusitania by Ger- Germany, in the minds of many best calculated to judge, has been regarded as the foremost nation in the world' in culture. Her men of science and philosophy have been in the very forefront of modern scholarship. Her “Failure of Culture”
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