The Gift-Bearing Germans.

If any of the peace proposals which have come from the Teutonic allies had come from nations alive to their international obligations, jealous of their national integrity, scrupulous as to their general honor, the world might be cheered by the hope that, presently, when the scales had fallen from deluded but honest eyes, we might reach a basis which would offer the poor comfort of a gradual rapprochement. But the Teutonic allies are not such nations--not any of them. They are, together, notorious for the lack of the things mentioned above. So, behind each offer camouflaged as Peace, hides the grinning skeleton of other wars; of national and personal deceit; of the advance repudiation of the very obligations they propose to take; of the absolute indifference to Right; of the utter lack of aggregate and individual honor. All these are gladly lost, sunk, destroyed, in the mad stress to achieve unholy means to unholy ends. It is hopeless to treat for peace with sovereigns so entirely turned from right to wrong thought. But one thing these peace offers with baleful, hidden purposes will do: they will fix forever our determination to conquer this Intolerable Thing and to turn the minds of the rulers and peoples who have conceived and are fostering it, toward the Right, or else to put them aside from the path of honest nations and men, to live sequestered in their ignominy. One of these two things is to be the judgment of the world against the Teutonic allies. --JOHN LUTHER LONG.