WHO ARE THE HUNS?

The Destruction of Telegraph Cables. 203
returned to their owners and the damage made good. This
proposal, to which England at first offered objections, was
afterwards unanimously accepted upon the motion of Denmark.
There is no "absolute necessity" for the doing-away with
all cables,—especially with the cable connections between
neutral countries—at least in the estimation of nations which
have been in the habit of conducting war honorably and with
honest weapons as in accordance with the usages of civilized
countries,—ere England made this the meanest war ever waged.
Soldierly nations have hitherto foreborne from using lies
and deliberately false communications as "ruses of war" in
order to carry on a systematic deception of neutral countries.
At all events the high contracting parties of the ist and
2nd Peace Conference did not for a moment think it possible
that a system such as this, so contrary to all the decency embodied
in the laws of nations, all morality and public conscience,
would be adopted in order to ensnare allies by means
of falsehoods—a practise of which England in particular has
been guilty—with the help of that cable-monopoly she acquired
by forcible means.
How far this system of vilification—a system such as the
world had never seen before, this slander of an honorable foe
and his .conduct of war,—extended, may be seen by glancing at
the press of the United States, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Switzerland,—in
fact, of all neutral countries. The most daring imagination
would find it impossible to follow this torrent of calumny
in all its ramifications, or to explain how it was possible to keep
great nations and millions of contemporary human beings so
completely in the dark regarding the real course of events in
August, 1914, and the following months.
That this system of lies was in reality a formidable weapon
is shown by the ill-natured attitude of a large part of the outside
world towards Germany. This evidences itself not only
in the usual commonplaces and platitudes regarding Germany's
"reaction," and Germany's "militarism," but in alleged concrete
instances of the "vandalism" and the "barbarism" of the
German army. We shall exhibit a small crop of these things
in our next chapter.
We do not pretend to claim that this system for the distrib-