Points of Friction
unconcerned with standards as with facts. "Absurd" is not the word to apply to Germany's campaign in France and Flanders. A man whose home has been burned and whose wife has been butchered cannot be expected to regard the incident as an absurdity, or to recall it with good-humour. The sight of a child bayoneted on the roadside (five wounds in one poor little body picked up near Namur) arouses something deep and terrible in the human heart. To say that one man's failure is no worse than another man's failure, that one nation's failure is no worse than another nation's failure, is to deny any vital distinction between degrees of right and wrong. It is to place the German Kaiser by the side of Belgium's King, and George Washington by the side of George the Third.
And by what shall men be judged, if not by their past? What other evidence can we seek? What other test can we
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