The repetition of conscientious objections to war, at a time when a nation is committed to a strife in which any slackening spells for it practical annihilation, causes graver and graver perplexity. It is doubtful whether any healthy mind can now plead a conscientious objection without provoking suspicion of his powers of coherent reasoning. A condition of things has arisen in which private sentiment, however honestly cherished, is bound to yield to public needs. It is a tradition of the country in normal times to treat the conscientious objector with tenderness. As far as public safety allows, it is even now a proper function of Government to discriminate between an honest delusion, however anti-social, and a wilful defiance, from contemptible motives of selfishness or cowardice, of right principle. A very formidable danger clearly lurks in any continuance of the lax toleration which is often extended to the conscientious objector, by virtue of the opportunity such considerate treatment offers the shirker of indulging his evil propensities.
There is no doubt a certain unfairness in the inevitable wartime method of laying the burden of the crimes of war upon this or that pair of shoulders. Princes in particular must pay this penalty attached to their august station. And few can have less just reason to complain than this slim heir of the Hohenzollerns who so thirsted for the glory of war. He has found out by now that it is a less glorious affair than it seemed when set forth in heady, unwise speech (after unwise dining) from the box of a Danzig theater.
Deprived of his expected bays by the idiotic obstinacy of the so utterly decadent French, his fond parent bestows on him the Order _pour le Mérite_ with oak leaves. It is not quite easy to see why. Surely there cannot have been any obscure sardonic reference to tanning.
But if, as the artist suggests, and the plainest reading of the facts of the fruitless Verdun assault seems to confirm, lives of men were squandered in a reckless attempt to save the princeling’s face (which was, in fact, beyond saving), then does he richly deserve the grim decoration with which in the name of infamy he is here invested--the Order of Butchery, with knives. And you may view the crosses upon the pathetic mounds before Verdun as so many entries in the Recording Angel’s ledger.