We wage war against the enemy's armed forces, and not against women, children, monuments, and hospitals. In spite of the most solemn denial issued by the Austrians of the acts which, after the first bombardments of Padua, Treviso, and Vicenza at the end of December and the beginning of January, they declared to be a question of reprisals for bombardments, carried out by Franco-British aviators on
German towns, the Germans, in substance, gave to be understood what the Austrians hypocritically wished to hide, that is, that the pretext of reprisals enabled them to persevere with their nameless atrocities, which had been imposed upon them by some of their leaders having yielded to the impulses of a criminal mentality. Thus it happened that the Austrian Catholic command, bowing to the orders of the German Lutheran pastors, bombarded Catholic churches in the Italian cities. And so we see the Austro-Hungarian Government--so solicitous for peace and love between nations--sowing hatred which nothing can quench.
Perhaps some light may be shed on the internal divisions which make the solution of the Irish question so nearly impossible by a realization of the fact that the population of Ireland consists of an unassimilated congeries of races, every element of which except one represents foreign invasion and conquest.
The earliest race, short, round-headed, dark, appears to be akin to the Ligurian race of the Mediterranean; this race hunted the huge Irish elks with flint arrows and axes, and may claim to be the real indigenous stock, still surviving in the west. The second race, tall, dark, long-headed, was akin to the Iberians (Basques) of Spain, who also invaded Western France, and who probably built the cromlechs and stone circles, since these are also found in Iberian Spain and Western France, as at Carnac in Brittany. The third race, tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed, came from the Baltic, bringing amber beads, and building chambered pyramids, such as are also found in Denmark. The fourth race to arrive included the Gaels, tall, round-headed, with red hair and gray eyes; they came from Central Europe, probably by way of France.
Each new arrival was followed by wars of conquest, the Gaels finally making themselves predominant, but not exterminating the older races, examples of whom may still be found, with unchanged race characteristics. In 1169 Norman French and Welsh came, as mercenaries in the army of the King of Leinster. The Burkes are descended from the Normans, the Fitzgeralds from the Welsh.