COURTS AND CORRUPTION 379 



many lines which has flooded our country with an 

 embarrassment of riches and made the great war- 

 ring nations our debtors. We may contemplate 

 with calmness the working out of this trouble, the 

 clearing of the roiled waters. 



But there is a phase of the situation more un- 

 pleasant to contemplate. Where do we stand 

 morally in the great death-grapple between civ- 

 ilization and barbarism? Would there be terri- 

 torial lines of resistance if the "Black Death" re- 

 appeared? That greatest of all epidemics car- 

 ried off 300,000 men, women and children in five 

 months of the seventeenth century. 



The victims of the greater plague, made in 

 Germany, have already been ten times that num- 

 ber. Innocent men, women and children have 

 been bayoneted and burned, starved, poisoned 

 and drowned through this malignant infection of 

 flendishness matured through an incubation of 

 forty years. 



Slavery in its worst form has followed the rape 

 of Belgium and France, where women and chil- 

 dren are starved and men murdered if thev fail to 



