Baltimore Evening Sun (18 February 1915): 8.

{illustration} International Law. [As expounded by Sir Edward Grey and the American “neutrals.”]

The Hon. Charles F. Brook in the immoal Letter Column:

The Free Lance has brought out a lot of awkward facts [against the English]. He is like a guilty conscience. But nobody takes him seriously anyway. * * *

The inevitable fate of conscience, at all times and everywhere.

The Germans now talk of enveloping the flabbergasted Russians in Bukowina. Let us hope that they succeed better than the French did with thieir historic enveloping of General von Kluck.

Associated Press dispatch from Petrograd via London, dated January 15 and passed by the Russian and English censors:

The forced retirement of the Russian Army from East Prussia is expected to result in a reversion biy the Russians to their original plan of conducting a defensive campaign in their own territory. . . . . . Russian officers say that . . . . . . the disposition now is to fall back . . . . . . on Russian soil along a line from the Nieman river, in the north, through Ostrolenka [and] Raigrod to Graevo.

From a Paris letter received by the Brooklyn Eagle February 16:

Unofficial reports are to the effect that before long the British forces will take the entire battle line north of Arras, or at [to?] the bend at Compiegne . . . . . .

A diligent perusal of these dispatches will throw a good deal of light upon the desperate violence of the current English attempt to drag the United States into the war against Germany, and also, perhaps, upon the Right Hon. David Lloyd-George’s dark hints about buying the help of another power, undoubtedly Italy. The fact is that the English at last begin to realize that they are face to face with a real war, and that they must soon begin to take over its appalling burdens. The Russians, having twice failed ingloriously in their efforts to reach Berlin, now frankly throw up the sponge. And the French, after holding a 300-mile battle-line for nearly six months, give a plain intimation that it is the turn of their gallant Allies to come to the bat.

The Russian announcement was not given much prominence in the “neutral” newspapers; there were other fish to fry on Tuesday morning. But its significance is none the less manifest. The Russians went into the war with the obvious and avowed object of invading and paralyzing Germany. To that end their enormous army had been mobilized weeks before the war began, and to that end it was hurled at the Germans with astonishing celerity and ferocity. The English, even after its first failures, were thoroughly convinced that it would ultimately succeed. Their papers openly argued, indeed, that the Russians would probably dispose of Germany before English troops could be brought into the field on the western front, and many Frenchmen were inclined to the same opinion. But now the Russians confess that they have failed, and what is more, they intimate that they will not try again. Field Marshal von Hindenburg has met them and beaten them.

In the same way the French have failed in the West. After two heroic attempts to reconquer Alsace and Lorraine they must now rest content with a few precarious footholds on the border. And along the main battle line their incessant and costly assaults have got them absolutely nothing. It now begins to grow plain that they tire of the impossible business, with its huge and useless sacrifices, and that they are disposed to step out of it for a while and let the English carry it on. The net result is that the Germans face an increasingly favorable situation. Having driven the Russian horde back, from the Baltic to the Serbian border, they will soon be free to reinforce the western army and so make ready for the onslaught of Lord Kitchener’s raw brigades. No wonder the English set up a moral caterwauling and bellow that the Germans are rough and terrible fellows!

The new Russian line mentioned in the Petrograd dispatch is well within the Russian border, and there is not the slightest doubt that the Germans will permit the genial Cossacks to hold it without challenge. Germany has no intention of invading Russia on a large scale, and would have nothing to gain by so foolhardy an enterprise. Her remaining aims on the eastern front would seem to be to finish Servia, to keep Roumania out of the war, to drive the Russians out of the small areas they still hold in Austrian Poland, and to complete the conquest of that part of Poland which is Russian. The new line mentioned by the Russians runs well the eastward of Warsaw, and indicates, perhaps, that they expect to lose the city shortly. But whether the Germans take it or not, they have at least shaken themselves free of the Russian peril, and are nearly ready to remedy their numerical inferiority in the West. Once they have attained to something approaching equal strength there, they will give a swift and cheerful test to the military genius of Sir John French.

The Hon. John A. Quayle in the long-suffering Letter Column:

I mentally picture the Hon. Herr Mencken as a caged beast, baffled of its prey and impotent in its rage, dashing its head against the walls of its chamber.

With the highest respect, bosh, old top! The Hon. Herr Mencken, in point of fact, is not incarcerated in any such cage. On the contrary, he is taking his ease in his inn, comfortably exploring a vase of genuine Pilsner and listening to a string quartet play the Kaiser quartet.

When the Russian army went dry the Rev. Dr. Charles M. Levister made such adroit use of the fact that he converted 200 Eastern Shore apple-jackers to Prohibition. But of late, so my spies tell me, there has been a good deal of backsliding.

The Rev. Dr. C. D. Harris, quoting a mysterious Dean Church:

A clergymen ought to be a student, a reader and a thinker.

Example of the ideal clergyman: the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday.