Trevelyan, Ponsonby, Morel, and Macdonald. Crushed they will and must be
to fine powder. The hammer strokes are falling now with a persistence
and force which, at long last, reverberates in the cafes and beer
gardens of Munich and Berlin. The Teuton tongue--a hideous concatenation
of noise at its best--must be almost inarticulate to-day in its guttural
chokings and splutterings. "Frightfulness" is coming home to roost.
With all our hearts we hold out the glad hand to Michael.
Come in, and stay in--bless you!
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
[Illustration: "COME IN, MICHAEL, I THINK I'M AWAKE NOW."]
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FIVE ON A BENCH
All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of
_deposuit potentes de sede_; but the bracing reality of such a
revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which
make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death.
To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems
only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not
picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no
reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest
wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to
represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary
fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to
that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many
thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the
most grim, or what would be called vindictive.
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