THE COLONIST. THURSDAY, AUGUST 3, 1916. THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN.

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 14154, 3 August 1916, Page 4

THE COLONIST. THURSDAY, AUGUST 3, 1916. THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN.

The murder of Captain Fryati, of the Channel steamer Brussels, adds but another count to the appalling indictment Germany will have to face when the time comes for the settling of accounts. This infamous deed.closely resembles in all essentials the judicial assassination of Miss Cavell, and it will be bracketed with that atrocity in the final reckoning. In both cases legal forms were made the vehicle for the gratification of the Gei*man lust for savage vengeance upon defenceless victims, and in each instance the sentence ha-d the formal approval of the highest authority. The legal paraphernalia which was invoked to compass the murder of Captain Fryatt only adds to the horror of the crime, and exhibits it as a deliberate and premeditated violation of international law which German casuistry is as little able to condone in the eyes of neutrals as the putting to death of Miss Cavell. It is a waste of time to discuss the attempts to justify the execution set out in the i German official statements. Captain Fryatt was no franc-tireur. He commanded an unarmed' passenger ship, a ferry boat travelling between Harwich and the Hook of Holland, and relying wholly for defence against submarine attack upon her speed and the seamanship of her officers. As Lord Grey de-j clared in his Note to the American Ambassador in London, Captain Fryatt's action when, after successfully evading submarines on many occasions he at length found himself surrounded, was perfectly legitimate. "The act of a merchant ship in steering for a submarine and forcing her to dive, was essentially defensive and on precisely the same footing as a defensively-armed merchant vessel using her defensh re armament to resist capture, which the British and American Governments hold to be the exercise of an undoubted right." The doctrine that a merchant ship when attacked by pirate.craft must submit without resistance to capture or destruction, is typically and essentially German. Such proofs of the ferocity and barbarism of the Germans as the Fryatt ease and the not less horrible deportation of women and children from towns in Northern France can only serve to harden the Allies' determination as they enter upon the third year of the war to bring about with the utmost possible speed the destruction of Germany's power for evil, and the infliction of just retribution upon those who have conceived and directed the atrocities which are her brand of infamy.