One can readily imagine the painful kind of questions that will arise in the mind of an intelligent ally who realizes for the first time how great are the inventive and organizing talents of the Teuton, how unswerving his resolve, how tenacious he is of purpose, and how unconscious most of us still are of the need of bestirring ourselves to compete with him on terms of equality. The German's striving is one, but all-embracing. His means are countless, for they are restricted by no limitations. In his search for tools and agents he enters into human nature, but not in its entire compass; only into the baser parts, so that his estimate is often erroneous and his expectations are unfulfilled. But even when ample deduction has been made for these failures, the odds remaining in his favour are formidable, and will continue undiminished unless and until we realize our plight, shuffle off the cramping coils of conservatism, insularity and self-complacency and brace ourselves to the most strenuous, the most painful effort we have ever yet put forth. On our capacity to effect this inward change, rather than upon any diplomatic arrangements, depends the issue of the struggle which will begin when military and naval hostilities have come to an end.



CHAPTER XX

PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE

Plain though these facts are, the Entente nations, and in particular the British people, either ignore them wholly or misinterpret their purport. Hence we continue absorbed in the pursuit of interests, parochial and parliamentary, which though quite human, are utterly off the line of racial and imperial progress. We obstinately shut our eyes to the magnitude of the Sphinx question that confronts us, and we address ourselves to one—and that the least important—of its many facets, and content ourselves with tackling that. We descant upon the turpitude of the Teuton who from the regions of idealism in which Goethe, Herder and their contemporaries dwelt has sunk into shift, treason and murder, and we proclaim our faith in the ultimate triumph of right, justice and of the democracy in which alone they flourish. But this frame of mind, which moves us to identify ourselves with all that is best in humanity, if cultivated will prove fatal. It accustoms us to dangerous hallucinations. We assume that we are the chosen people, and we neglect the virtues which alone would justify our election. For generations we have been reaping and wasting, instead of ploughing and sowing. We have been living on our capital, nay, on our credit, and have long since overdrawn our account. Our successes in the past, sometimes the result of fortuitous circumstances, more often of the blunders of our rivals, inspire a presumptuous confidence in successes for the future and a conviction that come what may we are destined to muddle through. A special providence is watching over us—a cousin German to the Kaiser's "good old God." In truth we are tempting Fate, postulating an exception to the law of cause and effect, and looking for Hebrew miracles in the twentieth century after Christ.

Were it otherwise, the nation would not have continued to entrust its destinies to the men who misguided it consistently and perseveringly for so many years, to the watchmen who saw nothing of the rocks and sandbanks ahead which it was their function to discern and their duty to avoid, and who are now unwittingly but effectually deluding the people into believing that the present campaign, which is but a single episode in a long-spun-out contest, is an independent event which began in August 1914 and may end this year or the next. These same leaders are busily inculcating the delusive notion that the diplomatic instrument which will one day close hostilities will be a treaty of peace. And they are seemingly prepared to negotiate its terms on that assumption.

In truth, we are engaged in a duel which began thirty years ago, gave the Germans such booty as Heligoland, their world-trade, their wealth, their formidable navy, their Baghdad Railway, their various overseas colonies, their European Allies, and the enormous resources with which when this acute phase of the contest is over they will re-transfer the venue to the economic and political domains and carry on the struggle with greater vigour than before. And peace terms concluded on any other supposition cannot be conducive to the national welfare. We are locked in a deadly embrace with a compact people of 120,000,000, of indomitable spirit, boundless resources, unquenchable faith and a single aim. Yet we are already looking forward to the time in the near future when our intercourse, however circumscribed, with this nation will be essentially pacific, and when we can revert to our cherished narrow interests and our easy-going dilettantism. We feed upon the hope that in a few brief years the British nation will have got safely back to its old beaten grooves, and not only business and sport but everything else will go on as usual. Yet all the salient facts which force themselves on our attention to-day, all the decisive events of the past thirty years are cogent proofs of the unbroken sequence of a trial of strength which the future historian and the present statesman, if there be one, must characterize as a life-and-death struggle between the champions of the new Teuton politico-social ordering and the partisans of the old. But after the lapse of a generation and with the record of all our losses before us, we have not yet formed a right conception of the situation, and its issues, or of the historic forces at work. In these circumstances, no degree of sagacity can help us to devise the only policy in which salvation resides. The prevailing mistaken conception must be rectified before any headway can be made against the currents that are fast bearing us down. And the time at our disposal is brief.

It needs few words to characterize the effects which the dreamy optimism of the Entente nations had on their method of mobilizing their resources to carry on the war. Taken unawares they had nothing ready. Misapprehending the nature of the issues and the redoubtable character of the contest, they pursued subordinate aims with insufficient means. The most daring strategical moves of the enemy, in war as in diplomacy, they ridiculed as either bluff or madness. The journalistic campaign in neutral countries they scoffed at as vain, and put their faith in the final triumph of truth. Their financial measures, oscillating from one extreme to another, denoted the absence of any settled plan, of any clear-cut picture of the needs of the moment. The odds in their favour, which circumstance had given and circumstance might take away again, they looked upon as inalienable, until they ended by forfeiting them all. Viewing the campaign as a transient event, the British Government prosecuted it by means of make-shifts, instead of radical measures. Obligatory service was scouted at as un-English. Discriminating customs tariffs were condemned as heretical. It was not until the enemy had occupied Poland, overrun Serbia, driven the Allied troops from the Dardanelles, bent Montenegro to the yoke, threatened Egypt, Riga and Petrograd, that some rays of light penetrated the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice through which the Allies surveyed the European welter. They had begun by counting upon the breaking up of the Habsburg Monarchy. They felt sure that the Tsar's armies would capture Budapest and advance on Berlin. They planned the defeat of Germany by famine. They built another fabric of hopes on "Kitchener's Great Army" in the spring of 1915. But one after another these anticipations were belied by events. And now the nation blithely accepts the further forecasts of the men who are chargeable with this long sequence of avoidable errors.

Respect for individual liberty was carried to such a point in Great Britain that organizations against recruiting were tolerated in England and Ireland, and strikes, which not only inflicted heavy pecuniary losses on the nation but actually stopped its supplies of munitions and brought it within sight of discomfiture, were treated with soft words and immediate concessions. One cannot read even Mr. Lloyd George's summary narrative of the preposterous doings of British slackers without wondering whether salvation is still possible. These men not only refused to work their best for the community, but forbade their comrades to work well. At Enfield, we are told, a man was obliged by trade union regulations so to regulate his work that he did not earn more than 1s. an hour, though he could easily have earned 2s. 6d.[118] Another man was doing two and a half days' work in two days, and when he refused to carry out the behest of the Ironfounders' Board to waste the other half day he was fined L1.[119] A consequence of this anti-national attitude was that "we had to wait for weeks in Birmingham with machinery lying idle, with our men without rifles, with our men with a most inadequate supply of machine guns to attack the enemy and defend themselves."[120] Every one will re-echo the Minister's comment on the outlook, if this attitude is persisted in—"we are making straight for disaster."

[118] Mr. Lloyd George's speech at Bristol. Cf. Daily Telegraph, September 10, 1915.

[119] Ibid.

[120] Ibid.

Compare this state of things with that which rules in Germany. It is a British Minister who describes it: "If you want to realize what organized labour in this war means, read the story of the last twelve months. By the end of September the German armies were checked. They sustained an overwhelming defeat in France, Russia was advancing against them towards the Carpathians, and I believe in East Prussia. That is not the case to-day. Why? The German workmen came in; organized labour in Germany prepared to take the field. They worked and worked quietly, persistently, continuously, without stint or strife, without restriction for months and months, through the autumn, through the winter, through the spring. Then came that avalanche of shot and shell which broke the great Russian armies and drove them back. That was the victory of the German workmen."[121]

[121] Mr. Lloyd George's speech at Bristol. Cf. Daily Telegraph, September 10, 1915.

Great Britain is the classic land of strikes. Strikers are sacred among us. Industrial compulsion is rank heresy.

That is one of our difficulties, and by no means the least formidable. The nation, despite the superb example of patriotic heroism given by all classes, parties, provinces and colonies of the Empire, is still deficient in cohesiveness. No fire of enthusiasm has yet burned fiercely enough among all sections of the Empire and all members of the race to fuse them in such a compact unified organism as we behold in the Teuton's Fatherland. Read the characteristic given of us by the ex-German Minister Dernburg, and say whether it is over-coloured. Discoursing on the difficulties which Britain has to cope with in carrying on the war, he says: "They are intensified ... by the narrow-minded customs of the English trade unions, which contrast with the patriotic behaviour of the German associations of the like nature as night contrasts with day."[122] This is melancholy reading for those whose hopes are fervent for a bright future of the British race, and it prepares them to listen in anxious silence to the general conclusion at which the Prussian ex-Minister arrives: "It is in the highest degree improbable," he says, "that after the winding up of this contest England will be able to keep or wield any form of economic superiority whatever over Germany."

[122] Berliner Tageblatt, March 9, 1916.

In our Allies we find a strong touch of resemblance to ourselves. Their state of unpreparedness is amazing, if less desperate than ours. Russia, it is true, did much better at the outset than friend or foe anticipated, and she might have done quite well if only she had been supplied with munitions. But she had not nearly enough, and her armies were slaughtered like sheep in consequence. Then there were no boots for the soldiers, who were forced to wear thin canvas leggings with leather soles. And scores of waggon-loads of incapacitated men were taken to Petrograd and other cities whose feet had been frozen for lack of shoe-leather. One of the urgent wants of the Tsardom are railways, which the late Count Witte was so eager to construct. When hostilities opened, the insufficiency of communications became one of the decisive factors in Russia's disasters. And it was heightened by the conduct of, shall we say, the prussianized officials,[123] who are reported to have disposed of waggons for large sums to greedy merchants, who used to raise the prices of the merchandise and batten on the misery of their fellows.

[123] It is but fair to say that venality is not one of the characteristics of the German bureaucracy. Their sense of duty towards the State is the nearest approach to morality of which they now seem capable.

Trains, needed to supply the fighting men at the front with food and the wounded at the rear with medicaments, were kept back to suit the schemes of these greedy cormorants. Gratuities, it is openly affirmed, had to be paid by Red Cross and other officers to those subordinate railway servants who had it in their power to send on a train or shunt it off for days on a side-track. Bribery is working havoc in the Tsardom. In January 1916 the Moscow municipality discussed the advisability of voting a certain sum of money and putting it at the disposal of the chief officer of the city, to be discreetly employed in transactions with complacent railway officials, in order to further the work of reducing prices on necessaries of life. The motive adduced for this homoeopathic way of treating a social distemper were the conditions of life in Russia and the necessity of complying with them. But as the Statute Book does not recognize these conditions and condemns bribery absolutely, a vote on the subject was not taken.[124]

[124] The German press gave great prominence to this item of news. Cf. Frankfurter Zeitung, January 8, 1916.

Acting on instructions issued by the Finance Minister, a Member of the Council of the Finance Ministry, D. I. Zassiadko, visited the Kharkoff circuit for the purpose of studying the bribery problem on the spot. M. Zassiadko acquired the conviction "on the spot" that the railway officials do really take bribes, "and even of considerable amounts." But, that ascertained, the representative of the Ministry decided to delve deeper to the root of the matter. And he reached the conclusion that railway servants belong to the class of the tempted. The evil, he reported, resides not in the circumstance that they take bribes, but that bribes are offered whereby these weak little souls are seduced. The representative of the Ministry discovered an entire category of bribes which do not bear the signs of extortion, but only of "gratitude." To us this conclusion sounds somewhat naive. The most widely circulated journal of Petrograd prefaces an article on the subject as follows.[125]

[125] The Bourse Gazette, February 21.

"The misdeeds of the officials and bribery on the railway system cry out to heaven," writes the organ of the Constitutional Democrats. "Compared with the reverses on the Carpathians and in Poland, the defeats we are sustaining in our own house and behind the enemy's back are much greater...." On the important line Petrograd-Moscow-Perm scandalous cases of corruption took place in which, according to Russian journals, officials of a class who might reasonably be regarded as unbribable were implicated. They are alleged to have let out to firms of speculators for large sums of money, goods waggons which were already destined to carry consignments to the front.[126] Russia's purchases abroad have made a profound impression on the peoples in whose midst they were effected. The principles on which these transactions were carried on provoked lively comments. It is not that they revealed a superlative degree of disorganization. That touch would have merely marked the kinship of the men concerned with their allies. By the discovery that the Russian Government's purchasing Commissioners, the representatives of one of its embassies, the agents of the British Government and the equally zealous agents of the French Government were all secretly bidding against each other for the same rifles to be delivered to the Tsar's Ministers, only a smile of recognition was elicited. It may have seemed at once amusing and consolatory to find that all were tarred with the same brush. But when it was discovered that the offer of certain army necessaries was put off for weeks and weeks, although they were to be had under cost price, and was then accepted at a much higher price, profound sympathy was felt for the Tsar's armies.

[126] Cf. Reitch (about February 17, 1916), March 5, 1916.

Chaos, waste and a variety of abuses that pressed heavily on the poorer classes marked the efforts made by the Russian Government to cope with the scarcity of fuel, corn and other necessaries which began to be felt soon after the war. The rolling stock, it was complained, was utterly insufficient, yet it was found possible to transport 1,000,000 poods[127] weight of mineral water of doubtful quality. When trains arrived bringing supplies to the suffering population, it turned out that there were no hands to unload the waggons. And when labour was requisitioned, vehicles were not to be had. In October 1915 on the rails of Moscow station five thousand waggons, laden with life's necessaries, stood waiting and waiting in vain for the unskilled labour which ought to have been abundant, considering the number of the population and of the refugees. At the same time 2000 waggons were on the rails of the Petrograd station, their contents lying unutilized.[128] It is only by the lack of order and organization that one can explain the facts that in Petrograd the inhabitants have no butter, while in the places where butter is made it is being sold cheaper than before, at 12 in lieu of 16 to 18 roubles a pood. In the province of Ekaterinograd, mines which own 800,000 poods of coal cannot get more than a few waggon loads of it every month.

[127] A pood is equal to 36.11 lbs.

[128] Cf. Novoye Vremya, October 9, 1915.

Russia has incomparably more than enough fuel, without importing any, to satisfy all the needs of her 180,000,000 inhabitants. But owing to the insufficiency of communications, and still more to the lack of forethought and enterprise, the population of many cities and towns underwent serious hardships in consequence of the impossibility of acquiring coal or wood. In September 1915 the Petrograd region could obtain no more than 65 per cent. of the necessary quantity, and a month later only 49 per cent. In Moscow the plight of the inhabitants was worse. In September they could get but 26 per cent. of their needs and in October 40 per cent. According to the Minister of Commerce, who volunteered these data, the condition of the towns of Rostoff, Novotcherkassk, Nakhitchevan, Taganrog, Ekaterinodar and others was not a whit better. The city of Vyatka was, according to the Novoye Vremya,[129] in January 1916 without fuel, while the mercury registered 30 degrees Reaumur below freezing-point. The unfortunate citizens heated their homes with fragments of hoardings, tables, desks and stools. And yet there is abundant fuel in the superb forests with which Vyatka is surrounded, and, what is more to the point, the city authorities had received during the preceding spring 60,000 roubles for the purpose of purchasing a supply of wood for the winter. But they did nothing, organization not being one of their strong points.

[129] The German press welcomes items of information like this. Cf. Frankfurter Zeitung, January 13, 1916.

Live stock in Russia has diminished during the war to a much larger extent than was anticipated. The peasantry, owing to the prohibition of alcohol, now consume from 150 to 200 per cent. more meat than before, and what with the refugees from Poland, the prisoners of war and the increased needs of the army, no less than 20 per cent. of the cattle of the entire Empire was used during the first eighteen months[130] and 30 per cent. of the stock of all European Russia. In consequence of the shortage and of the irregularity of the transport, three days of abstinence from meat were ordained. Yet in January 1916 a discovery was casually made in the Kieff forests between Byelitch and Pushtsha Voditzka, which caused considerable lifting of the eyebrows. About 8000 head of cattle and several thousand sheep were found with no cowherds, shepherds or owners, wandering about from place to place. Scores of them were succumbing to hunger and cold every day. The paths in the woods were covered with the dead bodies of kine, calves and sheep. The journal which records this fact affirms that these herds belong to the Union of Zemstvos, which had purchased them from the peasants who had to flee from the occupied provinces. The President of the Union of Zemstvos is said to have confirmed this odd story with the qualification that the forlorn horned cattle and sheep are the property not of the Union of Zemstvos, but of the Ministry of Agriculture, which is alone answerable.[131]

[130] Over a hundred million head.

[131] Cf. the Russian journal, Kieff, also the Frankfurter Zeitung, January 29, 1916.

The card system of distributing provisions that are scarce found its way first into Germany and then into Austria and Russia. But in the last-named empire it was much less successful than in the two first mentioned. According to the Petrograd journals in Pskoff, where it was tried, many individuals got no cards, and therefore no provisions. Many who possessed the cards found nothing to buy. And some of those who obtained the articles they wanted paid dearer for them than if they had bought them without cards. And as with cards one has to lay in a stock to last a fortnight, the poorer families were unable to utilize them.[132]

[132] Novoye Vremya, January 1916. Frankfurter Zeitung, January 21, 1916.

In France, as well as in Russia, the professional organizers, especially the civilians, were very much adrift. In the army all the sterling qualities of the French nation at its best, and many that were deemed extinct, but are now seen to have been only dormant, shone forth resplendent. Valour, fortitude, staying power, self-abnegation for the common good, became household virtues. Friends and foes were equally surprised. But the civil administration remained well-meaning, patriotic and unregenerate to the last. The old Adam lived and acted up to his reputation.

Before the war the French railway administration had been criticized severely. It is not for a foreigner to express an opinion on the internal ordering of a country not his own, but unbiassed French experts found that the strictures were called for and the verdict, in which the public acquiesced, was well grounded. Subsequently, when the struggle began and the railway system was tested, people had reason to remember the previous complaints, for they saw how little had been done in the meanwhile to remove the causes of dissatisfaction. The first drawback was the want of rolling stock. "Give us waggons and we will execute all orders and supply the War Ministry," cried the munitions firms. "There are no waggons in the ports, and we cannot get the coal delivered," exclaimed the importers. "The country is threatened with general paralysis," wrote the Journal;[133] "we can neither forward nor sell anything." The railway administration asked for a fortnight's notice, then for three weeks and finally an indefinite period, before it could provide a single truck. "I have fertilizing stuff to forward before the season is past," pleads the representative of one firm. "We have no waggons," is the reply. "I must have my produce delivered at once to the Government," argues another, "for it is wanted for the fabrication of powder." But the answer came promptly: "There are no waggons." "But you have waggons. I see them over there" (the station was Cognac). "Yes, but we may not touch them. They belong to the military engineering department." "Well, but what are they doing there?" "Ah, that is none of our business."[134]

[133] Le Journal, November 26, 1915.

[134] Le Journal, November 26, 1915.

And in the ports, at the termini, at intermediate stations, the merchandise lay heaped up, immobilized, while the merchants, the middlemen, the manufacturers, the Government, the army were waiting, time was lapsing, and the fate of the Republic and the nation hanging in the balance. At Havre great machines, destined for a Paris firm which was to have delivered them to factories making shells, lay untouched for two months. The number of shells lost in this way has never been calculated. Yet it was well known that during all that time there were numbers of waggons available. What had become of them? The answer was: They are to be found everywhere, immobilized. It is a case of general immobilization of the rolling stock. People slept in them, turned them into cottages, used them as warehouses, each individual reasoning that one waggon more or less would not be missed. And as this argument was used by large numbers of easy-going, well-meaning people the result was appalling.

The most terrific war known to history was raging in three Continents, and one group of belligerents, unaware or heedless of the magnitude of the issues, kept wasting its enormous resources and throwing away its advantages. At the little station of Cognac waggons laden with all kinds of war materials, barbed wire, galvanized wire, etc., were detained from September 1914 until November 1915, 400 days in all, doing nothing. Forty-two waggons ready to move were found on two grass-covered rails. Fourteen waggons were there since September 1914. Eight since December of the same year, twenty since June. Altogether at the modest little station of Cognac the total recorded by Senator Humbert's Journal was 228,500 tons-days. "All this during the most tremendous war the world has ever witnessed, in which hundreds of thousands of men have been slain, where we have continually been short of war material, while industry and commerce are agonizing for lack of means of transport. It may well seem a dream."[135]

[135] Le Journal, November 26, 1915.

Seven hundred French railway stations were devoid of rolling stock. On the other hand, from the beginning of the war down to November 1915, 729 waggons were lying immobilized at the station of Blanc-Mesnil. Seven hundred and twenty-nine![136] Merchants, manufacturers, importers, all were being literally beggared for lack of transports while hundreds of waggons lay rotting at obscure little stations for over a year. "The whole region of the West is encumbered," we read, "with 30,000,000 hectolitres of apples, valued at 300,000,000 francs, which cannot be conveyed anywhither, and which people are beginning to bury in the earth as manure. Sugar is scarce and is rising in price, whereas ever since last August[137] a single firm has unloaded 10,000 tons of sugar at Havre which it cannot have transported to Paris. Innumerable army purveyors are unable to send the machines for the shells...." An official order to the army prescribed a substitute for barbed wire, which was not to be had at any price, yet at a single station at least 135 tons of barbed wire were lying for a twelvemonth unused, untouched.[138] On November 27, 1915, the military hospital N16 at Poitiers needed coal. A request was made by telephone. The reply received was: "We have coal at La Rochelle, but there are no waggons to carry it." Yet there were forty-two waggons immobilized at Cognac, 729 at Blanc-Mesnil and 121 standing laden with barbed wire and other materials for over a year!

[136] Le Journal, December 2, 1915. They were photographed and the photograph reproduced in that paper.

[137] That was published in December 1915.

[138] Le Journal, December 2, 1915.

Organization and intelligence!

With engines the experience was the same. The French Government, anxious to make up for the deficiency, purchased 140 engines of British make to be delivered some time in 1916. Yet at that time there were at the station of Mezidon (Calvados) over 500 engines immobilized, nobody knew why or by whom. This cemetery of locomotives was photographed by the Journal. Such was the harvest reaped by the enterprising Senator Humbert's commission at that one station. There were others. At Marles six Belgian engines, at Serquigny twenty, etc.

The attention of the French authorities having been called to this unqualifiable neglect, a senatorial railway commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and it reported that: "The engines in question, numbering about 2000, of which 1000 on the State railway system are now going to be repaired." "There are therefore 2000 engines scandalously abandoned," comments the Journal, ... "forgotten during sixteen months, and having passed from the state of being inutilized to that of being inutilizable. For if these machines, which were in service before the war and came from Belgium, are to-day, like the waggons of Blanc-Mesnil, incapable of being utilized in their present state, as the official note puts it, the reason is that they were left to decay in the rain and the wind without cover or case for five hundred days."[139]

[139] Le Journal, December 4, 1915.

Interesting in a smaller way is the reply given by the French War Minister to a question by a deputy, the Marquis de Ludre, who asked for information about a consignment of knives which had been provided for the army, but were found to be quite useless. The Minister explained that the Generalissimus having requested the immediate dispatch of 165,000 knives, the department charged with the execution of the order had no time to examine the goods, and the circumstance was overlooked that all kinds of knives were supplied, without any reference to the purpose for which they were destined.[140] The Minister added that no one should be blamed for this, inasmuch as it was "the result of exaggerated but praiseworthy zeal." This construction is charitable and may be true in fact. But the soldiers who, in lieu of a serviceable blade, found themselves in possession of a dessert knife may have taken a different view of the transaction.

[140] Journal Official, answer to question No. 5730.

This is hardly what is understood by organization.

Beside those scenes from chaos set this picture of order: "In a small French town in which the supreme etape commando of Kluck's army was situated, we inspected a field postal station. On the ground floor the letters were being received and delivered. The stream of soldiers was endless. They were sending field postcards, which are forwarded gratuitously. The difficult work of sorting the correspondence was being transacted on the first storey. Every day from 1800 to 2000 post sacks arrive, mostly with small packets and postcards, and day after day the same difficult problem presents itself—how to find the addressee. Many regiments, it is true, have permanent quarters, but there are mobile columns as well. Quick transfers are possible, and individuals may be shifted to another place or incorporated in a different regiment. The arranging of the correspondence went forward in a spacious room; the letters which it was difficult to deliver were handed over to a number of specialists, who sat in an adjoining apartment and studied all the changes caused by the transfer of troops. They found help in an address-book containing a list of all the field formations. About once every four days, or even oftener, a new edition of this work was issued. By the middle of December 1914 the eighty-fourth edition was in print."[141]

[141] Karl Hildebrand, Ein starkes Volk, p. 108.

This talent for organization, this capacity of thought concentration in circumstances which tend to strengthen emotion at the cost of reason, have been constantly displayed by our enemies throughout the entire struggle of the past thirty years, and never more conspicuously than during the present war. Every emergency found them ready. The most unlikely eventualities had been foreseen and provided for. Private initiative, which "grandmotherly legislation" was supposed to have killed, was more alert and resourceful than among any of the Entente nations. Every German is in some respects an agent of his Government. Each one thinks he foresees some eventuality with the genesis of which he is especially conversant, and he forthwith communicates his forecast and at the same time his plan for coping with the danger to some official. And all suggestions are thankfully received and dealt with on their intrinsic merits. For such matters the rulers of the Empire, however engrossed by urgent problems, have always time and money.

It is instructive and may possibly be helpful to compare this spirit of detachment from the personal and party elements of the situation, this accessibility to every call of patriotic duty, this self-possession under conditions calculated to hinder calm deliberation, with the hesitations, the bewilderment, the conflicting decisions of the Entente leaders and their impatience of unauthorized initiative and offers of private assistance. Outsiders are not wanted. Their money is not rejected, but nothing else that they tender is readily received.

In other more momentous matters the Allies also lagged behind their adversaries. Despite their vast resources and the generous offers of private help, the care taken of the wounded left a good deal to be desired. The articles on this subject which were published in the London Press provided ample food for bitter reflection. In France, at the beginning of the war, wounded soldiers, after receiving first aid, were conveyed for days in carts over uneven roads to the hospitals in which they were to be treated. An American gentleman, witnessing the sufferings of these victims of circumstance, collected a number of motors in which to have them transported rapidly and with relative comfort. But his offer of these conveyances was rejected by all the departments to which he applied. And it was only after he had spent weeks in visiting influential friends in London that he finally obtained an introduction to the Secretary for War, who, overriding the decisions of his subordinates, closed with the proposal and sent the benefactor with his motors to the front.

It has been affirmed by unbiassed neutral witnesses who evinced special interest in the subject that tens of thousands of the allied wounded who died of their injuries might have been saved had they had proper care. But defective organization and other avoidable causes deprived them of efficient medical help.

By Great Britain more comprehensive measures were fitfully taken, of which our wounded have reaped the benefit. A French journal[142] enumerated, with a high tribute of praise, the results of the observations made by a commission of British physicians in the Grand Palais Hospital in Paris: "More than half, to be exact 54 per cent., of the wounded entrusted to the care of the doctors of the Grand Palais since last May have been sent back to the front, completely cured. What an achievement!" Undoubtedly it is a feat to be proud of, if we compare it with the percentage of cured in certain other countries and in the Dardanelles. But if we set it side by side with what is claimed for and by the Germans, it may appear less remarkable. It cannot be gainsaid that the British authorities have spared neither money nor pains to alleviate the sufferings and heal the injuries of the wounded. And if the measure of their success is still capable of being extended, the reason certainly does not lie in any lack of good will.

[142] The Figaro, February 22, 1916.

On the incapacitated German soldier every possible care is bestowed. His every need is foreseen and when possible provided for with an eye to thoroughness and economy. Waste and niggardliness are sedulously eschewed. Every man is provided with a square of canvas with eyelets, which serves as a carpet on which he lies at night, as a stretcher on which, when wounded, he is carried to the place where he can have his injuries attended to, and which, when he is killed, is used as a winding-sheet. The medical organization of the army is as thorough as the military. And the results attained justify the solicitude displayed. From month to month the percentage of wounded who are able to return to the front has been augmenting steadily, and the death-rate has decreased correspondingly. During the first month of the war, out of every hundred wounded there were 84.8 capable of further service, 3.0 dead, and 12.2 incapacitated or sent home. In September of the same year the number of those able to return to the front rose to 88.1, or about 4 per cent. more. And at the same time the death-rate sank from 3 to 2.7 per cent. In the third month the proportion of soldiers able to resume their places in the ranks of fighters was 88.9, while the deaths had been reduced to 2.4. During the period beginning with November and ending in March the number of the wounded who went back to the front oscillated between 87.3 and 88.9. In November the percentage of deaths was only 2.1 per cent., and in December only 1.7 per cent. January 1916 showed a further improvement, the death-rate having fallen to 1.4 and in February 1.3 per cent. During the two following months the percentage rose again to 1.4, but declined slowly until in June and July it had descended to 1.2 per cent. The number of wounded men who were sent back to their places at the front had meanwhile increased by April to 91.2, and by June 1915 to 91.7, and in May and July to 91.8. Seven per cent. were wholly incapacitated or dismissed to their homes. Among the latter a considerable percentage returned subsequently to the ranks. Altogether, then, about 91.8 per cent. of the wounded German soldiers who fall in battle are so well taken care of that they are able to fight again, and no more than 1.2 per cent. of the total number succumb to their wounds.[143]

[143] Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift.

This strict conformity to the material and psychological conditions of success marks the method by which the Germans proceed to realize a grandiose plan which is understood and furthered by one and all. Their talent for organization, their insight, their inventiveness, and their highly developed social sense are all pressed into the service of this patriotic cause. And it is to these permanent qualities, more even than to their thirty years' military and economic preparation, that they owe their many successes. The cynicism and ruthlessness of our arch-enemy should not be allowed to blind us to his enterprise, his stoicism, his meticulous applications of the law of cause and effect. These are among his most valuable assets, and unless we have solid advantages of our own to set against and outweigh them, our appeals to the justice of our cause and our denunciations of his wicked designs will avail us nothing. It is to our interest to seek out and note whatever strength is inherent in himself or his methods and to appropriate that. The struggle will ultimately be decided by the superiority of equipment, material and moral, which one side possesses over the other. As for the conceptions of public law and international right which the antagonists severally stand for, they must be gauged by quite other standards than heavy guns and asphyxiating gases. It is not impossible that in the course of time, and by dint of reciprocal action and reaction, the German views may be sufficiently modified and moralized to render possible the usual process of assimilation with which the history of speculative ideas and social movements has rendered us familiar. Meanwhile, truth compels us to admit that part at least of the western system is being overtaken by decay, and stands in need of speedy and thorough renovation.



CHAPTER XXI

THE FINAL ISSUE

To come victorious out of the present ordeal—if, indeed, that be possible with the leaders, principles, methods and strivings that still characterize us—will not suffice to effect the triumph of our cause. The present, momentous though it be, cannot with safety be separated in thought or action from the future. The struggle will go on relentlessly after this campaign until one side has worsted the other definitively. And it is for that struggle that it behoves us to prepare while the war is still at its height.

The Germans, true to their practice, have set us the example. Their curious combinations for dividing the Allies while negotiating their own schemes for reorganizing political Europe have been worked out in almost every detail. Their projects for creating a vast and powerful economic organization, to be known as Central Europe,[144] with its first appendix in the Balkan Peninsula, have been carefully woven, and will be duly embellished when the hour for unfolding them has struck. In a word, when opportunity suddenly appears like the bridegroom of the Gospel, the German will be found waiting, with girded loins and trimmed lamp. He has distributed the parts of each nation in the international drama, and if the roles cannot be taken over to-morrow, he will wait until the day after.

[144] Cf. Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa.

The world is henceforth no longer a field of labour for the individual. Co-operation is the open sesame to the economic life of the future. And co-operation means organization. Organization, then, is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a group of powers whose territory and population are many times greater than its own. That race has demonstrated the quasi-omnipotence of organized labour, and has thereby itself become almost omnipotent. On the success or failure of its adversaries to create a like force and rise to the same height depends the future of Europe and the British Empire. One of the first corollaries of the new principle is the enlargement of all great units, including political communities. Germany and Austria, therefore, are bound, if not precisely to coalesce in one whole, at least to co-operate and combine for their common ends against common competitors, and thus to form the nucleus of that federal state which is, our enemies hope, one day to be commensurate with the continent of Europe.

At present, however satisfactory the military situation may be said to be, the general outlook is far from bright. Our aims are impoverished, our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions are being frittered away in abortive efforts to neutralize dissolvent ideas that are sapping only those organs of our social and political system which are already vicious or decayed. The waste of the empire's resources has no parallel in history. Supreme confusion marks our internal condition. Our leaders have done nothing to familiarize the nation with the dangers that threaten it, the means by which they should be met, or with the social and political ideas which are destined to shape and sway the new order of things which is already close at hand.

In the absence of constructive leaders it is for the nation itself to make due preparation for the momentous changes in the social and political system of Europe to which the present crisis is but the prelude.

And although much has been spoken and written on the subject since the war began, little permanent work has as yet been done. And there are few signs of a radical change for the better. The confusion and incongruousness that mark the ideas of the reformers, and the hesitancy and conflicting interests of politicians make one dubious of the outcome of the present contest. Almost everything essential would appear to be still lacking to the Allies, and the nature of the coming "peace period" is not realized, because the war is looked upon as an isolated phenomenon which began in July 1914, and will end when hostilities have ceased. Another belief equally misleading and mischievous is that the Teuton race can be paralysed if not crushed, and that for fifty or sixty years to come no revival of its energies, no recrudescence of its morbid aggressiveness need be apprehended. If we continue to shape our conduct on that assumption we may find ourselves one day in a Serbonian bog from which there is no rescue. However stringent the conditions which the Allies may be able to impose on their enemies, there will still remain a keen, strenuous, irrepressible race of at least a hundred and twenty millions, endowed with rare capacities for organization, cohesion, self-sacrifice and perseverance, whom no treaties can bind, no scruples can restrain, no dangers intimidate. At any moment a new invention, a favourable diplomatic combination, would suffice to move them to burst all bounds and resume the military, naval and aerial contest anew.

Even now, while the war is still raging, they are busy with comprehensive plans for the economic struggle which will succeed it. Nor are they content to weave schemes. They have already begun to carry them out. To mention but a few of the less important enterprises, as symptoms of the German solicitude for detail, there was a numerous gathering of railway representatives, Austrian, Hungarian and German, in August 1915, to consider the means of readjusting the railway service to the conditions which the peace would usher in. Among the projects laid before the meeting and insisted on by various financial institutions was the reconstruction on a new basis of the Sleeping Car Company, from which Belgian capital is to be excluded.[145]

[145] Giornale del lavori pubblici. Cf. also Giornale d'Italia, August 22, 1915.

In Italy many of the German commercial houses are, so to say, hibernating during the war. They merely altered their names and substituted well-paid, friendly Italians for Germans, and the feat was achieved. In this way the Kaiser's mercury mines of Abbadia, San Salvatore and Corte Vecchia in Tuscany are being protected, and nobody in Italy is under any misapprehension as to what is going on there. They are nominally in the hands of Swiss.

One of the most successful manoeuvres by which the Germans have already parried the strokes of their rivals in the economic struggle is by crossing the frontiers and carrying on the contest in the enemy's country. It was thus that, when Russia, by way of protecting her own nascent textile industries, levied heavy duties on imports from abroad, the Germans transported their plant and their workmen across the border, built extensive works in Lodz which gradually grew into a prosperous German city and rendered sterling services to the Teuton invader during the present war. They intend to have recourse to the same device as soon as hostilities have ceased. German trade papers announced this to their readers and urged them to communicate with the staff with a view to receiving information respecting ways and means.

One Berlin trade journal—the most widely circulated in the German capital—had recently a great headline entitled: "How to keep up German Exportation after the War!" After a preamble enumerating the difficulties that would be thrown in the way of exporters by the Allies, the article went on thus: "For some years to come the means of extricating ourselves from this cruel predicament will consist in transporting the work of manufacturing or refining our merchandise to a neutral country. We are now in a position to offer information and advice on this head to those German manufacturers who are working for exportation, and we shall endeavour to extend our action in the future. We advise all those manufacturers who are desirous of developing their business in this way to enter into relations with us without delay."[146]

[146] Zeitschrift des Handelsvertragsvereins, March 30, 1915. Cf. also La Gazette de Lausanne and L'Idea Nazionale, December 5, 1915.

The device is simple, and has hitherto been efficacious. In Switzerland the number of German firms is large and continues to augment. They are branches of German houses, and their aim is to further the interests of these. They mask their intentions by assuming Swiss names and also by obtaining for their employees naturalization papers in the little republic. How, it may be asked, do the Allies propose to thwart these manoeuvres? They probably have not given the matter a moment's serious consideration. A Swiss journal of repute[147] published some time ago a characteristic letter received by a Swiss business man from a German textile manufacturer. One passage is worth reproducing: "The actual situation renders it impossible for us to maintain relations with our former customers. Hence, it is of the utmost importance for us to be informed respecting the commercial and financial situation with a view to the resumption of our intercourse in a lucrative form after this long interruption. It is our intention, therefore, to have our products sold through a Swiss branch by Swiss agents."[148]

[147] Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

[148] Neue Zurcher Zeitung, also L'Idea Nazionale, December 5, 1915.

With their incorrigible disposition to judge others by themselves, the British people fancy that after the war a wave of liberalism will sweep over Germany, demolish the strongholds of militarism there, and reveal a pacific, level-headed nation with whom it may be possible to hold friendly intercourse. This, to my thinking, is also a delusion. Even if the Kaiser and his environment were dislodged from their places, Germany's ideals, aims and strivings would remain unchanged. But the Kaiser and his Government are minded to leave nothing to chance. They, too, have their plans, which are simple and comprehensive, and would appear to have escaped the notice of British optimists. And yet they are well worth consideration. The Germans themselves put the matter thus—

The enormous expenditure necessitated by the war will call for special financial legislation of which the keynote will be found in monopolies. Now, the present German Finance Minister, who is a banker by training, intends that the monopolies to be created shall be effected, not by the unaided resources of the State, but by its co-operation with the interested business men and banks. On this basis he is working at monopolies of cigarettes, life insurance and electric power. This complex arrangement is facilitated by the machinery of the banks and their peculiar activity. And here we touch upon one of the main sources whence German organization after the war will draw its vitality. It is on the operations of these financial institutions that it behoves us to lay stress. They are so many magnetic centres which attract nearly all the free capital of the country and then employ it as they think fit. And one momentous consequence of this command of money is the possession of almost unrestricted power over industrial enterprises, present and future. For it depends on the banks to extend these and to restrict the output of those in consonance with the economic policy pursued by the State.

Nor should it be forgotten that the power and influence of the banks is not limited by the amount of capital they actually possess. Over and above this they wield all the financial force conferred by the vast amounts deposited with them by customers. This was evidenced in the case of the Banca Commerciale in Italy, which had a working capital of L6,240,000 in the year 1914. Now, of that sum only 2.5 per cent. was owned by Germans, yet the bank itself and all the industries dependent on it were exploited by the German Board of Directors.[149] In the Fatherland we observe the same phenomenon. All the German banks together, excepting the hypothecary institutions, owned L195,000,000 sterling, about 44 per cent. of which belonged to the eight principal banks of the empire.[150] Possessing only L86,050,000 of their own, they disposed of L259,600,000 belonging to other people.

[149] Giovanni Preziosi, La Germania alla Conquista d'Italia, 2d edizione, p. 150.

[150] Deutsche Bank, 248 million marks; Diskonto Gesellschaft, 149 millions; Dresdner Bank, 261 millions; Darmstaedter Bank, 192 millions; Berliner Handelsg. 145 millions; Commerz- u. Diskonto Bank, 100 millions; Nationalbank, 98 millions; Mitteldeutsche Kreditbank, 69 million marks.

One effect of the establishment of groups of monopolies will be to increase the number of persons dependent for their livelihood on the State. It is calculated that the total, including heads of families, will amount to tens of millions. The corn monopoly will bring in five million farmers, heads of families, who will have to look to the State for the amount of their yearly income. For it is evident that the Government will be "co-operating" not with the peasants, but with the great landed proprietors. Now, these are the men whose backing is indispensable, and has never been wanting, to the military and court parties who are primarily responsible for the war. Once the wages of the workmen and the interest on capital become dependent on the State, the entire nation is but a vast machine worked by the men in power. To suppose that these will lend a willing ear to the demands for political liberty which are certain to be made after the conclusion of peace is to expect the impossible. What will probably happen is a keen struggle between the classes and the masses for the mastery, but until it is decided in favour of the latter, the Germany of the future will continue to be the Germany of to-day.

In the meanwhile, the Teutons, despite their striking inferiority in numbers and resources, have kept the Great Powers of the world at bay, have defeated their armies, sunk their mercantile marine, occupied their territory, drained their wealth, paralysed their trade and deprived them of all the odds which they owed to circumstance. Organization has thus more than made up for the seemingly overpowering advantages possessed by the Allies at the outset. That it will suddenly lose its worth during the remainder of the campaign is hardly to be expected. The contingency which we may have to face, if we continue to move at our present pace, is manifest to the observant student of politics.

By the average man and our "leaders of men" it is hardly even suspected. Our easy-going optimism is largely the result of temperament and partly, too, of presumptuous confidence born of past luck, and in especial of the relief we feel at our escape from most of the obvious dangers that menaced us at the outset of the war. There has been no trouble over Ireland, no rising in India, no serious defection in South Africa, no invasion of Egypt. And we irrationally feel that these dark clouds, having drifted harmlessly past, the others will follow them. It was said of the Swiss in mediaeval times, that they were kept together by the bewilderment of men and the providence of God, confusione hominum et providentia Dei. The same might be truly predicated of the British people of to-day.

But there is no reason for assuming that they will be thus providentially cared for in the future. The Allies have not yet driven the Germans out of Belgium, France, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland or Kurland. Neither have they contrived to starve them into sueing for peace. They talk glibly of exhausting them as though their own resources were inexhaustible. They do well perhaps to make light of the Zeppelins, but they pay far too little attention to the submarines, and seem not to realize the magnitude of the losses which these weapons have inflicted on our merchant shipping, nor to have calculated how long it can hold out at the present rate of destruction. Freights have increased enormously, and they have not yet reached the highest point they are likely to attain. Imports have been restricted, prices have gone up and taxation has increased. Time may not be on the side of our enemies, but is it on ours? It is a fickle ally at best, and to rely on its support is to lean on a split reed.

Optimism of the unreasoning kind prevalent in Great Britain is unwarranted, whether we confine our view to the actual campaign or extend it to the greater struggle of which that forms but an episode. Taking the former case first, one is struck with certain considerations which, without inspiring dismay, ought surely to preserve us from that excessive self-confidence which is too often a hindrance to fruitful exertion. The financial burden and its relation to the limits of the allied nations' capacity to bear it is a fit subject for meditation when we feel uplifted in self-complacency. Doubtless it is encouraging to watch the symptoms of slow exhaustion displaying themselves in the central empires and to speculate on the consequences of the further fall of the German mark. But these consequences we are too apt to exaggerate. For we misjudge the character, the staying powers, the ideals, the psychology of the German people. We fancy that because they have been reduced from comfort to hardship therefore they are on the verge of collapse. We imagine that because their commercial and industrial classes are keen on making money and ardently desire peace, they are also ready to purchase it by acquiescing in conditions which would dispel their dreams of world power. We feel certain that if Prussia and all the German States received genuine parliamentary government, the costly ambitions of the military party would forthwith be dispelled for all time.

It is by delusions such as these that the British people were hoodwinked in the past, and it is by the same vain imaginings that they may be victimized in the future. For they seem incapable of gauging the German psyche. The two races meet each other in masks. The apparent ingenuousness of the English-speaking Teuton is calculated to throw the most vigilant Anglo-Saxon intelligence off its guard. We have no psychological X-rays by which to pierce the peculiar racial vesture in which the German soul is shrouded, nor are we endowed with the gift of patient observation which might enable us to extract those rays from facts. And so we stumble along, dealing with an imaginary people whom we ourselves have created after our own image and likeness, falling into fatal blunders and recommencing anew.

It is true that the mark has fallen, and that the German financial fabric is in a parlous condition. But that fabric is kept from crumbling away by the war, just as the Egyptian papyrus is preserved so long as it does not come into contact with the air. Moreover, common prudence should impel us to find out at what a cost to ourselves we have reduced the value of the mark. If financial exhaustion be among the ways in which one group of belligerents may be made to succumb, it is wise to ask whether it is the States which have to pay gold for their huge requirements or those which can get almost everything they need for paper that are likely to succumb first.

The question is relevant, yet, because it has not been moved into the foreground of discussion, there are few people who ponder on it.

Personally, I am convinced that impecuniosity and loss of credit will never bring the Germans to their knees.

Great Britain has achieved wonders in the financial sphere during this war, as the Allies and certain neutrals can testify. Our budgets are monuments of the nation's spirit of self-sacrifice. But we have not come scathless out of the ordeal. And besides our inevitable losses we are suffering from criminal waste. No other country is so thriftless as ours. In this respect we are a byword among the peoples of the world. But we give no thought to the consequences. Yet the yearly outlay on the one hand and the means of meeting it on the other hand are calculable, and it would be well if those who rely upon Germany's financial prostration would carefully reckon up and compare the two, were it only for the sake of the sobering effect. On this aspect of the problem it is needless to dwell further. It will compel close and painful attention before the end of the campaign.

Another point to which inadequate heed has been paid, is the lack of working men. This dearth of labour is not felt in Germany or Austria, because they have two million prisoners and two million Poles on whom they can draw not only for agricultural work but also for skilled labour. And the authorities of both those empires are employing their war prisoners very freely. Here, as everywhere else, the Teuton is enterprising. I have seen photographs of Russians in Germany harnessed and employed as beasts of burden. At any rate, it is no secret that from the latter half of the year 1915 Germany and Austria were far ahead of Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States and Japan combined in the amount of munitions they turned out every week. And they are still ahead of them to-day. This fact, which can be verified, has an ominous ring. What it connotes is that our enemies have no strikes, no conscientious objectors, no fiddling with obligatory service, industrial or military. Each man is at his country's beck and call. Germany is free from strikers, slackers and such-like anti-social types.

In Russia the want of working men is felt keenly. It is one of the main elements of the sharp rise of prices there. In France, too, the number of hands needed is very great, and the loss inflicted by their withdrawal from the labour market is more sensible than the average reader has any notion of. And far from being filled, these gaps are becoming wider day by day. This shortage is a source of solicitude to the Government of the Republic.

What it portends may readily be imagined. It certainly compels us to qualify the cheering assertion that time is on our side. What else it implies may be left to the imagination of the reader.

More serious still than the financial burden, or the dearth of workmen, is the inadequacy of the mercantile marine to the needs of the Allies in general, and of Great Britain in especial. To this privation submarine warfare has contributed materially. And there is not the slenderest ground for hope that the Germans will desist from it during this campaign. On the contrary, they will intensify it. Of the neutrals, some are too weak and others too timid to enter an energetic protest against this violation of international law. The freight-carrying capacity of the transports still available is less than the British optimist realizes. How much less, it would be unfruitful to inquire. It is enough to know that in this matter, too, we had better seek a more helpful ally than time. Those who are most conversant with these elements of the problem are haunted by a restive consciousness of disappointment and apprehension.

For the power, the independence, the destinies of the Empire are interwoven with our command of the sea. On our merchant tonnage depend our economic life, our army and navy, everything we have and are and hope to be. That destroyed or paralysed, nothing remains but a memory. And the Germans are working hard and not unsuccessfully to cripple it. During the week ending April 13, 85,000 tons of British and neutral shipping were destroyed. Since the beginning of the submarine blockade over 3,000,000 tons have been sent to the bottom of the sea. On an average 50,000 tons a week are being torpedoed or mined, and our losses tend to augment rather than diminish. Nor is that all. Not only is our merchant tonnage being whittled down below the minimum needed for our strict requirements, but we are also being hindered from utilizing the transports available. And herein lies a danger the full significance of which has not yet received proper attention. Shortage of labour is pleaded as the reason why effective measures have not been adopted to fill the gaps made by the enemy submarines. And labour is inadequate because the Government eschewes industrial as well as military compulsion. It possesses the power, but shrinks from wielding it. To my thinking, this is one of the symptoms of that madness with which the gods strike a nation before destroying it.

And the longer this process of—shall we call it mutual?—exhaustion goes on, the more important grow the neutral States and the louder sound their voices. They are like Jeshurun, who waxed fat and kicked. Without special aptitudes for arithmetic one may calculate, with a rough approach to accuracy, the time when the process of mutual exhaustion will enable the neutrals to exert an absurdly disproportionate and possibly dangerous influence over the belligerents. That is a calculation which those optimists would do well to make who tell us that all is well because "time is on our side."

It is still open to us to utilize our superior resources, realize our latent strength, and ward off the dangers that beset us. But the first advance towards the goal must be to face the facts, behold things and persons as they are, and apply our new-found knowledge to the work of self-rescue. Our conception of the nature of the contest in which we are engaged must be recast. Our demands on our national leaders—not those now in power who only mislead—must be greatly enlarged. Truth, however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be displaced. The nation's aims and policy should be stated boldly and clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word, system will have to be substituted for confusion, method for haphazard. Destitute of a great or strong man, it behoves us to imitate our enemy and create a vast organization with branches all over the empire. But the influence of the government ever since the outbreak of the war has militated against all those reforms.

If these changes had been effected at the outset the story of the present campaign would have been different from what it is. A group of belligerents representing only 5,921,000 square kilometres of territory and 150,199,000 inhabitants, or, say, 4 per cent. of dry land and 9.1 per cent. of human beings, would not have held its own for twenty-one months against a group disposing of 68,031,000 square kilometres of territory and a population of 770,060,000, or 46 per cent. of the land on the globe and 47 per cent. of the human race. Providence has bestowed upon the Allies the wherewithal to attain their legitimate ends. The Allies' leaders are frittering them away.

For the thirty years of preparation do not afford us an adequate explanation of the Teuton superiority. The clue is to be found in the psychological factor. Germany is wholly alive, physically, intellectually and psychically. And she lives in the present and future. We either drowse or vegetate in and for the past. She has the decisive advantage of possessing organization and organizers. Therein lies the secret of her sustained success. The Allies lack both, and are hardly conscious of the necessity of making good the deficiency. Therein lies their weakness. It has made itself felt throughout the campaign and will determine the upshot of the war. And in the politico-economic struggle that will follow the war, it is the same psychological factor which the Allies rate so low that will decide the final issue.

Unless we wake up to the reality and readjust our ideas and methods to that—and of such awakening there is as yet no sure token—the outcome of the present war will be a draw, and the final upshot of the larger contest will be our utter defeat. No journalistic optimism, no ministerial magniloquence can alter that. These contingencies are already fullfronting us, as we shall soon learn to our cost, and the people who are veiling them from the public view, however praiseworthy their intentions may be, are leading the nation to ruin. And if we continue to uphold our present chiefs and methods national disaster is as inevitable as destiny. But it is well to remember that it is not Fate that is pursuing us; it is we who are overtaking Fate.

THE END