That the German Government is keenly aware of the dangers of the situation is evident from the rigorous measures that it has taken to conserve and economize the food supply. After having fixed maximum prices for cereals soon after the war began, the Government last week decided to requisition and monopolize all the wheat and rye in the country, and allow the bakers to sell only a limited quantity of bread (2.2 pounds per capita a week) to each family. It had previously taken measures to restrict the consumption of cereals for other purposes than breadmaking; the feeding of rye was prohibited and its use in producing alcohol was restricted by 40 per cent.; a percentage of potato flour was ordered added to rye flour, and of the latter to wheat flour in making bread. These are but a few of the economic measures adopted by the Government since the outbreak of the war.

The general opinion of the people in Germany is that the country cannot be starved out, and this opinion is asserted with a great deal of patriotic fervor, particularly by newspaper editors. The leading scientists of the country, moreover, have taken up the question in a thoroughgoing way and investigated it in all its bearings. A little book ("Die Deutsche Volksernaehrung und der Englische Aushungerungsplan") has just been issued, giving the conclusions of sixteen specialists in various fields, which will be briefly summarized here. Economists, statisticians, physiologists, agricultural chemists, food specialists, and geologists have all taken part in producing a composite view of the whole subject; it is not a book of special contributions by individual specialists, but is written in one cast and represents the compared and boiled-down conclusions of the sixteen scholars.

The authors by no means regard the problem of feeding Germany without foreign assistance as an easy and simple one; on the contrary, they say it is a serious one, and calls for the supreme effort of the authorities and of every individual German; and only by energetic, systematic, and continued efforts of Government and people can they prevent a shortage of food from negativing the success of German arms. Yet they feel bound to grapple the problem as one calling for solution by the German people alone, for very small imports of food products can be expected from the neutral countries of Europe, and none at all from the United States and other oversea countries, and the small quantities that do come in will hardly be more than enough to make good the drain upon Germany's own available stocks in helping to feed the people of Belgium and Poland.

The simplest statistical elements of the problem are the following: Germany, with a population of 68,000,000, was consuming food products, when the war broke out, equivalent to an aggregate of 90,420 billion calories, including 2,307,000 tons of albumen; whereas the amount now available, under unchanged methods of living and feeding, is equal to only 67,870 billion calories, with 1,543,000 tons of albumen. Thus, there will be an apparent deficit of 22,590 billion calories and 764,000 tons of albumen. On the other hand, the authors hold that the minimum physiological requirements are only 56,750 billion calories, containing 1,605,000 tons of albumen, which would give a large surplus of calories and a small deficit of albumen, but they make certain recommendations which, if carried into effect, would bring the available supply up to 81,250 billion calories and 2,023,000 tons of albumen.

Germany raises (average for 1912-13) about 4,500,000 tons of wheat and imports nearly 2,000,000 tons, (about 73,000,000 bushels.) On the other hand, it exports about 530,000 tons net of the 11,900,000 tons of rye produced. It imports nearly 3,000,000 tons of low-grade barley and about 1,000,000 of maize, both chiefly for feeding stock. Its net imports of grain and legumes are 6,270,000 tons. Of its fruit consumption, about 30 per cent. has been imported. While Germany has been producing nearly its entire meat supply at home, this has been accomplished only by the very extensive use of foreign feedstuffs. The authors of this work estimate that the imports of meats and animals, together with the product from domestic animals fed with foreign feedstuffs, amount to not less than 33 per cent. of the total consumption. They also hold that about 58 per cent. of the milk consumed in Germany represents imports and the product of cows fed with foreign feedstuffs. Nearly 40 per cent. of the egg consumption was hitherto imported. The consumption of fish has averaged 576,000 tons, of which not less than 62 per cent. was imported; and the home fisheries are now confined, besides the internal waters, almost wholly to the Baltic Sea—which means the loss of the catch of 142,000 tons hitherto taken from the North Sea. Even the German's favorite beverage, beer, contains 13 per cent. of imported ingredients.

The authors assume, as already intimated, that nearly all of these imports will be lost to Germany during the full duration of the war, and they take up, under this big limitation, the problem of showing how Germany can live upon its own resources and go on fighting till it wins. They undertake to show how savings can be made in the use of the supplies on hand, and also how production can be increased or changed so as to keep the country supplied with food products.

In the first place, they insist that the prohibition of the export of grain be made absolute; in other words, the small exception made in favor of Switzerland, which has usually obtained most of its grain from Germany, must be canceled. Savings in the present supplies of grain and feedstuffs must be made by a considerable reduction in the live stock, inasmuch as the grain, potatoes, turnips, and other stuffs fed to animals will support a great many more men if consumed directly by them. From the stock of cattle the poorer milkers must be eliminated and converted into beef, 10 per cent. of the milch cows to be thus disposed, of. Then swine, in particular, must be slaughtered down to 65 per cent. of the present number, they being great consumers of material suitable for human food. In Germany much skim milk and buttermilk is fed to swine; the authors demand that this partial waste of very valuable albumens be stopped. The potato crop—of which Germany produces above 50,000,000 tons a year, or much more than any other land—must be more extensively drawn upon than hitherto for feeding the people. To this end potato-drying establishments must be multiplied; these will turn out a rough product for feeding animals, and a better sort for table use. It may be added here that the Prussian Government last Autumn decided to give financial aid to agricultural organizations for erecting drying plants; also, that the Imperial Government has decreed that potatoes up to a maximum of 30 per cent. may be used by the bakers in making bread—a measure which will undoubtedly make the grain supply suffice till the 1915 crop is harvested. It is further recommended that more vegetables be preserved, whether directly in cold storage or by canning or pickling. Moreover, the industrial use of fats suitable for human food (as in making soaps, lubricating oils, &c.) must be stopped, and people must eat less meat, less butter, and more vegetables. Grain must not be converted into starch. People must burn coke rather than coal, for the coking process yields the valuable by-product of sulphate of ammonia, one of the most valuable of fertilizers, and greatly needed by German farmers now owing to the stoppage of imports of nitrate of soda from Chile.

In considering how the German people may keep up their production of food, the authors find that various factors will work against such a result. In the first place, there is a shortage of labor, nearly all the able-bodied young and middle-aged men in the farming districts being in the war. There is also a scarcity of horses, some 500,000 head having already been requisitioned for army use, and the imports of about 140,000 head (chiefly from Russia) have almost wholly ceased. The people must therefore resort more extensively to the use of motor plows, and the State Governments must give financial assistance to insure this wherever necessary; and such plows on hand must be kept more steadily in use through company ownership or rental. It may be remarked here, again, that the Prussian Government is also assisting agricultural organizations to buy motor plows. The supply of fertilizers has also been cut down by the war. Nitrate has just been mentioned. The authors recommend that the Government solve this problem by having many of the existing electrical plants turn partly to recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere. This, they say, could be done without reducing the present production of electricity for ordinary purposes, since only 19 per cent. of the effective capacity of the 2,000,000 horse power producible by the electrical plants of Germany is actually used. The supply of phosphoric fertilizers is also endangered through the stoppage of imports of phosphate rock (nearly 1,000,000 tons a year) as well as the material from which to make sulphuric acid; also, through the reduction in the production of the iron furnaces of the country, from the slag of which over 2,000,000 tons of so-called Thomas phosphate flour was produced, will involve a big reduction in the make of that valuable fertilizer. Thus, there is a lack of horses, of fertilizers, and of the guiding hand of man. This last, however, can be partly supplied by utilizing for farm work such of the prisoners of war as come from the farm. As Germany now holds considerably more than 600,000 prisoners, it can draw many farm laborers from among them. Prisoners are already used in large numbers in recovering moorland for agricultural purposes.

This latter remark suggests one of the recommendations of the authors for increasing agricultural production—the increased recovery of moorlands. They show that Germany has at least 52,000 square miles (more than 33,000,000 acres) of moors convertible into good arable land, which, with proper fertilizing, can be made at once richly productive; they yield particularly large crops of grain and potatoes. Moreover, the State Governments must undertake the division of large landed estates among small proprietors wherever possible—and this is more possible just now than ever, owing to the fact that many large owners have been killed in battle. The reason for such a division is that the small holder gets more out of the acre than the large proprietor.

As Germany makes a large surplus of sugar, the authors advise that the area planted in beets be reduced and the land thus liberated be planted in grain, potatoes, and turnips; as a matter of fact, it is reported that the Government is now considering the question of reducing the beetroot acreage by one-fourth. The authors also recommend that sugar be used to some extent in feeding stock, sweeting low-grade hay and roots with it to make them more palatable and nutritious. It is also regarded as profitable to leave 20 per cent. of sugar in the beets, so as to secure a more valuable feed product in the remnants. Still another agricultural change is to increase the crops of beans, peas, and lentils—vegetables which contain when dried as much nutrition as meat. Germany will need to increase its home production of these crops to replace the 300,000 tons of them hitherto imported.

Such are the principal points covered by these experts. Their conclusion is that, if their recommendations be carried out fully, and various economies be practiced—they could not be touched on in the limits of this article—Germany can manage to feed its people. But they insist, in their earnest, concluding words, that this can only be done by carrying out thoroughly all the methods of producing and saving food products advised by them. It is a serious problem, indeed, but one which, all Germany is convinced, can and will be solved.



HOCH DER KAISER

BY GEORGE DAVIES

HOCH DER KAISER! Amen! Amen! We of the pulpit and bar, We of the engine and car; Hail to the Caesar who's given us men, Our rightful heritage back again.

Who kicks the dancing shoes from our feet; Snatches our mouths from the hot forced meat; Drags us away from our warm padded stalls; From our ivory keys, our song books and balls; Orders man's hands from the children's go-carts; Closes our fool schools of "ethics" and "arts." Puts our ten fingers on triggers and swords, Marshals us into War's legions by hordes.

Hoch der Kaiser! Amen! Amen! We of the sea and the land; We of the clerking band; Hail to the Caesar who's given us men Our rightful heritage back again.

WHO SUMMONS:

These women who write of loves that are loose, (Those little perversionist scribes of the Deuce!) Laughter of lies lilting lewd at their lips, Their souls and brains both in a maudlin eclipse; Their bosoms as bare as their stories and songs; These coaxers of dogs with their "rights" and their wrongs.

WHO COMMANDS:

Strike from their shoulders the transparent mesh; Mark the Red Cross on the cloth for their flesh.

WHO ORDAINS:

Ye, men who seem women in work and at play; Ye, who do blindly as women may say; Ye, who kill life in the smug cabarets; Ye, all, at the beck of the little tea-tray; Ye, all, of the measure of daughters of clay.

Waken to face me: be women no more; But fellow-men born, from top branch to the core; Men who must fight—who can kill, who can die, While women once more shall be covered and shy.

Hoch der Kaiser! Amen! Amen! We of the hills and the homes; We of the plows and the tomes; Hail to the Caesar who's given us men Our rightful heritage back again.



The Submarine of 1578

[From The London Times, Jan. 16, 1915.]

The earliest description of a practical under-water boat is given by William Bourne in his book entitled "Inventions or Devices," published in 1578. Instructions for building such a boat are given in detail, and it has been conjectured that Cornelius van Drebbel, a Dutch physician, used this information for the construction of the vessel with which in the early part of the seventeenth century he carried out some experiments on the Thames. It is doubtful, however, whether van Drebbel's boat was ever entirely submerged, and the voyage with which he was credited, from Westminster to Greenwich, is supposed to have been made in an awash condition, with the head of the inventor above the surface. More than one writer at the time referred to van Drebbel's boat and endeavored to explain the apparatus by which his rowers were enabled to breathe under water.

Van Drebbel died in 1634, and no illustration of his boat has been discovered. Nineteen years later the vessel illustrated here was constructed at Rotterdam from the designs of a Frenchman named de Son. This is supposed to be the earliest illustration of any submarine, and the inscription under the drawing, which was printed at Amsterdam in the Calverstraat, (in the Three Crabs,) is in old Dutch, of which the following is a translation:

The inventor of this ship will undertake to destroy in a single day a hundred vessels, and such destruction could not be prevented by fire, storm, bad weather, or the force of the waves, saving only that the Almighty should otherwise will it.



Vain would it be for ships lying in harbor to be regarded as safe, for the inventor could reach anywhere unless prevented by betrayal. None but he could control the craft. Therefore it may truly be called the lightning of the sea.

Its power shall be proven by a trip to the East Indies in six weeks or to France and back in a day, for as fast as a bird flieth can one travel in this boat.

This boat was 72 feet in length, and her greatest height was 12 feet, while the greatest breadth was 8 feet, tapering off to points at the end. Capt. Murray Sueter in his book on submarines gives these and other particulars of the vessel. At either end the boat had a cabin, the air in which remained good for about three hours, and in the middle of the boat was a large paddlewheel rotated by clockwork mechanism, which, it was claimed, would run for eight hours when once wound up. The iron tips at the ends of the vessel were intended for ramming, and the inventor was confident he could sink the biggest English ship afloat by crushing in her hull under water. The boat was duly launched, but on trial of the machinery being made the paddlewheel, though it revolved in air, would not move in the water, the machinery being not powerful enough. This, says Capt. Sueter, was apparently the only reason for de Son's failure, for his principles were distinctly sound, and he was certainly the first inventor of the mechanically propelled semi-submarine boat. After her failure de Son exhibited her for a trifle to any casual passer-by.



THE TORPEDO.

By Katharine Drayton Mayrant Simons, Jr.

Death, our mother, gave us her three gray gifts from the sea— (Cherish your birthright, Brothers!)—speed, cunning, and certainty. And mailed Mars, he blest us—but his blessing was most to me!

For the swift gun sometimes falters, sparing the foe afar, And the hid mine wastes destruction on the drag's decoying spar, But I am the wrath of the Furies' path—of the war god's avatar!

Mine is the brain of thinking steel man made to match his own, To guard and guide the death disks packed in the war head's hammered cone, To drive the cask of the thin air flask as the gyroscope has shown.

My brother, the gun, shrieks o'er the sea his curse from the covered deck, My brother, the mine, lies sullen-dumb, agape for the dreadnought's wreck, I glide on the breath of my mother, Death, and my goal is my only check!

More strong than the strength of armored ships is the firing pin's frail spark, More sure than the helm of the mighty fleet are my rudders to their mark, The faint foam fades from the bright screw blades—and I strike from the under dark!

Death, our mother, gave us her three gray gifts from the sea— (Cherish your birthright, Brothers!)—speed, cunning, and certainty. And mailed Mars, he blest us—but his blessing was most to me!



"God Punish England, Brother"

A New Hymn of Germany's Gospel of Hatred

[From Public Opinion, London, Feb. 5, 1915.]

The amazing outburst of hatred against England in Germany is responsible for a new form of greeting which has displaced the conventional formulas of salutation and farewell: "God punish England!" ("Gott strafe England!") is the form of address, to which the reply is: "May God punish her!" ("Gott moeg'es strafen!")

"This extraordinary formula," says The Mail, "which is now being used all over Germany, is celebrated in a set of verses by Herr Hochstetter in a recent number of the well-known German weekly, Lustige Blaetter. In its way this poem is as remarkable as Herr Ernst Lissauer's famous 'Hymn of Hate.'"

Among the prayers at Bruges Cathedral on the Kaiser's birthday was this German chant of hate, "God Punish England!"

A HYMN OF HATE.

Translated by

G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS.

This is the German greeting When men their fellows meet, The merchants in the market-place, The beggars in the street. A pledge of bitter enmity, Thus runs the winged word: "God punish England, brother!— Yea! Punish her, O Lord!"

With raucous voice, brass-throated, Our German shells shall bear This curse that is our greeting To the "cousin" in his lair. This be our German battle cry, The motto on our sword: "God punish England, brother!—Yea! Punish her, O Lord!"

By shell from sea, by bomb from air, Our greeting shall be sped, Making each English homestead A mansion of the dead. And even Grey will tremble As falls each iron word: "God punish England, brother!— Yea! Punish her, O Lord!"

This is the German greeting When men their fellows meet, The merchants in the market-place, The beggars in the street. A pledge of bitter enmity, Thus runs the winged word: "God punish England, brother!— Yea! Punish her, O Lord!"

"What German Lutheran pastors think of the gospel of hate that is at present being preached throughout the Fatherland may be judged from an article on the subject written for the Vossische Zeitung of Berlin, by Dr. Julius Schiller of Nuernberg, who describes himself as a royal Protestant pastor," says The Morning Post.

"Before the war, the pastor writes, it was considered immoral to hate; now, however, Germans know that they not only may, but they must hate. Herr Lissauer's 'Hymn of Hate' against England is, he declares, a faithful expression of the feelings cherished in the depths of the German soul.

"'All protests against this hate,' the pastor writes, 'fall on deaf ears; we strike down all hands that would avert it. We cannot do otherwise; we must hate the brood of liars. Our hate was provoked, and the German can hate more thoroughly than any one else. A feeling that this is the case is penetrating into England, but the fear of the German hate is as yet hidden. There is a grain of truth in Lord Curzon's statement that the phlegmatic temperament of his countrymen is incapable of hating as the Germans hate.

"'We Germans do, as a matter of fact, hate differently than the sons of Albion. We Germans hate honorably, for our hatred is based on right and justice. England, on the other hand, hates mendaciously, being impelled by envy, ill-will, and jealousy. It was high time that we tore the mask from England's face, that we finally saw England as she really is.

"'We hate with a clean conscience, although religion seems to condemn as unaesthetic everything that is included in the word hate.' The Pastor concludes by asserting that 'we, who are fighting for truth and right with clean hands and a clean conscience, must have Him on our side Who is stronger than the strongest battalions. Hence our courage and our confidence in a fortunate outcome of the world conflagration. The dawn will soon appear that announces that the "Day of Harvest" for Germany has broken.'"

"The avowal that the love of good Germans for Germany is inseparable from hatred of other countries shows how deeply the aggressiveness of German policy has sunk into the nation's mood," says The Times. "Only by constantly viewing their own country as in a natural state of challenge to all others can Germans have come to absorb the view that hatred is the normal manifestation of patriotism. It is a purely militarist conception.

"Hate is at bottom a slavish passion, and remote from that heroic spirit of the warrior with which the Germans represent themselves as facing a world in arms. The hater subjects his mind to the domination of what he hates; he loses his independence and volition and becomes the prey of the hated idea. At last he cannot free his mind from the obsession; and the deliberate cultivation of hate in the conscientious German manner is a kind of mental suicide."



THE GREAT HOUR.

By HERMANN SUDERMANN.

Whether, O Father in Heaven, we still put our trust in You, Whether You are but a dream of a sacred past, See now, we swear to You, Witness of Truth, Not we have wanted it— This murder, this world-ending murder— Which now, with blood-hot sighs, Stamps o'er the shuddering earth. True to the earth, the bread-giving earth, Happy and cheery in business and trade, Peaceful we sat in the oak tree's shade, Peaceful, Though we were born to the sword.

Circled around us, for ever and ever, Greed, sick with envy, and nets lifted high, Full of inherited hatred. Every one saw it, and every one felt The secret venom, gushing forth, Year after year, Heavy and breath-bated years. But hearts did not quiver Nor hands draw the sword.

And then it came, the hour Of sacred need, of pregnant Fate, And what it brings forth, we will shape, The brown gun in our mastering hand.

Ye mothers, what ye once have borne, In honor or in vice, Bring forth to every sacred shrine— Your country's sacrifice.

Ye brides, whom future happiness, Once kissed—it but seemed true, Bring back to fair Germania What she has given you.

Ye women, in silks or in linen, Offer your husbands now. Bid them goodbye, with your children, With smiles and a blessing vow.

Ye all are doomed to lie sleepless, Many a desolate night, And dream of approaching conquests And of your hero's might.

And dream of laurel and myrtle, Until he shall return, Till he, your master and shepherd, Shall make the old joys burn.

And if he fell on the Autumn heath And fell deep into death, He died for Germania's greatness, He died for Germania's breath.

The Fatherland they shall let stand, Upon his blood-soaked loam, And ne'er again shall they approach Our sacred, peaceful home.

—Translated by Herman J. Mankiewicz.



The Peace of the World

A Famous Englishman's Diagnosis of the War Disease and His Prescription for a Permanent Cure

By H.G. Wells

(COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY.)

(Copyrighted in Great Britain and Ireland.)

I.

Probably there have never been before in the whole past of mankind so many people convinced of the dreadfulness of war, nor so large a proportion anxious to end war, to rearrange the world's affairs so that this huge hideousness of hardship, suffering, destruction, and killing that still continues in Europe may never again be repeated.

The present writer is one of this great majority. He wants as far as possible to end war altogether, and contrive things so that when any unavoidable outbreak does occur it may be as little cruel and mischievous as it can be.

But it is one thing to desire a thing and another thing to get it. It does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost universal that it will be realized. There may be faults in ourselves, unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to defeat our superficial sentiments. There must be not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries of peace.

No apology is needed, therefore, for a discussion of the way in which peace may be organized and established out of the settlement of this war. I am going to set out and estimate as carefully as I can the forces that make for a peace organization and the forces that make for war. I am going to do my best to diagnose the war disorder. I want to find out first for my own guidance, and then with a view to my co-operation with other people, what has to be done to prevent the continuation and recrudescence of warfare.

Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world pacification. So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also setting to work upon it. It is a research. It is a research exactly like a scientific exploration. Each of us will probably get out a lot of truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and the errors will confute and disperse each other. But it is clear that there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road the peace-desiring multitude must follow.

Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence, a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden at Cocos Island.

I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing blows delivered by the guns of the Australian. There is a sensation of greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not; the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control that. And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep in mind the other side of the realities of war.

As my own corrective I have at hand certain letters from a very able woman doctor who returned last week from Calais. Lockjaw, gangrene, men tied with filthy rags and lying bitterly cold in coaly sheds; men unwounded, but so broken by the chill horrors of the Yser trenches as to be near demented—such things make the substance of her picture. One young officer talked to her rather dryly of the operations, of the ruined towns and villages, of the stench of dead men and horses, of the losses and wounds and mutilations among his men, of the list of pals he had lost. "Suddenly he began to cry. He broke down just like an overtaxed child. And he could not stop crying. He cried and cried, and I could do nothing to help him." He was a strong man and a brave man, and to that three months of war had brought him.

And then this again:

There were a fair number of Belgian doctors, but no nurses except the usual untrained French girls, almost no equipment, and no place for clean surgery. We heard of a house containing sixty-one men with no doctor or nurses—several died without having received any medical aid at all. Mrs. —— and I even on the following Wednesday found four men lying on straw in a shop with leg and foot wounds who had not been dressed since Friday and had never been seen by a doctor. In addition there were hundreds and hundreds of wounded who could walk trying to find shelter in some corner, besides the many unwounded French and Belgian soldiers quartered in the town.

As if this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but French. It appears that both English and French armies have to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting area—partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve. They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.

That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not believe that their sodden figures were real. They were dematerialized by misery in some odd way.

Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all the week, and was going on when we left.

Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort.

Let us consider first, then, the forces that are directly opposed to the pacification of the world, the forces that will work openly and definitely for the preservation of war as a human condition. And it has to be remembered that the forces that are for a thing are almost always more unified, more concentrated and effective than the forces that are against it. We who are against war and want to stop it are against it for a great multitude of reasons. There are other things in life that we prefer, and war stops these other things. Some of us want to pursue art, some want to live industrious lives in town or country, some would pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and austerity.

But we all agree in fixing our minds upon something else than war. And since we fix our minds on other things, war becomes possible and probable through our general inattention. We do not observe it, and meanwhile the people who really care for war and soldiering fix their minds upon it. They scheme how it shall be done, they scheme to bring it about. Then we discover suddenly—as the art and social development, the industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered—that everything must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game. And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.

The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.

You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living.

The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces" comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the world.

This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.

Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the vituperation of the Hebrew prophets—those models for infinite mischief.

The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees. We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance, and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real strength in our occasional complicities.

The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes," of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.

Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern, self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.

And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.

The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist better than a pothouse fool.

Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Vise who went out with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of invasion that trampled down their fields.

Or war to aid such defensive war.

II.

But the people who positively admire and advocate and want war for its own sake are only a small, feverish minority of mankind. The greater obstacle to the pacification of the world is not the war-seeker, but the vast masses of people who for the most various motives support and maintain all kinds of institutions and separations that make for war. They do not want war, they do not like war, but they will not make sacrifices, they will not exert themselves in any way to make war difficult or impossible.

It is they who give the war maniac his opportunity. They will not lock the gun away from him, they will not put a reasonable limit to the disputes into which he can ultimately thrust his violent substitute for a solution. They are like the people who dread and detest yellow fever, but oppose that putting of petrol on the ponds which is necessary to prevent it because of the injury to the water flowers.

Now, it is necessary, if we are to have an intelligently directed anti-war campaign, that we should make a clear, sound classification of these half-hearted people, these people who do not want war, but who permit it. Their indecisions, their vagueness, these are the really effective barriers to our desire to end war forever.

And first, there is one thing very obvious, and that is the necessity for some controlling world authority if treaties are to be respected and war abolished. While there are numerous sovereign States in the world each absolutely free to do what it chooses, to arm its people or repudiate engagements, there can be no sure peace. But great multitudes of those who sincerely desire peace forever cannot realize this. There are, for example, many old-fashioned English liberals who denounce militarism and "treaty entanglements" with equal ardor; they want Britain to stand alone, unaggressive, but free; not realizing that such an isolation is the surest encouragement to any war-enamored power. Exactly the same type is to be found in the United States, and is probably even more influential there. But only by so spinning a web of treaties that all countries are linked by general obligations to mutual protection can a real world-pacification be achieved.

The present alliance against the insufferable militarism of Germany may very probably be the precursor of a much wider alliance against any aggression whatever in the future. Only through some such arrangement is there any reasonable hope of a control and cessation of that constant international bickering and pressure, that rivalry in finance, that competition for influence in weak neutral countries, which has initiated all the struggles of the last century, and which is bound to accumulate tensions for fresh wars so long as it goes on.

Already several States, and particularly the Government of the United States of America, have signed treaties of arbitration, and The Hague Tribunal spins a first web of obligations, exemplary if gossamer, between the countries of the world. But these are but the faint initial suggestions of much greater possibilities, and it is these greater possibilities that have now to be realized if all the talk we have had about a war to end war is to bear any fruit. What is now with each week of the present struggle becoming more practicable is the setting up of a new assembly that will take the place of the various embassies and diplomatic organizations, of a mediaeval pattern and tradition, which have hitherto conducted international affairs.

This war must end in a public settlement, to which all of the belligerents will set their hands; it will not be a bundle of treaties, but one treaty binding eight or nine or more powers. This settlement will almost certainly be attained at a conference of representatives of the various Foreign Offices involved. Quite possibly interested neutral powers will also send representatives. There is no reason whatever why this conference should dissolve, why it should not become a permanent conference upon the inter-relations of the participating powers and the maintenance of the peace of the world. It could have a seat and officials, a staff, and a revenue of its own; it could sit and debate openly, publish the generally binding treaties between its constituent powers, and claim for the support of its decisions their military and naval resources.

The predominance of the greater powers could be secured either by the representatives having multiple votes, according to the population represented, or by some sort of proportional representation. Each power could appoint its representatives through its Foreign Office or by whatever other means it thought fit. They could as conveniently be elected by a legislature or a nation. And such a body would not only be of enormous authority in the statement, interpretation, and enforcement of treaties, but it could also discharge a hundred useful functions in relation to world hygiene, international trade and travel, the control of the ocean, the exploration and conservation of the world's supplies of raw material and food supply. It would be, in fact, a World Council.

Today this is an entirely practicable and hopeful proposal if only we can overcome the opposition of those who cling to the belief that it is possible for a country to be at the same time entirely pacific and entirely unresponsible to and detached from the rest of mankind.

Given such a body, such a great alliance of world powers, much else in the direction of world pacification becomes possible. Without it we may perhaps expect a certain benefit from the improved good feeling of mankind and the salutary overthrow of the German military culture, but we cannot hope for any real organized establishment of peace.

I believe that a powerful support for the assembly and continuance of such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar, unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his reign, the warm accordance of educated China and Japan, and the good will of a renascent Germany. It would open a new era for mankind.

III.

Now, this idea of a congress of the belligerents to arrange the peace settlements after this war, expanding by the accession of neutral powers into a permanent world congress for the enforcement of international law and the maintenance of the peace of mankind, is so reasonable and attractive and desirable that if it were properly explained it would probably receive the support of nineteen out of every twenty intelligent persons.

Nevertheless, its realization is, on the whole, improbable. A mere universal disgust with war is no more likely to end war than the universal dislike for dying has ended death. And though war, unlike dying, seems to be an avoidable fate, it does not follow that its present extreme unpopularity will end it unless people not only desire but see to the accomplishment of their desire.

And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future management of international relations through a world congress, the whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.

For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people, for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war.

All men get set in a way of living, and it is as little in human nature to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.

In the question of the possible abolition of the present diplomatic system, just as in the case of the possible abolition of war, while on the side for abolition there must be a hugely preponderating interest and a hugely preponderating majority, it is, nevertheless, a dispersed interest and an unorganized, miscellaneous majority. The minority is, on the other hand, compact, more intensively and more immediately interested and able to resist such great changes with a maximum of efficiency. There is a tremendous need, therefore, for a world congress organization propaganda if this advantageously posted minority is to be overcome.

And from such countries as the American States in particular, and from the small liberal neutrals in Europe, whose diplomacy is least developed and least influential, liberal-minded people through the world are most disposed to expect, and do expect, a lead in this particular matter. The liberal forces in Britain, France, and Russia are extraordinarily embarrassed and enslaved by the vast belligerent necessities into which their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.

No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of international ambitions, the world might have been saved this catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this. The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which fresh mischief may fester for our children.

Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.

Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective meeting.

This has now become a possible way of doing the world's business because of the development of the means of communication and information. The embassy in a foreign country, as a watching, remonstrating, proposing extension of its country of origin, a sort of eye and finger at the heart of the host country, is now clumsy, unnecessary, inefficient, and dangerous. For most routine work, for reports of all sorts, for legal action, and so forth, on behalf of traveling nationals, the consular service is adequate, or can easily be made adequate. What remains of the ambassadorial apparatus might very well merge with the consular system and the embassy become an international court civility, a ceremonial vestige without any diplomatic value at all.

IV.

Given a permanent world congress developed out of the congress of settlement between the belligerents, a world alliance, with as a last resort a call upon the forces of the associated powers, for dealing with recalcitrants, then a great number of possibilities open out to humanity that must otherwise remain inaccessible. But before we go on to consider these it may be wise to point out how much more likely a world congress is to effect a satisfactory settlement at the end of this war than a congress confined to the belligerents.

The war has progressed sufficiently to convince every one that there is now no possibility of an overwhelming victory for Germany. It must end in a more or less complete defeat of the German and Turkish alliance, and in a considerable readjustment of Austrian and Turkish boundaries. Assisted by the generosity of the doomed Austrians and Turks, the Germans are fighting now to secure a voice as large as possible in the final settlement, and it is conceivable that in the end that settlement may be made quite an attractive one for Germany proper by the crowning sacrifice of suicide on the part of her two subordinated allies.

There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in which militant imperialism can survive at all.

The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression, becoming constitutional and democratic—the alternative, that is to say, of a great liberal Germany—is one that will be as distasteful almost to the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.

At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really represented at all. The Prussian militarist empire will still be in existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own survival. Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular sanctions—a thing they are very unlikely to demand—that is what "Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East; aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own Chancelleries.

It is just here that the value of neutral participation will come in. Whatever ambitions the neutral powers may have of their own, it may be said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor States are equally concerned in securing a settlement that shall settle.

And moreover, so wide reaching now are all international agreements that they have not only a claim to intervene juridically, but they have the much more pressing claim to participate on the ground that no sort of readjustment of Europe, Western Asia, and Africa can leave their own futures unaffected. They are wanted not only in the interests of the belligerent peoples, but for their own sakes and the welfare of the world all together.

V.

Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and monstrosity of war.

In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead—of the western Allies, at any rate—have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.

Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.

The increased dreadfulness of war due to modern weapons is, however, only one consequence of their development. The practicability of aggressive war in settled countries now is entirely dependent on the use of elaborate artillery on land and warships at sea. Were there only rifles in the world, were an ordinary rifle the largest kind of gun permitted, and were ships specifically made for war not so made, then it would be impossible to invade any country defended by a patriotic and spirited population with any hopes of success because of the enormous defensive capacity of entrenched riflemen not subjected to an unhampered artillery attack.

Modern war is entirely dependent upon equipment of the most costly and elaborate sort. A general agreement to reduce that equipment would not only greatly minimize the evil of any war that did break out, but it would go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be greatly facilitated.

And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey, Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons. It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.

But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to smithereens.

At the risk of being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted great numbers of investors and financial people. It is perhaps the most powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns, to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.

From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy. It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers. Russia, with her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the value of machinery and so enhanced that of men. Beyond this and certain American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade. The problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.

It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.

Now none of this really involves the abandonment of armies or uniforms or national service. Indeed, to a certain extent it restores the importance of the soldier at the expense of machinery. A world conference for the suppressing of the peace and the preservation of armaments would neither interfere with such dear incorrigible squabbles as that of the orange and green factions in Ireland, (though it might deprive them of their more deadly weapons,) nor absolutely prohibit war between adjacent States. It would, however, be a very powerful delaying force against the outbreak of war, and it would be able to insist with a quite novel strength upon the observation of the rules of war.

It is no good pretending that mere pacifism will end war; what will end war, what, indeed, may be ending war at the present time, is war—against militarism. Force respects itself and no other power. The hope for a world of peace in the future lies in that, in the possibility of a great alliance, so powerful that it will compel adhesions, an alliance prepared to make war upon and destroy and replace the Government of any State that became aggressive in its militarism. This alliance will be in effect a world congress perpetually restraining aggressive secession, and obviously it must regard all the No-Man's Lands—and particularly that wild waste, the ocean—as its highway. The fleets and marines of the allied world powers must become the police of the wastes and waters of the earth.

VI.

Now, such a collective control of belligerence and international relations is the obvious common sense settlement of the present world conflict, it is so manifest, so straight-forward that were it put plainly to them it would probably receive the assent of nineteen sane men out of twenty in the world. This, or some such thing as this, they would agree, is far better than isolations and the perpetual threat of fresh warfare.

But against it there work forces, within these people and without, that render the attainment of this generally acceptable solution far less probable than a kind of no-solution that will only be a reopening of all our hostilities and conflicts upon a fresh footing. Some of these forces are vague and general, and can only be combated by a various and abundant liberal literature, in a widely dispersed battle in which each right-thinking man must do as his conscience directs him. There are the vague national antagonisms, the reservations in favor of one's own country's righteousness, harsh religious and social and moral cant of the Carlyle type, greed, resentment, and suspicion. The greatest of these vague oppositions is that want of faith which makes man say war has always been and must always be, which makes them prophesy that whatever we do will become corrupted and evil, even in the face of intolerable present evils and corruptions.

When at the outbreak of the war I published an article headed "The War That Will End War," at once Mr. W.L. George hastened to reprove my dreaming impracticability. "War there has always been." Great is the magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a motor car—namely, that they may all be the means of death.

If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America, it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr. George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the great task of settlement before the world.

It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who render possible the continuation of war dangers. They give scope for the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war and more. And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands. "What do we know about the nuance of such things?" they will ask, with that laziness that apes modesty. It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out the armaments people. Probably all the private armament firms in the world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers will shake their heads and say: "Then there will only be something else instead."

Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater settlement. Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile. Russia is a land of strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the Wilhelm-Napoleon pattern. He began his reign, and he may yet crown his reign, with an attempt to establish peace on a newer, broader foundation. His religion, it would seem, is his master and not his servant. There has been no Russian Bernhardi.

And there has been much in America, much said and much done, since the war broke out that has surprised the world. I may confess for myself, and I believe that I shall speak for many other Europeans in this matter, that what we feared most in the United States was levity. We expected mere excitement, violent fluctuations of opinion, a confused irresponsibility, and possibly mischievous and disastrous interventions. It is no good hiding an open secret. We judged America by the peace headline. It is time we began to offer our apologies to America and democracy. The result of reading endless various American newspapers and articles, of following the actions of the American Government, of talking to representative Americans, is to realize the existence of a very clear, strong national mentality, a firm, self-controlled, collective will, far more considerable in its totality than the world has ever seen before.

We thought the United States would be sentimentally patriotic and irresponsible, that they would behave as though the New World was, indeed, a separate planet, and as though they had neither duties nor brotherhood in Europe. It is quite clear, on the contrary, that the people of the United States consider this war as their affair also, and that they have the keenest sense of their responsibility for the general welfare of mankind.

So that as a second chance, after the possibility of a broad handling of the settlement by the Czar, and as a very much bigger probability, is the insistence by America upon her right to a voice in the ultimate settlement and an initiative from the Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress like a family solicitor among the Gods. What is the good of shamming about this least heroic of Fatherlands? But Britain would follow a lead; the family solicitor is honest and well-meaning. France and Belgium and Italy are too deeply in the affair, or without sufficient moral prestige, for a revolutionary initiative in international relationship.

There is, however, a possible third source from which the proposal for a world congress might come, with the support of both neutrals and belligerents, and that is The Hague. Were there a man of force and genius at The Hague now, a man speaking with authority and not as the scribes, he might thrust enormous benefits upon the world.

It is from these three sources that I most hope for leading now. Of the new Pope and his influence I know nothing. But in the present situation of the world's affairs it behooves us ill to wait idle until leaders clear the way for us. Every man who realizes the broad conditions of the situation, every one who can talk or write or echo, can do his utmost to spread his realization of the possibilities of a world congress and the establishment of world law and world peace that lie behind the monstrous agonies and cruelties and confusions of this catastrophic year. Given an immense body of opinion initiatives may break out effectively anywhere; failing it, they will be fruitless everywhere.



SMALL BUT GREAT-SOULED.

By EMMELINE PANKHURST.

[From King Albert's Book.]

The women of Great Britain will never forget what Belgium has done for all that women hold most dear.

In the days to come mothers will tell their children how a small but great-souled nation fought to the death against overwhelming odds and sacrificed all things to save the world from an intolerable tyranny.

The story of the Belgian people's defense of freedom will inspire countless generations yet unborn.



Zeppelin Raids on London

By the Naval Correspondent of The London Times

[From The London Times, Jan. 22, 1915.]

Some doubt has been thrown by correspondents upon the ability of the Zeppelins to reach London from Cuxhaven, the place from which the raiders of Tuesday night appear to have started. The distance which the airships traveled, including their manoeuvres over the land, must have been quite 650 miles. This is not nearly as far as similar airships have traveled in the past. One of the Zeppelins flew from Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance, to Berlin, a continuous flight of about 1,000 miles, in thirty-one hours. Our naval officers will also recall the occasion of the visit of the First Cruiser Squadron to Copenhagen in September, 1912, when the German passenger airship Hansa was present. The Hansa made the run from Hamburg to Copenhagen, a distance of 198 miles, in seven hours, and Count Zeppelin was on board her. Supposing an airship left Cuxhaven at noon on some day when the conditions were favorable and traveled to London, she could not get back again by noon next day if she traveled at the half-power speed which the vessels on Tuesday appear to have used. But if she did the run at full speed—that is to say, at about fifty miles an hour—she could reach London by 9 o'clock the same evening, have an hour to manoeuvre over the capital, and return by 7 o'clock next morning. With a favorable wind for her return journey, she might make an even longer stay. Given suitable conditions, therefore, as on Tuesday, there appears to be no reason why, as far as speed and fuel endurance are concerned, these vessels should not reach London from Cuxhaven.

With regard also to the amount of ammunition a Zeppelin can carry, this depends, of course, on the lifting power of the airship and the way in which it is distributed. The later Zeppelins are said to be able to carry a load of about 15,000 pounds, which is available for the crew, fuel for the engines, ballast, provisions, and spare stores, a wireless installation, and armament or ammunition. With engines of 500 horse power, something like 360 pounds of fuel is used per hour to drive them at full speed. Thus for a journey of twenty hours the vessel would need at least 7200 pounds of fuel. The necessary crew would absorb 2000 pounds more, and probably another 1500 pounds would be taken up for ballast and stores. Allowing a weight of 250 pounds for the wireless equipment, there would remain about 4000 pounds for bombs, or something less than two tons of explosives, for use against a target 458 miles from the base. This amount of ammunition could be increased proportionately as the conditions were altered by using a nearer base, or by proceeding at a slower and therefore more economical speed, &c.

It is noteworthy that although the German airships were expected to act as scouts in the North Sea they do not appear to have accomplished anything in this direction. Possibly this has been due to the fear of attack by our men-of-war or aircraft if the movements were made in daytime, when alone they would be useful for this purpose. What happened during the Christmas Day affair, when, as the official report said, "a novel combat" ensued between the most modern cruisers on the one hand and the enemy's aircraft and submarines on the other, would not tend to lessen this apprehension. On the other hand, the greater stability of the atmosphere at night makes navigation after dark easier, and I believe that it has been usual in all countries for airships to make their trial trips at night.

[Illustration: Radius of Action of a Modern Zeppelin

The above outline map, which we reproduce from "The Naval Annual," shows in the dotted circle the comparative radius of action of a modern Zeppelin at half-power—about 36 knots speed—with other types of air machines, assuming her to be based on Cologne. It is estimated that aircraft of this type, with a displacement of about 22 tons, could run for 60 hours at half-speed, and cover a distance equivalent to about 2160 sea miles. This would represent the double voyage, out and home, from Cologne well to the north of the British Isles, to Petrograd, to Athens, or to Lisbon. The inner circle shows the radius of action of a Parseval airship at half-power—about 30 knots—based on Farnborough, and the small inner circle represents the radius of action of a hydro-aeroplane based on the Medway.]

It is customary also for the airships to carry, in addition to explosive and incendiary bombs, others which on being dropped throw out a light and thereby help to indicate to the vessel above the object which it is desired to aim at. Probably some of the bombs which were thrown in Norfolk were of this character. It is understood that all idea of carrying an armament on top of the Zeppelins has now been abandoned, and it is obvious that if searchlight equipment or guns of any sort were carried the useful weight for bombs would have to be reduced unless the range of action was diminished. It will have been noticed that the Zeppelins which came on Tuesday appear to have been anxious to get back before daylight, which looks as if they expected to be attacked if they were seen, as it is fairly certain they would have been.

Assuming the raid of Tuesday to have been in the nature of a trial trip, it is rather curious that it was not made before. Apparently the Zeppelins can only trust themselves to make a raid of this description in very favorable circumstances. Strong winds, heavy rain, or even a damp atmosphere are all hindrances to be considered. That there will be more raids is fairly certain, but there cannot be many nights when the Germans can hope to have a repetition of the conditions of weather and darkness which prevailed this week. It should be possible, more or less, to ascertain the nights in every month in which, given other suitable circumstances, raids are likely to be made. In view of the probability that the attacks made by British aviators on the Zeppelin bases at Duesseldorf and Friedrichshafen caused a delay in the German plans for making this week's attack, it would appear that the most effective antidote would be a repetition of such legitimate operations.



JULIUS CAESAR ON THE AISNE

[From The New Yorker Herold (Morgenblatt.)]

It has repeatedly been pointed out that 2000 years ago Julius Caesar fought on the battlegrounds of the Aisne, which are now the location of the fierce fighting between the Germans and the French. It is probably less known, however, that in this present war Caesar's "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" are used by French officers as a practical text book on strategy. The war correspondent of the Corriere della Serra reports this some what astonishing fact.

A few weeks ago he visited his friend, a commanding Colonel of a French regiment, in his trench, which was furnished with bare necessities only. In a corner on a small table lay the open volume of "Commentarii Caesaris," which the visitor took into his hand out of curiosity in order to see what passage the Colonel had just been reading. There he found the description of the fight against the Remer, who, at that time, lived in the neighborhood of the present city of Rheims. Principally with the aid of his Numidian troops, Caesar at that time had prevented the Remer from crossing the River Axona, today called the Aisne.

Caesar's camp was only a few kilometers from Berry-au-Bac, in the vicinity of Pontavert, the headquarters of the division to which the regiment of the Colonel belonged. This Colonel had received the order to cross the River Aisne with Moroccans and Spahis, and for this purpose he had studied the description of Caesar. To the astonished question of the reporter, what made him occupy his mind with the study of Caesar, the Frenchman replied:

"Caesar's battle descriptions form a book from which even in this present day war a great deal may be learned. Caesar is by no means as obsolete as you seem to think. I ask you to consider, for instance, that the trenches which have gained so much importance in this war date back to Julius Caesar."



Sir John French's Own Story

Continuing the Famous Dispatches of the British Commander in Chief to Lord Kitchener

The previous dispatches, reviewing the operations of the British regular and territorial troops on the Continent under Field Marshal French's chief command, appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES CURRENT HISTORY of Jan. 23, 1915, bringing the account of operations to Nov. 20, 1914. The official dispatch to Earl Kitchener presented below records the bitter experiences of the Winter in the trenches from the last week of November until Feb. 2, 1915.

The following dispatch was received on Feb. 12, 1915, from the Field Marshal Commanding in Chief, the British Army in the Field.

To the Secretary of State for War, War Office, London, S.W.

General Headquarters,

Feb. 2, 1915.

My Lord: I have the honor to forward a further report on the operations of the army under my command.

1. In the period under review the salient feature was the presence of his Majesty the King in the field. His Majesty arrived at Headquarters on Nov. 30 and left on Dec. 5.

At a time when the strength and endurance of the troops had been tried to the utmost throughout the long and arduous battle of Ypres-Armentieres the presence of his Majesty in their midst was of the greatest possible help and encouragement.

His Majesty visited all parts of the extensive area of operations and held numerous inspections of the troops behind the line of trenches.

On Nov. 16 Lieutenant his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, K.G., Grenadier Guards, joined my staff as aide de camp.

2. Since the date of my last report the operations of the army under my command have been subject almost entirely to the limitations of weather.

History teaches us that the course of campaigns in Europe, which have been actively prosecuted during the months of December and January, have been largely influenced by weather conditions. It should, however, be thoroughly understood throughout the country that the most recent development of armaments and the latest methods of conducting warfare have added greatly to the difficulties and drawbacks of a vigorous Winter campaign.

To cause anything more than a waste of ammunition long-range artillery fire requires constant and accurate observation; but this most necessary condition is rendered impossible of attainment in the midst of continual fog and mist.

Again, armies have now grown accustomed to rely largely on aircraft reconnoissance for accurate information of the enemy, but the effective performance of this service is materially influenced by wind and weather.

The deadly accuracy, range, and quick-firing capabilities of the modern rifle and machine gun require that a fire-swept zone be crossed in the shortest possible space of time by attacking troops. But if men are detained under the enemy's fire by the difficulty of emerging from a water-logged trench, and by the necessity of passing over ground knee-deep in holding mud and slush, such attacks become practically prohibitive owing to the losses they entail.

During the exigencies of the heavy fighting which ended in the last week of November the French and British forces had become somewhat mixed up, entailing a certain amount of difficulty in matters of supply and in securing unity of command.

By the end of November I was able to concentrate the army under my command in one area, and, by holding a shorter line, to establish effective reserves.

By the beginning of December there was a considerable falling off in the volume of artillery fire directed against our front by the enemy. Reconnoissance and reports showed that a certain amount of artillery had been withdrawn. We judged that the cavalry in our front, with the exception of one division of the Guard, had disappeared.

There did not, however, appear to have been any great diminution in the numbers of infantry holding the trenches.

3. Although both artillery and rifle fire were exchanged with the enemy every day, and sniping went on more or less continuously during the hours of daylight, the operations which call for special record or comment are comparatively few.

During the last week in November some successful minor night operations were carried out in the Fourth Corps.

On the night of Nov. 23-24 a small party of the Second Lincolnshire Regiment, under Lieut. E.H. Impey, cleared three of the enemy's advanced trenches opposite the Twenty-fifth Brigade, and withdrew without loss.

On the night of the 24th-25th Capt. J.R. Minshull Ford, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and Lieut. E.L. Morris, Royal Engineers, with fifteen men of the Royal Engineers and Royal Welsh Fusiliers, successfully mined and blew up a group of farms immediately in front of the German trenches on the Touquet-Bridoux Road which had been used by German snipers.

On the night of Nov. 26-27 a small party of the Second Scots Guards, under Lieut. Sir E.H.W. Hulse, Bart., rushed the trenches opposite the Twentieth Brigade, and after pouring a heavy fire into them returned with useful information as to the strength of the Germans and the position of machine guns.

The trenches opposite the Twenty-fifth Brigade were rushed the same night by a patrol of the Second Rifle Brigade, under Lieut. E. Durham.

On Nov. 23 the One Hundred and Twelfth Regiment of the Fourteenth German Army Corps succeeded in capturing some 800 yards of the trenches held by the Indian Corps, but the general officer commanding the Meerut Division organized a powerful counter-attack, which lasted throughout the night. At daybreak on Nov. 24 the line was entirely re-established.

The operation was a costly one, involving many casualties, but the enemy suffered far more heavily.

We captured over 100 prisoners, including 3 officers, as well as 3 machine guns and two trench mortars.

On Dec. 7 the concentration of the Indian Corps was completed by the arrival of the Sirhind Brigade from Egypt.

On Dec. 9 the enemy attempted to commence a strong attack against the Third Corps, particularly in front of the trenches held by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Middlesex Regiment.