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OT long ago a conference of representatives of the Social Democrats of all the Balkan States was held in Bucharest. In brotherly agreement, though debating with great animation, they defined the best plan for development among their nations. Among the Balkan peoples, they affirmed, there is no enmity. They have no reason for war among themselves, except those furnished them by the treacherous politics of the classes who try to make the Governments extend their boundaries over the land of their neighbors. And even this only occurs through the submission of the Balkans to the shameful yoke of the great European plunderers. This is the true voice of the conscious proletarians of the Balkan States.

Bulgaria betrayed unhappy Serbia with hellish cold-bloodedness. But at the same time she betrayed her own national weakness: the inability to resist the greedy appetite of the great plunderers. The Balkan Social Democrats had that in mind when they said that the politics of the dominating classes was treacherous. Did the Bulgarian Nation do this? Does it sympathize with the politics of treason? Once for all-no. The power of the King and that of the reigning party of the capitalists are responsible. It is quite consistent for the desires of the capitalists of Bulgaria, making for economic superiority, to be so in harmony with the plans of King Ferdinand, who dreams of ruling the Balkan Peninsula. The small nations will not be able to resist their destruction, as the selfish aims of the dominating classes separate them into hostile camps. It is the rivalry of these nations (which should be allies) which throws them together like cats in a bag to destroy one another.

In this darkness there is only one possible ray of light: proletarian self-consciousness. Between the persecuted, between victims, there can be no enmity. The proletarians of the Balkans said so on the very eve of the war.

between the population of the German Empire and that of the United Kingdom with the Overseas Dominions, the German losses are about eight times as large as the British. It is impossible

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to believe that these frightful losses are not having a terrifying effect upon the mind of the German people. They are learning in blood and in tears that war is bad business. In addition to the loss of 3,000,000 men and the destruction of her Colonial Empire Germany has pretty well used up the war material accumulated during the past forty years. has added already £1,000,000,000 to her national debt. She has aroused against her the active and abiding hatred, so far as this generation is concerned, of nearly one-third of the people of the world. This hatred is certain to find expression in the restriction of future trade with Germany. Above all, the central powers, after making all these sacrifices and incurring such frightful losses, have not been able to obtain a decision in any theatre of the war, and they find ringed around their frontiers many millions more armed men and better equipped men than they had to contend with at the end of the first month of the war.

The prolongation of the war through another Winter will destroy Prussian militarism. Germany's supplies of raw materials for her manufactures are approaching exhaustion at the same time

Power. Russia

*France

that her supplies of certain indispensable war materials are running out. Her reserves of men of military age are also within sight of exhaustion. When the facts of the situation are realized by the great mass of the German people the whole economic fabric, which is based upon belief in the success of German arms, will collapse, the war spirit of the German people will be broken, and there will be an economic upheaval in Germany such as the world has never witnessed.

The rulers of Germany are not fools. They recognize the danger of her position. They are past masters of the game of “bluff," and they are trying to "bluff" the world. They know that it would be against the interest of "High Finance" that Germany should be crushed, because many profitable channels of intercourse between the different countries of the world would be eliminated. For these reasons I am convinced that "High Finance" will exert all its influence to prevent Germany from being completely crushed.

In order to show the suffering and destruction which Prussian militarism has already brought upon the world I have prepared the two following tables. The first shows the estimated number of killed, wounded, and missing, including prisoners, in the first twelve months of the war, and the second table shows the losses and destruction in terms of money during the same period:

†Great Britain Belgium

Serbia

Italy

Total for Allies..

.1,480,713

2,768,994

1,443,188

1915.*

of Govern

Destruction of

Capitalized Value of

1915.

In twelve months Prussian militarism has caused the death or maiming of nearly 9,000,000 of men and the destruction of about £10,000,000,000 ($50,000,000,000) of the world's wealth. If Germany had been the winner of this war she would have known how to make the losers pay. The question which it is very much in the power of the British people to decide is whether Germany is to be punished or whether she is to be allowed to escape the penalty of her crime against the world because her punishment cannot be accomplished without inflicting further enormous losses upon

certain great financial interests. It is our duty to sweep aside all influences and considerations which stand in the way of the destruction of Prussian militarism. At an immense cost we have transformed our industrial organization from a commercial basis to a war basis, and we are only just beginning to reap the full benefit of this tremendous effort.

Our greatest danger now is that we may allow ourselves to be "bluffed " into a premature and inconclusive peace. We hold the winning position, and all we have to do is to stand fast with our allies.

IF

F I were to attempt anything like a formal account of the first year of the war, the subject would naturally fall apart into campaigns and "phases," bounded by dates of day and month more or less precise. It would be the campaign in the west and the campaign in the east, the war in Belgium, the invasion of France, the battle of the Marne, the Russians in East Prussia, the Russians in Galicia, the Germans before Warsaw, the Germans across the Vistula, and so on, in orderly textbook fashion. But when I think back upon the past

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months as a man and not as a war expert, the chronicle does not present itself as a succession of events and phases, but as a succession of moods and states of mind. The record I most clearly visualize is less of what was going on in Europe than of what was going on in me, and millions like myself, in reaction to the news from the battlefields and the capitals. It is a record of what people in this neutral country thought and talked about, the fluctuation of their hopes and fears, their pities and indignations, their speculations of the world-issues at stake, and their

wagers as to whether the war would end before November, 1916. For a review of this kind, maps and charts, names and dates, are of little help, though the concrete event and time underlie, of course, what may be called the psychic chronicle of the war. Such a psychic record, too, falls apart into phases and movements, but they are not always chronologically definable.

The first of the mental periods we lived through was the period of Belgian achievement as distinguished from the period of Belgian suffering. To the extent that chronology can bound a psychological state this phase ran for something like four weeks, from the first gun at Liége to Cambrai and St. Quentin. It was a time when men's hearts glowed with the vision of righteousness apparently prevailing against might, and of the unconquerable soul of man. During the first three weeks of August, it seemed as if David and Goliath had returned and the colossus of Europe had been shattered by a pigmy. * * *

There followed a period of severe psychic reaction which I think of as the Sayville or von Kluck period. After four weeks of isolation, Germany was in touch with her wireless towers on Long Island, and the first news she gave to the world was that force, after all, was having its own way against righteousness. Already we knew that Brussels had fallen, but that, we said, was largely for strategic reasons, or, at worst, because of a delay in the approach of French and British reinforcements. We had some hint, too, that the French were not doing as well as they should have done, measured by Belgium's showing, but we were not yet adept in translating the official language of the dispatches, with their vague regroupings and retirements and their confused geography.

Then, in the last days of August, Germany, by way of Sayville, announces victory on every hand-victory in Alsace, in Lorraine, in Belgian Luxemburg, victory at Charleroi, and at Mons. iron ring is drawing tight around France, and von Kluck shoots up in the headlines. For two weeks after that the world re

The

I think of the period which followed as the Time-against-Germany period. By this time people were aware that the work of von Moltke and Bismarck was not undone, that the German Army was what forty-five years of preparation should have made it, that the Germans were apparently winning. Only they were not winning fast enough. Time ran against the Kaiser, and we spoke of the Russian steam-roller. The Russian steamroller came to grief in the mud of the Masurian Lakes; and, after a painful process of extrication, started lumbering back to the Niemen. But just then came the battle of the Marne, and in a trice we were again portioning out the German Empire and exiling the Kaiser to St. Helena. The formal history of the war may yet show that at the Marne the German cause failed definitely, and that the swift rebound of spirits that followed the "strategic withdrawal" of the German right wing was justified.

* * *

Up to the fall of Antwerp we had not lost our faith in the human quality as against the Krupp quality. Those were the days of Joffre and Sir John French and the beginning of the four weeks' race between Joffre and the Germans for Antwerp and the shores of the North Sea. Like a child stringing beads Joffre strung territorial battalions and cavalry brigades in a chain that seemed destined to reach the Belgian fortress before the heavy German guns.

But the German guns won the race, and for months after that we were under the shadow of the 42-centimeter. German generalship had been outwitted, but German brute strength was in the ascendant. Sixteen-inch guns, caterpillar wheels, motor traction, we saw little else. Just as during mobilization days the imaginative correspondents saw endless lines of troop trains pouring across Cologne bridge or shunted back to East Prussia, so now they followed the itinerary of the Krupp howitzers. Where the guns came they would conquer. How

soon would the Germans have them before Verdun? * * *

While Kitchener was gathering his millions for the Spring drive and the armies lay watchful but inert in the ditches, the deadlock gave us leisure for a campaign which I believe has impressed itself on the mind of the world more vividly than the strategy and casualties of Galicia and Flanders, and which to a great many of us will be the real war years after dates and names have sunk into obscurity. Who now can place Liaoyang and Mukden within their month or even the year? Who was Kodama? Who was Nodzu? Who, to answer instantaneously, was Kuroki? But we still remember Samurai and Bushido, Japanese loyalty and superstition, hara-kiri, Emperor worship, Elder Statesmen. So in the present war what will be longest remembered, I dare say, are not the battles and campaigns, but the passions far behind the battle line. While Kitchener was drilling his men there raged the Battle of the Multi-colored Books-white books, yellow books, orange books, blue books, green books, red books-these being the Truth as revealed to the Foreign Offices of the various nations. *

*

Simultaneously with the battle of the books there raged the battle of the professors and the poets. In this Kultur campaign the Germans displayed their characteristic organization, discipline, and determination, but on the whole it was a defensive fight. The assault was delivered by the Allies. It was they who began the attack on Kultur after Louvain, and Professors Ostwald, Haeckel, attacked. The allied bombardment was attacked. The Allied bombardment was first directed against Fort Bernhardi, as I have shown in a former article. When that position was in a fair way of being demolished and the paper editions of Bernhardi, as I have pointed out, were selling as low as 10 cents, the allied fire was trained against Fort Treitschke. The Germans in Fort Treitschke held out rather well, but the Allies masked that strong position and concentrated the fire of their batteries on Fort Nietzsche. That position is still under siege.

*

It was sapping tactics that were chiefly

brought into play by the Allies in the battle of Kultur. The entire German position was undermined. " Let us see," said the allied scientists, professors, historians, scholars, "what are the real claims of these German professors, technicians, text-editors, dictionary-makers, and coal-tar specialists, whose authority we have hitherto acknowledged without question, and whose example we have humbly tried to imitate." And it at once appeared that German science and learning, was a Kultur of mediocrity, a middleman, parasitic, sweat-and-grub Kultur, which made its profits by working over the tailings thrown up by the pioneer delvers of other nations, which rushed in its disciplined Teuton hordes only where some great alien had shown the way, which originated little and borrowed everywhere. The roll of the great discoverers and inventors was called, and nearly every time it appeared that it was an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or even a Russian, to whom we owed the basic ideas of progress. All of German progress was coal-tarred with the same brush of imitation. Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Descartes, Lavoisier, Faraday, Pasteur, Becquerel, Benedetto Croce, Mendeleef, were found to be the real foundation German great

of

As I write, phase after phase of the great conflict suggests itself, almost without end, and always they are phases of emotion, phases of mind, attitudes, hopes, fears, exultation, depression. There was the period when Germany was to be starved into surrender, and the period when England's empire was on the verge of ruin. There were months when neutrality held us absorbed, the neutrality of Rumania, of the Balkans, of Italy, of the Balkans again, of Rumania once more. There were the days when we lay under the pall of the Lusitania, as dry-wrung of emotions. as no event to come can conceivably leave us; it will not yet bear thinking about or writing about. There is the phase which is dominant at this moment of writing-the munition