EUROPE'S DYNASTIC SLAUGHTER HOUSE 65 



pecially to a novelty, and includes the vast, complicated, and diversely 

 constituted mechanism of " blood and iron " which goes to the making 

 of a standing army. The military system of the German empire vras 

 such a machine. The opportunity came to test its efficient action (for- 

 tune adding or making, or merely defending, it is all one) and imme- 

 diately the opportunity was availed of. Germany was prepared to 

 mobolize and she did mobolize, admirably and with wonderful celerity. 

 She was prepared to attack, and doubtless with no thought, or but 

 trifling thought of failure or even serious impending, she did attack. 

 Owing to the rather unexpected and stubborn resistance of Belgium, 

 and the entirely unexpected and most masterly strategy, credited, and 

 it is probably correctly so, to General JofEre, the dynamics of offense — 

 the sudden and overwhelming crushing of France — failed. The static 

 energy still remains, as yet unimpaired, capable perhaps, though that is 

 unlikely, of further offensive movement on a large scale. 



What has been said of Germany's utilization of her wonderful war 

 organization must not be taken as solely applying to the German em- 

 pire. Certainly to debit the Kaiser, or the " ruling military class " or 

 the mass of the Germanic peoples with a deliberate desire to incite war, 

 is to assume an intention of murder-plotting which did not exist. 

 France, as well as Germany, possessed a highly organized and (as has 

 been amply proved in the field) effective military machine, which she 

 would have employed with equal readiness aggressively, but for the ever- 

 present doubt as to whether it would work in practise. France sighed 

 as she thought of the alienated provinces, contemplated the preponder- 

 ance of power of the neighbor who had filched them, exorting the bil- 

 lion of loot, sighed, shook her head with a doleful, C'est trop dur, and 

 was at least partially consoled by the reflection, not that she felt her- 

 self more moral than Germany, but that "the inevitable was not de- 

 batable." 



TVe come now to a candid, impartial, and unprejudiced considera- 

 tion of another and quite different phase of the continental conflict. 



Rivals in any line of activity are never very scrupulous as to utiliz- 

 ing — or sometimes even creating — opportunities to cripple, or even to 

 destroy each other. This is especially cognizable in business affairs 

 (from corner-groceries to empires) . But a rival, however unscrupulous, 

 feels in these modern days when public opinion is a force, a compulsion 

 (called by some "moral") to defer to that force. It is incumbent upon 

 him to find a pretext, real if possible, certainly plausible, for his crip- 

 pling or destruction. 



Eussia, for the chances of an open Bosphorus and a permanent-ice- 

 free port welcomed the challenge to arms, not with very great alacrity, 

 but still it was welcome. France, because of possibilities that the 

 future might disclose of reclaiming the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, 



VOL. LXXXVI. — 5. 



