July 20, 1916 
LAND & W' A T E R 
LAND & WATER 
EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, LONDON, W.C 
Telephone: HOLBORN 2828 
THURSDAY, JULY 20. 1916 
CONTENTS 
PAcn 
Germany's Climb to World Power. By Louis 
Raemaekers i 
The Political Side. (Leading Articles 3 
The Offensive in Picardy. By Hilaire Belloc 4 
A New Situation. By Arthur Pollen 11 
British and Metric Systems. By Sir Henry Cunyng- 
hamc, K.C.B. 13 
To-day and To-morrow in Ireland. By T. W. 
RoUeston 15 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 17 
Raemaekers' Cartoons — A Review 18 
Greenmantlc. By John Buchan ic) 
The ^\■est End 22 
Town and Country 24 
Choosing Kit xiii. ' 
THE POLITICAL SIDE 
IT is characteristic of the somewhat irrational 
moods produced by the strain of war that the 
general offensive of the Allies — now deliberately 
engaged — should have rendered real again what 
had seemed for so long mere academic debate ; the dis- 
cussion of the general settlement that should follow the 
war. The great offensive has before it we know not what 
fortunes, good or bad. We only know that the Allies 
are now well in the saddle, have a necessary advantage 
henceforward in numbers, in munitionment and in moral. 
There no longer exists the .paradoxical situation which 
hampered them so grie\'ously last year ; equality grow- 
ing to superiority in the West, but the grave difference in 
power of munitionment between the enemy and the 
Russians in the East. 
The fundamental principle of a settlement is one 
upon which opinion is now so agreed and firm that it 
only needs statement. The few who might desire to 
tiualify that statement through old connection, or through 
financial interest or through whatever other motives, 
can no longer stand against, or even deflect the pouring 
tide of national opinion. It must be rendered absolutely 
impossible for Prussia to bring about such a disaster 
again ; and there is only one way of doing that, which 
is to destroy Prussia as a military state. If Prussia as 
a military state, the leader and organiser of Central 
Europe, remains in existence at the end of the war, able 
to raise armies and to ally herself and her dependents 
with other armies formed upon her own model, the com- 
mon civilisation of Europe, already grievously wounded 
by the tremendous strain of the defence it has had to 
put up during the last two years, will rapidly decline ; 
and all that each of the Allied nations \alues as its own 
soul will be wholly distorted and will in part perish. 
We do not know how rapidly the miUtary situation 
may develop. It is however possible, though not probable , 
that the enemy's exhaustion may lead to a decline far 
more rapid than most of us are expecting, and if victory 
finds us unprepared with at any rate the large lines of 
the Peace which the AUies should dictate, that unpre- 
. paredness would be a great moral asset for the enemy. It 
is not for any private section of opinion or for any 
one organ, or even for any one nation in the Alliance to 
say in detail that things should be thus, or thus, but it is 
the task of all of ik to consider what salient points there 
are in the settlement upon which we can all be agreed. 
There is, in the first place, a root principle which is 
not vague or general, but capable of fairly exact definition 
in concrete terms. We mean the principle of nationality. 
It certainly cannot be tolerated at the close of this war 
that Slav populations, Roumanian populations, or 
Italian populations shall remain subject to any one of the 
group which has been organised by Prussia as a menace 
to the rest of Europe. There has been in this matter a 
little too much cynicism, especially since the defection of 
Bulgaria. The enemy has been given no small oppor- 
tunity to blaspheme. " You went out for the liberty 
of the smaller nations," he and his sympathisers say, 
" or at any rate' you pretended to do so. What you now 
find is Greece coerced, Bulgaria in arms against you, 
the rest of the smaller peoples are neutral, and some of 
them (in opinion) actually hostile." The answer is simple 
enough. It is true that the accidents of the war have 
developed the anomalies just mentioned, but they remain 
anomalies. They will teach us in the settlement to le- 
strain and to limit such of the smaller nations as ha\e 
betrayed the trust reposed in them. But those accidents 
do not eliminate the principle of nationality. 
Prussia, in a hundred ways and through a hundred 
pens and tongues, and that for generations, has definitely 
taken the ground that this ideal of nationality was, in • 
her eyes, contemptible. She has ridiculed it everywhere 
and, where it was in her power, she has ignored it. In 
making her pay the price for such a blasphemy we 
must also erect against her the principle of nationality 
again with greater force than ever in Europe. But that 
is not all. There are not only the smaller nations, which 
stand in jeopardy, there are also certain things essential 
to the common life of Europe which accidents of geography 
have now left the monopoly of our enemies. The entry 
to the Baltic — that is to-day in practice the control of 
the Kiel canal — is one. The Dardanelles is another. 
The island refuges of the Adriatic are a third. No 
settlement will be tolerable which does not secure the 
free passage of the Black Sea trade and of the Baltic 
trade, and the freedom of the Adriatic. 
Lastly, there is the question which we in the West had 
half forgotten, but which is really the key question of 
all — the situation of Poland. Here we are not dealing 
with a smaller nation whose freedom may be imperilled. 
We are dealing with a great nation which has been 
murdered. It was the original murder of Poland by 
Prussia which brought about in long sequence, more / 
than any other one historical event, the awful disaster of 
the last two years. Poland must be raised from the 
dead. Since it will not be possible so to restore Poland that 
it shall form an equilibrium with the great military 
Powers, Poland must be restored with its weight leaning 
to the Russian and not to the German side. And Poland 
so restored gives guarantee after guarantee in every 
aspect, commercial, territorial, military for the stabihty 
of peace in a renewed Europe. 
A large leunited Poland reduces North Germany (and 
Prussia in particular) to its true limits. It is a standing 
proof and symbol of their chastisement. An autonomous 
Slav population bounds and limits the German con- 
federation and, if the point be not thought too senti- 
mental, a freed Poland throws up a sort of bastion of 
ancient civilisation which it is vastly to the ihterest 
of the Allied Powers to erect and to maintain, for Poland 
has ever been, in spite of her geographical situation, a 
nation of ancient classical culture in civilisation and ia 
spirit. The very buildings of her great cities — Thorn, 
for instance, or Cracow — where they date from the time 
of her freedom are buildings much more like our own, 
than the vulgar disfigurements that a modern Germanism 
has erected among them. So far as a territorial settlement 
is concerned, this re-creation of an untrammelled, 
autonomous Poland — Slav not (ierman, in its dynastic 
attachment — will form, as it were the very test of our 
success in this war. 
