ly such an assurance enables them to submit
to the starvation of their women and children, to their tragic
isolation in a hostile world, to the appalling sacrifices on the
battlefield.

IV.

And now the conspiracy of lies and the conspiracy of silence is about
to be exposed. The inexorable truth must be proclaimed. The German
present is dark, but the future is desperate. The U-boat campaign has
failed, the hope of a separate peace with Russia has vanished, the
menace of America is drawing near. Greater exertions and more
appalling sacrifices are needed, and yet all the motives for further
sacrifices have vanished. The rulers were fighting for conquest and
plunder. But it is now obvious that there can be no conquest nor
plunder. The German people were misled into the belief that they were
struggling in self-defence against the "Slav peril," but since the
Ides of March in Petrograd the Russian bugbear has disappeared. They
were misled into the belief that they were struggling for liberty. But
the Germans are now the only people still deprived of political
liberty. Even the much-despised Slav has ceased to be a slave. The
only slaves in Europe to-day are the subjects of the Hohenzollern.

V.

This German war has been described as a tragedy of Prussian craft and
graft, and the Teuton rulers have been denounced rightly for their
cruelty and brutality. But posterity would be more inclined to see in
this war a tragedy of German virtue. For the virtues of the German
have been more terrible than his vices. For this catastrophe has been
possible, not because the German people are so wicked, but because
they have been so good, because they have practised too well the
"three" theological virtues of blind faith, passive obedience, and
inexhaustible patience; because they have been so pathetically loyal
to their misrulers; because they have shown the sentimentality of a
woman and the credulity of a child. The German Michel has been the
political Peter Pan of Europe, the boy that won't grow up. He has
been the boy that has been let loose and has lit the match to the
powder magazine. He has been the incurable romanticist who has
continued to believe in fairy-tales in a world of stern realities. And
now this child-like faith in fairy-tales has been dispelled by
disaster. The vision of a holy German Empire, of the pomp and
circumstance of war, its glory and glamour, is shattered. The spell is
broken. The German Michel is awaken