g help that
in the present appallingly entangled situation
America can give Europe. The Old World is
poisoned. The virus of the most irrational hatred
of its component sections against each other,
inoculated into them by all sorts of false
leaders of opinion, eats deeper and deeper and
threatens to mortify all the roots of a wholesome
life. May the United States of America help a
disunited Europe to find the way out of the deadly
miasmatic jungle into which it has lost itself.

THE HELPLESSNESS OF EUROPE

BY ---- ----, MEMBER OF THE REICHSTAG

Europe is in the position of a wanderer who has
gone astray into a swamp. In vain he labours to
regain firm ground. The more frantically he
struggles the surer he is to become submerged.
Like an infant child he is unable to help himself.
Help must come from people outside the swamp.

We are now in the third year of the biggest, the
most fratricidal and the most hopeless war the
world has ever seen. It is hopeless in so far as
on the one side none of the two coalitions is
likely to be in a visible time as much the victor
over the other that it can dictate it its own
terms, and as on the other side there is no common
basis to be seen for a sensible compromise. It is
not the extravagance of demands that forms an
insuperable barrier for peace. Extravagant terms
of peace have indeed been formulated by
unauthorised persons or groups but they have
nowhere received the sanctioning stamp of the
responsible governments. The latter prefer rather
to shine by the moderation of their demands, at
least as far as territory is concerned. But it is
just this apparent moderation that makes peace
such an almost insoluble problem.

Far behind this moderation in regard to
territorial demands looms the desire to destroy
the opponents' chances of political predominance.
The war is, for the present at least, in the
first instance a struggle about the supremacy in
Europe. And this perhaps more in a negative sense
than otherwise. Jingoes are, of course, everywhere
in high and low quarters, but it is very doubtful
whether one of the responsible heads of the
belligerent nations pursues for himself or his
nation seriously and consistently what might be
call