containing in round numbers 40,000,000 inhabitants, ought to increase
annually by 500,000. Before the war the total number of births in
Germany was computed at one million nine hundred and fifty thousand, but
hardly more than one million of the children born were viable.[304] The
general conclusion to be drawn from these figures and from the
circumstances that the falling off in the French population still goes
on unchecked, is disquieting for those who desire to see the French
race continue to play the leading part in continental Europe. One of the
shrewdest observers in contemporary Germany--himself a distinguished
Semite--commented on this decisive fact as follows:[305] "Within ten
years Germany will contain seventy million inhabitants, and in the
torrent of her fecundity will drown anemic and exhausted France.... The
French nation is dying of exhaustion. There is no reason, however, for
the world to get alarmed ... for before the French will have vanished
from the earth, other races, virile and healthy, will have come to their
country to take their place." That is what is actually happening, and it
is impressively borne in upon the visitor to various French cities by
the vast number of exotic names over houses of business and in other
ways.

With this formidable obstacle, then, the three members of the Supreme
Council strenuously coped by exercising to the fullest extent the power
conferred on the victors over the vanquished. And the result of their
combinations challenged and received the unstinted approval of all those
numerous enemies of Teutondom who believe the Germans to be incapable of
contributing materially to human progress, unless they are kept in
leading-strings by one of the superior races. The Treaty represents the
potential realization of France's dream, achieved semi-miraculously by
the very statesmen on whom the Teutons were relying to dispel it.
Defeated, disarmed, incapable of military resistance, and devoid of
friends, Germany thought she could discern her sheet-anchor of salvation
in the Wilsonian gospel, and it was the preacher of this gospel himself
who implicitly characterized her salvation as more difficult than the
passage of a camel through the eye of a needle. The crimes perpetrated
by the Teutons were unquestionably heinous beyond words, and no
punishment permitted by the human conscience is too drastic to atone for
them. How long this punishment should endure, whether it should be
inf