d of
its immense resources, and particularly without the operations of its
great navy against Germany and Austria, the latter nations would find it
not so very difficult a task to dispose of both Russia and France.

English statesmen very promptly must have become alive to the
probability that a Germany which had subdued Russia and France, and thus
had made itself master of the Continent, would be unlikely long to
tolerate a continuance of England's world leadership.

So, even if the neutrality of Belgium had not been violated, other
reasons would have been found by England for joining France and Russia
in the war against Germany, for England would not risk, without any
effort to protect them, the loss of her continued domination of the
high seas and her undisputed possession of her vast colonial empire.

Germany Fighting for Life.

I am not defending the violation of Belgian neutrality. This,
undeniably, was a most unjustifiable action, in spite of German claims
that she was forced into it by the necessities of the situation. But I
am explaining that, even had it not occurred, still England would have
gone to war.

That was the situation.

Germany is now fighting for her very existence, and I, who am not
without knowledge of German conditions, am convinced that never has
there been a war more wholly that of a whole people than is this present
conflict, as far as Germany is concerned.

Any one who has been in even superficial touch with German public
opinion and individual feeling in any part of the empire, since the war
began, must know that there is hardly a man, woman, or child throughout
the empire who would hesitate if called upon to sacrifice possessions or
life in order to insure victory to the Fatherland. Seventy million
people who are animated by unanimous sentiment of this sort cannot be
crushed, probably not subdued.

And England is confronted by the certainty that her world leadership is
the stake for which she is fighting; that her defeat would mean the end
of the vast dominance which she has exercised throughout the world,
since the time of the Armada, through the power of her great navy.

Is it not apparent, therefore, that these nations, if left to
themselves, inevitably must continue the war until one side or the
other, or both, shall become exhausted--an eventuation which may be
postponed not for mere months but for years?

In our own civil war Grant for almost two years stood within a hu