essfully handled problems feared by all
the outside world. While, as a result of the development of humane
feeling, England and the United States have been saying that ignorance,
vagabondage, and misery ought to be abolished, Germany has said, 'They
shall be!' And, saying it, she had actually commenced to abolish them.

"She had cut down enormous wastes of human energy and, for the first
time in the history of the world, had established an economic minimum
below which men and families were not permitted to sink.

"The cost of this was large; for insurance, colonies for tramps and
vagabonds, employment agencies, and the like; but Germany made it pay in
the creation of a nation built of loyal and efficient people. Both their
loyalty and their efficiency have been proved and reproved in the course
of the present struggle. They had accomplished marvels, they were ready
for amazing sacrifices.

"Now, one of the principal reasons why Germany was able to do these
things, although, she probably ignored it and possibly would deny it, is
to be found in the free-trade policy of England.

"At any time during the past twenty years England could have checked
German progress effectively by the establishment of a protective tariff
system designed to encourage her own colonies and other nations with
whom she had long been on friendly and influential terms, to the utmost
development of exclusive trade privileges designed to shut out Germany.
Except for the long-established English policy of commercial freedom
Germany could not have accomplished for herself what she has.

"Germany has been growing rapidly. Her birth rate has been high, but of
late it has been falling, and when the war began there were indications
that she soon would approach the low ratio of population increase
already characteristic of France, of New England and the Middle West in
the United States, and lately of England. But Germany's population was
still a growing one and, in a sense, a restive one.

"The Malthusian theory has not worked out in the civilized world as
Malthus supposed it would, for the application of science to
manufacturing, agriculture, &c., has prevented increasing populations
from pressing upon the means of subsistence; but in all parts of the
Western World the standards of living have been raised, the ambitions of
the average man and woman have expanded. They have lived better than
their parents lived, and they have wished their children to li