n all-commanding star,
The morning star that heralds forth the day.

A Swiss View of Germany

By Maurice Millioud

M. Maurice Millioud, an eminent member of the Faculty of the
University of Lausanne, Switzerland, has written an article of
marked breadth and penetration in which he presents a quite
novel view of the forces which, in combination, have brought
Germany to its actual position. These forces are political,
social, and economic; beneath and through them works the
subtle impulsion of a national conception of right and might
which the author sums up as the "ideology of caste." Want of
space forbids the publication of the entire article. We give
its most significant parts with such summary of those portions
which it was necessary to omit as, we trust, will enable our
readers to follow the general argument.

Humanitarians the most deeply buried in dreams yield with stupefaction
to the evidence of fact. European war was possible, since here it is,
and even a world war, for all continents are represented in the melee.
Millions of men on the one side or the other are ranged along battle
fronts of from 500 to 1,000 kilometers. We are witnessing a displacement
of human masses to which there is nothing comparable except the
formidable convulsions of geologic ages.

The world then was in formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new
humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination
is confounded?

We can at least seek to understand what we cannot hinder.

This war was not a matter of blind fate, but had been foreseen for a
long time. What are the forces that have set the nations in movement? I
do not seek to establish responsibility. Whosoever it may be, those who
have let loose the conflict have behind them peoples of one mind. That,
perhaps, is the most surprising feature in an epoch when economic,
social, and moral interests are so interwoven from one end of the earth
to the other that the conqueror himself must suffer cruelly from the
ruin of the conquered.

The Governments have determined the day and the hour. They could not
have done it in opposition to the manifest will of the nations. Public
sentiment has seconded them. What is it then which rouses man from his
repose, impels him to desert his gains, his home, the security of a
regular life, and sends him in eager search for bloody adventures?

This prob