nd the instruments by
which it was built up are heavy artillery, mighty armies, the gallows,
bribery and guile. With some of those arms she had opened the
campaign of conquest a quarter of a century ago, and of that campaign
the present war, unexampled though it be, is but an acute and
transient episode. This would appear to be the only true reading of
contemporary events.
Few careful students of European politics will now deny that the
struggle between the forces for which Teutonism stands and those on
which the social ordering of the rest of Europe is based was
inaugurated long ago, that the ground was then cleared for the new
politico-social structure, or that the dissolution of our "effete,
drowsy States, saturated with wealth and honeycombed with
hypocrisies," was carefully planned and taken in hand with scientific
precision. It is equally clear, to those who have eyes to see, that
the present clash of nations, despite its appalling effects on
civilization, is but an acuter phase of that campaign, a series of
incidents in a mighty struggle which neither began in July 1914 nor
will end with the close of hostilities, but will rage on for years to
come in less sanguinary but more decisive forms. For the future
peace--whatever its terms--which will silence the cannon's boom, will
but transfer the war theatre without ending the war. The methods will
be changed from military to economic. But only the weapons will be
different; the military discipline, the callous indifference to the
dictates of human and divine law, the utter absence of scruple will
continue to characterize the tactics of our enemy, who will then have
a wider scope for his activities than the battlefield can offer. The
German has no match among the allied nations in the regions of the new
diplomacy, trade, industry, applied science, insidious journalism and
vast organization. He is incomparably better equipped than they, and
owing to his amorality has none of those obstacles to contend with
which so often confront them with scruples and check their advance.
And during the progress of the present war the Teutons are making
ready for that economico-political duel which will, they hope, give
them the decisive superiority for which they had vainly hoped from the
war. That hope, if their experience of the past thirty years be a fair
indication, is by no means groundless.
Not to realize these facts to-day is to play into the hands of our
enemies, as we
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