sympathies, should sustain the regime of caporalism which is now
destroying it.

*The Vital Energies of France*

*By Henri Bergson.*

*From The Bulletin des Armees, Nov. 5, 1914.*

The issue of the war is not doubtful: Germany will succumb. Material
force and moral force, all that sustains her will end by failing her
because she lives on provisions garnered once for all, because she
wastes them and will not know how to renew them.

Everything has been said about her material resources. She has money,
but her credit is sinking, and it is not apparent where she can borrow.
She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her
sixty-five millions of inhabitants. For all this she has made provision,
but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her
reservoirs dry. How will she fill them? War as she practices it consumes
a frightful number of her men, and here, too, all revitalization is
impossible; no aid will come from without, since an enterprise launched
to impose German domination, German "culture," German products, does not
and never will interest those who are not Germans. Such is the situation
of Germany confronting a France who keeps her credit intact and her
ports open, who procures provisions and ammunition according to her
need, who reinforces her army with all that her Allies bring to her, and
who can count--since her cause is that of humanity itself--upon the
increasingly active sympathy of the civilized world.

But it is not merely a question of material force, of visible force.
What of the moral force that cannot be seen and that is more important
than the other--which to a certain degree can be supplied--that is
essential, since without it nothing avails?

The moral energy of nations, like that of individuals, can only be
sustained by some ideal superior to themselves, stronger than they are,
to which they can cling with a strong grip when they feel their courage
vacillate. Where lies the ideal of contemporary Germany? The time has
past when her philosophers proclaimed the inviolability of justice, the
eminent dignity of the person, (the individual?), the obligation laid
upon nations to respect one another. Germany militarized by Prussia has
thrust far from her those noble ideas which came to her formerly for the
most part from the France of the eighteenth century and the Revolution.
She has made for herself a new soul, or rather, she has docilely
accepted that