The French feel with passionate conviction that this is the last stand of France, and that if she does not now succeed and is again trampled under foot, her people will lose for all time their place in the forefront of that great modern civilization of which the debt to France is literally incalculable. It would be impossible too highly to admire the way in which the men and women of France have borne themselves in this nerve-shattering time of awful struggle and awful suspense. They have risen level to the hour’s need, whereas in 1870 they failed so to rise. The high valor of the French soldiers has been matched by the poise, the self-restraint, the dignity and the resolution with which the French people and the French government have behaved. Of Austria and Hungary, of Servia and Montenegro, exactly the same is true, and the people of each of these countries have shown the sternest and most heroic courage and the loftiest and most patriotic willingness for self-sacrifice. To each of these peoples the war seems a crusade against threatening wrong, and each man fervently believes in the justice of his cause. Moreover, each combatant fights with that terrible determination to destroy the opponent which springs from fear. It is not the fear which any one of these powers has inspired that offers the difficult problem. It is the fear which each of them genuinely feels. Russia believes that a quarter of the Slav people will be trodden under the heel of the Germans, unless she succeeds. France and England believe that their very existence depends on the destruction of the German menace. Germany believes that unless she can so cripple, and, if possible, destroy her western foes, as to make them harmless in the future, she will be unable hereafter to protect herself against the mighty Slav people on her eastern boundary and will be reduced to a condition of international impotence. Some of her leaders are doubtless influenced by worse motives; but the motives above given are, I believe, those that influence the great mass of Germans, and these are in their essence merely the motives of patriotism, of devotion to one’s people and one’s native land. We nations who are outside ought to recognize both the reality of this fear felt by each nation for others, together with the real justification for its existence. Yet we cannot sympathize with that fear-born anger which would vent itself in the annihilation of the conquered. The right attitude is to limit militarism, to destroy the menace of militarism, but to preserve the national integrity of each nation. The contestants are the great civilized peoples of Europe and Asia.