But even without these repeated warnings it should have been clear that a carefully calculating people like the Germans, in whom the gift of organizing is inborn and solicitude for detail is a passion, would not embark on a preventive war without having first established a just proportion between their own equipment for the struggle and the magnitude of the issues dependent on its outcome. It was, further, reasonable to assume that this was no mere onset of army against army and navy against navy according to the old rules of the game, but a mobilization by the two military empires of all their resources--military, naval, financial, economic, industrial, scientific and journalistic--to be utilized to the fullest for the destruction of the Entente group. It was also easy to discern that, whichever side was worsted, the Europe which had witnessed the beginning of the conflict would be transfigured at its close, and that Germany would, therefore, not allow her freedom of action in conducting the war to be cramped by sentimental respect for the checks and restraints of a political system that was already dead. Lastly, it might readily be inferred that the huge resources hoarded up by the enemy during forty years of preparation would be centupled in value by the favourable conditions which rendered them capable of being co-ordinated and directed by a single will to the attainment of a single end. All these previsions, warranted then by unmistakable tokens, have since been justified by historic events, and it is to be hoped that the practical conclusions to which they point may sink into the minds of the allied nations as well as of their Governments, now that nearly two years have gone by since they were first expressed.