The query, How goes the battle? involves the statement that Germany is now fighting this war at the expense of her neighbours. Her great Krupp factories are using enormous quantities of coal, but it is Belgian coal. Every week she consumes vast stores of rich iron ore, but it is French ore. Her motors, trucks, military cars, consume oceans of oil; this oil comes from Rumania. Each month she burns up human muscles in field and factory and shop, but these spent men and women are subject peoples. In a thousand ways events are worked for her interests. Because she is in the center it is very easy for Germany to transport her troops from one front to another, while it is very difficult for the United States to transport munitions and guns and food across an ocean 3,000 miles in width. It is a conservative statement to say that it does not cost Germany one-tenth as much to move a cannon from Essen to Ypres as it costs the United States to move a machine gun from Bridgeport to Cambrai and Verdun. Nor must we forget that we are building our iron ships with $6 a day labour, our wooden ships with $7 a day carpenters, while Germany is impressing labourers from Belgium and forcing them to work like slaves. Slowly she is starving them to death, while pretending to pay them seven cents a day for their eighteen hours of toil. When one group of men breaks down and dies, Germany simply forces at the point of the bayonet another group to take their places. Brutality, savagery, have an enormous advantage over civilized States. One wolf is equal to a hundred sheep and a thousand lambs. Thus far Germany has not lost one inch of territory, and this fact must be considered when we raise the question as to how goes the battle. Ignorant of the real situation, underestimating the peril that is upon the United States, many of our citizens refuse to support the government, discourage enlistment on the one hand, or else carry about with them an atmosphere of ignorant optimism. They talk loudly about America winning this war. They never tire of telling about our one hundred millions of people, our two hundred and fifty billions of wealth, our possible ten millions of soldiers, and upon the basis of these considerations they count the war ended, and win battles by waving perils into thin air. Others say that in a moral universe, injustice and cruelty cannot be victorious, and that in the nature of the case Germany must be beaten, quite forgetting that Belgium has been beaten, and so have Alsace and Lorraine. It is a truism that what has been may be. A just God permitted the first republic, Athens, to be ruined by her military neighbour, Macedonia. The story how the militarism of Macedonia brought about the fall of Athens, and contributed to dark ages, makes up a black page in the history of liberty.