When he crossed his southern frontier, Philip made himself terrible. The flames of the burning towns at midnight lighted up the land as a terrible warning. Thirty-two towns that had flourished as commercial communities vanished from the face of the earth. These border states above Athens, answering to our modern Belgium, were made into a desert. Terrorized into submission, the Greeks threw down their arms and opened the gates of their cities to Philip's soldiers, who brought with them women and children in fetters that the spirit of Athens might be utterly broken. Has there ever been in historic times any parallel quite so striking as that between the organized militarism of Macedonia with the subsequent ruin of Athens, and the present systematized militarism of Germany, now attempting the ruin of Belgium, France and England? Listen to Professor von Stengel, the German authority on International Law: "There will be no conference at The Hague when this war is over. The one condition of prosperous existence for the natives is submission to our [Germany's] supreme direction. Under our overlordship all international law would become superfluous, for we of ourselves, and instinctively, will give to each nation its own rights." WHAT IT MEANS TO AMERICA The acuteness of our peril was well set forth in a conversation that took place last year between an aged German officer of the Franco-Prussian war and a French officer who won his medal in the same campaign, both of whom had sought a rest in the village of Vevey upon the banks of Lake Geneva. For weeks the two old men on their wheeled chairs had passed each other without recognition. One morning, it is said, the German officer saluted. After expressing sorrow over the losses of the war, solely "for the purpose of making conversation," as he claimed, the German officer raised a question. First of all he insisted that he spoke merely as a private citizen who loved his fellow men, and represented in no sense the rulers in Berlin: "Suppose the German armies were to withdraw from Belgium and France, and agree to restore the devastated regions and repay England for her sunken ships. Do you think the Allies would then return to the conditions of 1914, granting the Fatherland the trade privileges that then were hers? For," added the officer, "it is quite certain that Germany could never raise the billions of indemnity involved in the restoration of Belgium and France, and England's ships, unless she was free to buy raw material, kept her factories intact and also her three thousand and more passenger ships, freight ships, sailing vessels and her battle-ships to protect her fleet."