But it is not alone to the political reconstruction of Germany or of Europe that those who take an optimistic view of the issue of the present European war look hopefully. The whole economic system of modern capitalism will have received a shock from which the beginnings of vast changes may date. Apart from this, however, the avowed aim of the war, the destruction of Prussian militarism and, indirectly, the weakening of military power throughout the world, should have immediate and important consequences. The brutalities and crimes committed in Belgium and the North of France at the instigation of the military heads of this Prusso-German army do but indicate exaggerations of the military spirit and attitude generally. Von Hindenburg is not the first who has given utterance to the devilish excuse for military crime and brutality that it is "more humane in the end, since it shortens war." To refute this transparent fallacy is scarcely necessary, since every historical student knows that military excesses and inhumanity do not shorten but prolong war by raising indignation and inflaming passions. The longest connected war known to history--the Thirty Years' War--is generally acknowledged to have been signalized by the greatest and most continuous inhumanity of any on record. But whether military crime has the effect claimed for it or not, we may fain hope that public opinion in Europe will insist upon giving the "humane" commanders who "mercifully" endeavour to "shorten" war by drastic methods of this sort a severe lesson. A few such treated to the utmost penalties the ordinary criminal law prescribes to the crimes of arson, murder, and robbery would teach them and their like that war, if waged at all nowadays, must be waged decently and not "shortened" by such devices as those in question. If the present war with all its horrible carnage issues, even if only in the beginning of those changes which some of us believe must necessarily result from it--changes economical, political, and moral--then indeed it will not have been waged in vain. With the great intellectual powers of the Germanic people devoted, not to the organization of military power and of national domination, but to furthering the realization of a higher human society; with the determination on the part of the best elements among every European people to work together internationally with each other, and not least with the new Germany, to this end, and the great European war of 1914 will be looked back upon by future generations as the greatest world-historic example of the proverbial evil out of which good, and a lasting and inestimable good, has come for Europe and the world. UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED THE GRESHAM PRESS WOKING AND LONDON. * * * * *