As many men are now engaged simultaneously as were then called out in the course of years. And the instruments of death are a hundred times more deadly. From the skies above destruction rains down; from subterranean forts and from the depths of the sea it wells up. The difference between hand labor and machinery has been transmitted into terms of killing; we have artificial earthquakes and eruptions. How shall we name the war? The War of 1914? But it may last on into the next year, and the next and the next. As I know Germany she will never now submit to being conquered unless the social democrats gain the upper hand. And even then I am not sure that the social democrats are prepared to draw the last consequences of their long agitation against the imperial, or against any national government. Our descendants may look back on it as the Thousand Years’ War, for one fails to see how the passions now unchained can ever again be calmed. And there are signs that we are at the beginning of a colossal shoving around of races that will make our children mock at the awe with which their fathers read of the so-called wandering of the nations. All the Suevi and Allemanni and Goths, Vandals and Visigoths that ever overran Gaul would have made but a few corps in the great Teuton army that is now pressing into France. Russia, with her one hundred sixty millions, is likely to claim a much vaster influence than she has yet had. Napoleon would once have been willing to share Europe with Czar Alexander; will some such partition enter into the new treaty of peace? Will it perhaps be between Teuton and Slav and will England have to move to Canada and France to Africa? I can not believe, in any case, that Germany will succumb. She is reproached now by sentimental ladies with having devoted such serious study to the work of destruction. She devotes serious study to everything that she attempts. Only recently I was initiated into the splendid methods by which she runs her labor-exchanges and also into the workings of her prisons and penitentiaries. Everything is foreseen, everything provided for. And so it is with her fighting force. Every single problem is attacked theoretically as well as practically, and in almost every regard we other nations are but as untrained children to her. Once more, who is to blame for the horrible war? A clever writer, such as we have for detective stories, would have little difficulty in convincingly foisting the guilt on each of the great powers in succession. Austria is to blame for her ultimatum to Servia, Russia for mobilizing against Austria, France for entering the conflict when the matter did not concern her at all, Germany for demanding Russian demobilization, England for stabbing Germany in the back when she was already struggling with enemies on either side, Japan for her bumptious self-assertion.