The answer is still withheld, for the trial is in process. It was a magnificent conception, and inevitable, for the great sequence of spiritual and material happenings that has followed from the first weakening of Christian civilisation and Catholic culture at the very beginning of the fourteenth century was bound to have issue in its logical and dramatic crest, and in the final test of its efficiency. There is nothing half-way in its effort, nothing indifferently accomplished or insecure at any point. Essen, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin have forgotten nothing, failed in nothing. Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed; coal, iron, steam, electricity, chemistry are built up into a great and puissant unity, made operative by the wealth they themselves have created and energised by the dynamic force of intensive intellect no longer hampered by fear of God or charity for man, or an ancient sense of honour that came out of feudalism, the Crusades, and a Church that held the state in thrall and should have perished with the things she had made. The mystery of the “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” the mystery of “Antichrist” are mysteries no longer, but clear writings on an open page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and searching terror. Coal and iron. These territories are now the centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her mines and manufactures, and add them to the resources of Germany; in the south to preserve to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; in the west to gain from France the coal and iron of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that are the foundations of her empire (actual and potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe that matched the sombre theatricalism of life itself? Here in the west, far back in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, great cities and world markets when London was a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a frontier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen Prussia. Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up--black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the