Germany, by bursting her way through Belgium, was enabled to seize eighty to ninety per cent. of the coal and iron resources of France and the greater part of her apparatus for the production of arms. She holds also the entire resources of Belgium, both of raw material and finished product. The foul blow by which she possessed herself of these indispensable treasures had two consequences which she did not look for--the active hostility of England and the moral indignation of all other nations. In helping France to make good the loss which she sustained through such perfidy the American people think that they are doing God's service, and their only regret is that they cannot do more of it. If they had foreseen the present conditions they would have enlarged their gun factories and powder mills to meet the emergency more promptly. A German writer in the New York _Times_ of May 30, Mr. Vom Bruck, says: "If the German nation is wiped out with the help of American arms and ammunition no man of the white race in the United States would be able to think of such a catastrophe without horror and remorse." All of the contending nations say that they are fighting for existence, which means that if they do not win in the end they will be wiped out. With such an alternative staring us in the face very few tears would be shed by Americans, of any color, if both the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, with all their belongings, should be wiped off the face of the earth. War and Non-Resistance The pacifist "mollycoddle," as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him in his San Francisco Exposition speech, finds expression in these words of Bertrand Russell in the August number of the Atlantic Monthly: All these three motives for armaments--cowardice, love of dominion, and lust for blood--are no longer ineradicable in civilized human nature. All are diminishing under the influence of modern social organization. All might be reduced to a degree which would make them almost innocuous, if early education and current moral standards were directed to that end. Passive resistance, if it were adopted deliberately by the will of a whole nation, with the same measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is good in national life than armies and navies can ever achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter of brutality involved in modern war. But it is hardly to be expected, Mr. Russell reluctantly concludes, that progress will come in this way, because "the imaginative effort required is too great." He adds: