Germany has no sea-expansive ability, no foreign credit, no international reserves to carry out an offensive warfare. Her only possibility of success lay in a sudden and decisive march over the rich territory of France, the possession of Paris, and a huge indemnity tax levy as in 1871. The rest might have been easy. Hence the supreme military necessity for a quick drive through Belgium, the only open road to Paris. The size of the crime in Belgium has shown the supreme financial necessity. There was no military necessity for the outrage against the free Belgian people--only the economic necessity. There is nothing left for Germany but a defensive warfare, a warfare now conducted upon foreign soil just over her own borders--the burden upon the enemy, the supply base near at hand. Germany must reduce and conserve her shell-fire. The Krupp works have no ability to turn out daily the number of shells that Germany was exploding, and the United States in its own arsenals could not in a year make a week's supply of shells at the rate at which they were being exploded from Switzerland to the English Channel. Greater than progress in the arts of peace is progress in the art of war. We have read in the American papers of a most wonderful new French shell that in bursting paralyzes and destroys life so instantly that all the living things within so many yards are, in a flash, set rigid in position as though manufactured for Jarley's Wax Works, the officer standing in position with uplifted arm, yet dead, the soldier by the window with a cigar in his fingers, a smile on his face, stone dead. I was informed that the effectiveness of this shell was not due to its poisonous gases but to the fact that, instead of being filled with bullets, it was charged with a wonderful new explosive. For the development of the science of war twelve months in the line of battle is worth in new inventions ten years of peaceful military study. A three years' warfare for which the English are planning is likely to put Germany's thirty years of "peaceful" war preparation quite in the shade, so far as practical results are concerned. I hear of new and more powerful mortars and cannon, wonderful new rifles, now being manufactured by the million from secret plans, and new guns to bring down Zeppelins, that it is not useful to discuss here. In the first six months of this war, the German casualties must be well up toward 2,000,000. A million of the injured may go back to the firing line. But in killed, seriously wounded, missing, and prisoners, Germany must be losing at the rate of 2,000,000 men a year, and the forces of destruction against her will increase rather than diminish. That she can lose at this rate for three years and have anything left worth consideration as a military power is beyond reason.