Dr. Elliot has thus stated in terms as exact as they are complete the real problem which the Americans have to solve. Clearly it reached far beyond the controversies about the submarine warfare. It is not enough, indeed, for the Americans to constitute themselves the champions of right and justice against Teutonic barbarity; _they must understand that the maintenance of the independence of the United States absolutely depends on the complete victory of the Allies in Europe_. Already many Americans come near to accepting this view. Thus at Carnegie Hall, New York, at the end of May, 1916, Major Putnam, addressing 3000 members of the “Committee of American Rights,” excited great enthusiasm by demanding that America should at once take part in the war on the side of the Allies. His chief argument was: “If Germany wins in this war, her next aggression will be against our Republic.” (Quoted by _Le Temps_, May 22nd, 1916.) But these clear ideas, involving immediate and decisive action, are as yet shared only by a minority of Americans, better informed than the rest. The progress of American opinion in general will be complete when from a general view of the facts of the war, as these have occurred in America as well as in Europe, the people shall logically infer the formidable consequences which a German victory would entail on the United States. That general view, which the great American Republic will probably take in time, is as follows. It will necessarily be based on an exact knowledge of the German plan for dealing with the United States, a plan, by the way, which is of long standing. In 1898, before Manilla, the German Rear-Admiral von Goetzen, a friend of the Kaiser, said to the American Admiral Dewey: “In about fifteen years my country will begin a great war.... Some months after we have done our business in Europe we shall take New York and probably Washington, and we shall keep them for a time. We do not intend to take any territory from you, but only to put your country in its proper place with reference to Germany. We shall extract one or two billions of dollars from New York and other towns.” (See _Naval and Military Record_, quoted by _L’Echo de Paris_, September 24th, 1915.) These words at the time were regarded as mere gasconade. But now it is indisputable that even before 1898 the Germans of Berlin had, by means of the processes described above (p. 200), been systematically laying the foundations of a State within the United States, a State that has long been silently sapping the ground on which stands the American Republic.