And yet, returning from "war-ridden Europe" I was more convinced than of anything else in life that what was being slowly settled in that grim trench--land over there did mean something to us--more, much more than money or neutral rights or sympathetic charities. Not that I was apprehensive of an immediate German raid on New York, the crumbling of her sky-scrapers and the exaction of colossal indemnities. For it looked to me that Germany might well have other occupation after peace was made in Europe, whichever way the war should go. The German peril did not lie, I thought, in her big guns, her ships, her "Prussianized machine." It lay deeper, in herself, in her image of the world. If Germany could win even a partial victory under that monstrous creed of applied materialism, illuminated as it had been with every sort of cynical crime, with its reasoned defiance of contract, its principle of "indispensable severities," its "military reasons," _that_ must become inexorably the law of the world--the barbarians' law. Germany would have made the morality of the world! And of all the world's peoples to accept the victor's new reading of the commandments, proud America would be the first. For we cannot resist the fascination of success. The German aim, the German tyranny over the individual, the German morality--one for you and me as individuals and another utterly lawless one when we get together in a social state--would be imitated more than the German lesson of thoroughness in civil and military organization. Hypnotized by German success, we should not discipline ourselves, which is the German lesson, so much as we should riot in the moral license of the German creed. Americans would worship at the altar of that queer "old German god," who apparently encourages rape, murder, arson, and tyranny in his followers. For in young America, with every social tradition in it seething blood, there is already an insidious tendency to accept this new-old religion of triumphant force. American "Big Business" can understand the Kaiser's philosophy, can reverence his "old German god" when he brings victory, more than any other people outside of Germany. For it, too, believes in "putting things over" with a strong hand. There is not an argument of the German militarist propaganda that would not find a sympathetic echo somewhere in the headquarters of American corporations. * * * * *