The decision, however, was for war, and for a “thorough” war. This meant the immediate throwing upon the national machinery of far more activity than it could handle. It meant attaching to a food and ship programme a military programme, a loan programme, a censorship programme. All these latter have involved a vast amount of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, and dissension. The country’s energies and attention have been drained away from the simple exigencies of the situation and from the technique of countering the submarine menace and ending the war. Five months have passed since the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have done nothing to overcome the submarine. The food and ship programmes are still unconsolidated. The absorption of Congress and the country in the loan and the conscript army and the censorship has meant just so much less absorption in the vital and urgent technique to provide which we entered the war. The country has been put to work at a vast number of activities which are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but which may have little relation to the particular situation in which this country found itself and to the particular strategy required. The immediate task was to prevent German victory in order to restore the outlines of our strategy toward a negotiated peace. War has been impotent in that immediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our very participation was a means of weakening our strategy. We have not overcome the submarine or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has apparently made not a dent in the morale of the German people. The effect of our entrance, it was anticipated by liberals, would be the shortening of the war. Our entrance has rather tended to prolong it. Liberals were mistaken about the immediate collapse of the British Commonwealth. It continued to endure the submarine challenge without our material aid. We find ourselves, therefore, saddled with a war-technique which has compromised rather than furthered our strategy.