At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is feeling the pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitually parsimonious, and instinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which is hardy and insensitive.  Great Britain has really only begun to feel the stress.  She has probably suffered economically no more than have Holland or Switzerland, and Italy and Japan have certainly suffered less.  All these three great countries are still full of men, of gear, of saleable futures.  In every part of the globe Great Britain has colossal investments.  She has still to apply the great principle of conscription not only to her sons but to the property of her overseas investors and of her landed proprietors.  She has not even looked yet at the German financial expedients of a year ago.  She moves reluctantly, but surely, towards such a thoroughness of mobilisation.  There need be no doubt that she will completely socialise herself, completely reorganise her whole social and economic structure sooner than lose this war.  She will do it clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, with much trickery on the part of her lawyers, and much baseness on the part of her landlords; but she will do it not so slowly as a logical mind might anticipate.  She will get there a little late, expensively, but still in time....

The German group, I reckon, therefore, will become exhausted first.  I think, too, that Germany will, as a nation, feel and be aware of what is happening to her sooner than any other of the nations that are sharing in this process of depletion.  In 1914 the Germans were reaping the harvest of forty years of economic development and business enterprise.  Property and plenty were new experiences, and a generation had grown up in whose world a sense of expansion and progress was normal.  There existed amongst it no tradition of the great hardship of war, such as the French possessed, to steel its mind.  It had none of the irrational mute toughness of the Russians and British.  It was a sentimental people, making a habit of success; it rushed chanting to war against the most grimly heroic and the most stolidly enduring of races.  Germany came into this war more buoyantly and confidently than any other combatant.  It expected another 1871; at the utmost it anticipated a year of war.

Never were a people so disillusioned as the Germans must already be, never has a nation been called upon for so complete a mental readjustment.  Neither conclusive victories nor defeats have been theirs, but only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort and an illusion of rapid triumph to hardship, loss and loss and loss of substance, the dwindling of great hopes, the realisation of ebb in the tide of national welfare.  Now they must fight on against implacable, indomitable Allies.  They are under stresses now as harsh at least as the stresses of France.  And, compared with the French, the Germans are untempered steel.