If to this class, more powerful than numerous, of natural partisans of the war in Europe you are going to add the American partisans of the European war, you will commit a grave fault, for the Americans have more than ever everything to gain by peace and all to lose in war, which they will not be able to limit if it breaks out again in the world.

The truth is that the Americans evidently gain in the war, but they lose more.  Europe is something else to them than a market over which to dispute, she is a reservoir of experiences, good and bad, but of experiences which you cannot do without.  To wish for the continuation of the war in Europe or even to take sides with it as a sort of half evil is for the Americans a crime, a sort of suicide; that would be to applaud the destruction of models which civilization seems to have collected for your edification and for your development.  Later, the United States can do without many of these lessons which she learns from Europe, but she will always have need of the inspiration of the masterpieces of our civilization.  It is only a barbarous reasoning which allows one to see in the European war profit for the United States; it is a loss, a mourning, a shame for the whole world, and particularly for the free countries which are the guides of other peoples and which can only fulfill their mission in times of peace.

I have often heard the profits of war discussed.  The undertakers of impressive funeral services can also congratulate themselves over catastrophes.  A railroad accident which puts an entire country in mourning can enrich them.  The most murderous battles bring profit in the final reckoning to somebody, if it is only to the jackals and the crows; but it is the whole of a country, and for the United States it is the whole world, which must be considered, and the more the whole world prospers the more will the United States find friends, collaborators, and clients.  The more the world is troubled, on the contrary, the more commerce and general activities will suffer from it, without mention of the development of instruction and of the progress of human thought, which will be paralyzed.

I have been surprised to see a serious American paper bring up these old questions for discussion, and I conclude that we are going to feel in Europe the result of our errors.  It is going to be necessary to find money to fill up the financial gulf which we dig each day under our feet without realizing it; a gulf twice made, by the billions which it has been necessary to spend for the war, by the billions of ordinary income which must now go by default.  We cannot reasonably expect that Germany will be able to pay all the deficits in France, England, Russia, Belgium, and Japan; she will have no longer her foreign commerce; her misery is going to be frightful; it will be necessary then that each of the adversaries which she has so rashly provoked limit his demands; we must ourselves limit her ruin unless our own credit shall be ruined also.