It is impossible that the free United States, born out of the sacred struggle against European domination, enlarged, enriched, and ennobled by that struggle, and now in the front rank among nations as the fruit of that struggle, should hesitate between revolution and reaction, between right and conquest, between peace and war.

Americans are too generous to hesitate, too wise, also, for Prussian reaction is cracking and is going to crumble; even Americans of German origin would be acting against their own fatherland if they, by their sympathies, should sustain the regime of caporalism which is now destroying it.

The Vital Energies of France

By Henri Bergson.

From The Bulletin des Armees, Nov. 5, 1914.

The issue of the war is not doubtful:  Germany will succumb.  Material force and moral force, all that sustains her will end by failing her because she lives on provisions garnered once for all, because she wastes them and will not know how to renew them.

Everything has been said about her material resources.  She has money, but her credit is sinking, and it is not apparent where she can borrow.  She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her sixty-five millions of inhabitants.  For all this she has made provision, but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her reservoirs dry.  How will she fill them?  War as she practices it consumes a frightful number of her men, and here, too, all revitalization is impossible; no aid will come from without, since an enterprise launched to impose German domination, German “culture,” German products, does not and never will interest those who are not Germans.  Such is the situation of Germany confronting a France who keeps her credit intact and her ports open, who procures provisions and ammunition according to her need, who reinforces her army with all that her Allies bring to her, and who can count—­since her cause is that of humanity itself—­upon the increasingly active sympathy of the civilized world.

But it is not merely a question of material force, of visible force.  What of the moral force that cannot be seen and that is more important than the other—­which to a certain degree can be supplied—­that is essential, since without it nothing avails?

The moral energy of nations, like that of individuals, can only be sustained by some ideal superior to themselves, stronger than they are, to which they can cling with a strong grip when they feel their courage vacillate.  Where lies the ideal of contemporary Germany?  The time has past when her philosophers proclaimed the inviolability of justice, the eminent dignity of the person, (the individual?), the obligation laid upon nations to respect one another.  Germany militarized by Prussia has thrust far from her those noble ideas which came to her formerly for the most part from the France of the eighteenth century and the Revolution.