So stand things in the western area of conflict.  But how about the east?  You are kind enough to admit in your letter that “from this (the aforementioned) standpoint of course the appearance of Russia among the allies is an anomaly and must be explained on other grounds.”  Anomaly is a rather tame word to characterize the meaning of this appearance of Russia.  I should hardly designate it by this term.

She does not “appear among the allies.”  She is the leading power among them; it is her war, as Mr. Tsvolski, the Russian Ambassador to Paris, very properly remarked:  “C’est ma guerre.”  She planned it, she gave Austria-Hungary no chance to live on peaceful terms with her neighbors, she forced it upon us, she drew France into it by offering her a bait which that poor country could not resist, she created the situation which England considered as her best opportunity for crushing Germany.  I must repeat it over and over again:  it is in its origin a Russian war, with a clearly outlined Russian program of conquest.

Here, then, you have a real clash between two principles; not shades of principles as these may subsist between Germany and her western foes, but principles in all their essential features; not between different tints of gray, but between black and white, between affirmation and negation; affirmation of the principle of human dignity, liberty, safety, and negation of the same; western evolution and eastern reaction.

I wonder why those prominent Americans who are so deeply impressed by the comparatively slight shades of liberalism differentiating Germany from England and France are not struck by the absolute contrast existing between Muscovitism and western civilized rule as represented by Austria-Hungary and Germany; that they overlook the outstanding fact that while in the western area the conflict has nothing whatever to do with the principles embodied in the home policy of the belligerents, in the east, on the other hand, these principles will in truth be affected by the results of war, since a Russian victory, followed by a Russian conquest, would mean the retrogression of western institutions and the corresponding expansion of eastern ones over a large area and large numbers of men.

It is the consciousness of fighting in this war which has been forced upon us, against the direst calamity threatening our kind and on behalf of the most precious conquests of progress and civilization, which enhances our moral force so as to make it unconquerable.  The hope which I expressed in my first letter, that Serbia’s doom would soon be fulfilled, has been prostrated by the mistakes of an over-confident Commander in Chief; but that means postponement only and does not alter the prospects of war in their essentials.