He is an awkward infant giant,
      The oak by the roots uptearing;
    He’ll beat you till your backs are sore,
      And crack your crowns for daring.

    He is like Siegfried, the noble child,
      That song-and-saga wonder,
    Who, when his fabled sword was forged,
      His anvil cleft in sunder!

    To you, who will our Dragon slay,
      Shall Siegfried’s strength be given;
    Hurrah! how joyfully your nurse
      Will laugh on you from heaven!

    The Dragon’s hoard of royal gems
      You’ll win, with none to share it;
    Hurrah! how bright the golden crown
      Will sparkle when you wear it!

But it would not be stranger than many other things which have happened in human history if the defeat of German military imperialism should result in restoring to Europe and spreading more widely over the world the beneficent influence of Germanic civilization.  Certainly they are not the same thing, and they do not stand or fall together.

GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD.

Yale University, Oct. 20, 1914.

Possible Profits From War

INTERVIEW WITH FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS.

Dr. Giddings is Professor of Sociology and the History of Civilization at Columbia University; author of many works on sociology and political economy; President of Institut Internationale de Sociologie, 1913.

By Edward Marshall.

No man in the United States is better entitled to estimate the probable social and economic outcome of the present European debacle than Prof.  Franklin H. Giddings of Columbia, one of the most distinguished sociologists and political economists in the United States.

“Today all Europe fights,” he said to me, “but, also, today all Europe thinks.”

That is an impressive sentence, with which he concluded our long talk, and with which I begin my record of it.

He believes that this thinking of the men who crouch low in the drenched trenches and of the women who tragically wait for news of them will fashion a new Europe.

He agrees with the remarkable opinions of President Butler, that that new Europe will be marked by the rise of democracy.

He sees the probability of broadened individual opportunity in it, accompanied by the breaking down of international suspicions; and he thinks that all these processes, which surely make for peace, will surely bring a lasting peace.

In the following interview, which Prof.  Giddings has carefully reread, will be found one of the most interesting speculative utterances born of the war.

“The immediate economic cause of the war,” said Prof.  Giddings, “lay in the affairs of Servia and Austria.  Servia had been shut in.  She had been able to get practically nothing from, and sell practically nothing to, the outside world, save by Austria’s permission, while Austria, with Germany professing fear of Slavic development, for years had been taking every care to prevent the Balkan peoples from having free access to the Adriatic.