The American people grieve over the fruitless sacrifices of life, property, and the natural human joys which the German people are making to a wrong and impossible ideal of national power and welfare.  The sacrifices which Germany is imposing on the Allies are fearfully heavy, but there is reason to hope that these will not be fruitless, for out of them may come great gains for liberty and peace in Europe.

All experienced readers on this side of the Atlantic are well aware that nine-tenths of all the reports they get about the war come from English and French sources, and this knowledge makes them careful not to form judgments about details until the events and deeds tell their own story.  They cannot even tell to which side victory inclines in a long, far-extended battle until recognizable changes in the positions of the combatants show what the successes or failures must have been.  The English and French win some advantage so far as the formation of public opinion in this country is concerned, because those two Governments send hither official reports on current events more frequently than the German Government does, and with more corroborative details.  The amount of secrecy with which the campaign is surrounded on both sides is, however, a new and unwelcome experience for both the English and the American public.

German Ignorance of Events.

The pamphlets by German publicists and men of letters which are now coming to this country, and the various similar publications written here, seem to indicate that the German public is still kept by its Government in ignorance about the real antecedents of the war and about many of the incidents and aspects of the portentous combat.  These documents seem to Americans to contain a large amount of misinformation about the attack of Austria-Hungary on Servia, the diplomatic negotiations and the correspondence between the sovereigns which immediately preceded the war, and the state of mind of the Belgian and English peoples.  American believers in the good sense and good feeling of the common people naturally imagine, when an awful calamity befalls a nation, that the people cannot have been warned of its approach, else they would have avoided it.  In this case they fear that the Emperor, the Chancellery, and the General Staff have themselves been misinformed in important respects, have made serious miscalculations which they are proposing to conceal as long as possible, and are not taking the common people into their confidence.  American sympathies are with the German people in their sufferings and losses, but not with their rulers, or with the military class, or with the professors and men of letters who have been teaching for more than a generation that might makes right.  That short phrase contains the fundamental fallacy which for fifty years has been poisoning the springs of German thought and German policy on public affairs.