It’s beginning to wear on us badly.  It presses down, presses down, presses down in an indescribable way.  All the people you see have lost sons or brothers; mourning becomes visible over a wider area all the time; people talk of nothing else; all the books are about the war; ordinary social life is suspended—­people are visibly growing older.  And there are some aspects of it that are incomprehensible.  For instance, a group of American and English military men and correspondents were talking with me yesterday—­men who have been on both sides—­in Germany and Belgium and in France—­and they say that the Germans in France alone have had 750,000 men killed.  The Allies have lost 400,000 to 500,000.  This in France only.  Take the other fighting lines and there must already be a total of 2,000,000 killed.  Nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of the world.  A flood or a fire or a wreck which has killed 500 has often shocked all mankind.  Yet we know of this enormous slaughter and (in a way) are not greatly moved.  I don’t know of a better measure of the brutalizing effect of war—­it’s bringing us to take a new and more inhuman standard to measure events by.

As for any political or economic reckoning—­that’s beyond any man’s ability yet.  I see strings of incomprehensible figures that some economist or other now and then puts in the papers, summing up the loss in pounds sterling.  But that means nothing because we have no proper measure of it.  If a man lose $10 or $10,000 we can grasp that.  But when nations shoot away so many million pounds sterling every day—­that means nothing to me.  I do know that there’s going to be no money on this side the world for a long time to buy American securities.  The whole world is going to be hard up in consequence of the bankruptcy of these nations, the inestimable destruction of property, and the loss of productive men.  I fancy that such a change will come in the economic and financial readjustment of the world as nobody can yet guess at.—­Are Americans studying these things?  It is not only South-American trade; it is all sorts of manufacturers; it is financial influence—­if we can quit spending and wasting, and husband our earnings.  There’s no telling the enormous advantages we shall gain if we are wise.

The extent to which the German people have permitted themselves to be fooled is beyond belief.  As a little instance of it, I enclose a copy of a letter that Lord Bryce gave me, written by an English woman who did good social work in her early life—­a woman of sense—­and who married a German merchant and has spent her married life in Germany.  She is a wholly sincere person.  This letter she wrote to a friend in England and—­she believes every word of it.  If she believes it, the great mass of the Germans believe similar things.  I have heard of a number of such letters—­sincere,