now turned into German militarism, had become one with industrialism, it was the enemy’s industry, his commerce, the sources of his wealth, his wealth itself, as well as his military power, which war must now make the end in view.  His factories must be destroyed that his competition may be suppressed.  Moreover, that he may be impoverished once and for all and the aggressor enriched, his towns must be put to ransom, pillaged, and burned.  Above all must the war be short, not only in order that the economic life of Germany might not suffer too much, but further, and chiefly, because her military power lacked that consciousness of a right superior to force by which she could sustain and recuperate her energies.  Her moral force, being only the pride which comes from material force, would be exposed to the same vicissitudes as this latter:  in proportion as the one was being expended the other would be used up.  Time for moral force to become used up must not be given.  The machine must deliver its blow all at once.  And this it could do by terrorizing the population, and so paralysing the nation.  To achieve that end, no scruple must be suffered to embarrass the play of its wheels.  Hence a system of atrocities prepared in advance—­a system as sagaciously put together as the machine itself.

Such is the explanation of the spectacle before us.  “Scientific barbarism,” “systematic barbarism,” are phrases we have heard.  Yes, barbarism reinforced by the capture of civilization.  Throughout the course of the history we have been following there is, as it were, the continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of debased moral materialism.

Many years hence, when the reaction of the past shall have left only the grand outline in view, this perhaps is how a philosopher will speak of it.  He will say that the idea, peculiar to the nineteenth century, of employing science in the satisfaction of our material wants had given a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts and had equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on the earth.  Each new machine being for man a new organ—­an artificial organ which merely prolongs the natural organs—­his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body.  From this disproportion there issued the problems, moral, social, international, which most of the nations endeavoured to solve by filling up the soulless void in the body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen.  Now, while mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, inferior powers—­I was going to say infernal powers—­plotted an inverse experience for mankind.  What would happen if the mechanical forces, which science had brought to a state of readiness for the service of man, should themselves take possession