people.  They mobilized twenty-five million men.  Six million of them are dead.  The Czar was overthrown, a new government was set up, one of conservative socialism, and that was swept aside and a group of impractical socialists put in its stead, and where is Russia now?  Broken to bits, its population dying of hunger, its industries unworked, its soil untilled, and Germany coming on with her great feet, stamping down the few who are brave enough to interpose themselves between Germany and her end.  If we were to quit, Germany would do to us, or try to do to us, what she has done to Russia.

If there ever was a real defensive war it is the one that we are engaged in, and we must sacrifice, and sacrifice, and sacrifice, not merely for the world’s sake but for our own sake.  Ned is in France.  He went through England.  He tells me that everybody is serious, solemn, purposeful.  They would rather all die than live under Germany’s mastery of the world.

The President is being bitterly criticized because he has taken every opportunity to talk of terms and of ways out, but I think he is right.  He must make the people of the world feel that we are not foolishly, and in a headstrong way, fighting to get anything for ourselves or for anybody else, except the chance to live our own lives.  And we will show these Germans something.  Our capacity to produce aeroplanes is still altogether unrealized, and we will have great guns a few feet apart along the entire front.  We can bomb German harbors where submarines are, and are made—­that’s the work that Ned is going in for,—­and we will hold that western line until every resource is exhausted.  And we will go through it one of these days, perhaps not this year.  But we must go through it or else American ships will live on the sea by consent of Germany, and Canada will become German territory.  This is no dream.  Give Germany Paris and Calais and she can exact terms from England.  Why should she not ask for Canada?  And give Germany Canada and what becomes of the United States?  An army of Germans on our border, 5,000,000 men in arms in the United States always, the army and navy budget taking thirty or forty per cent of every man’s income.  Who wants to live in such a country?  We are fighting the greatest war that history has ever seen, not merely in numbers but in principle.  We are fighting to get rid of the most hateful survivals from the past.  The overlord, the brusque and arrogant soldier, is the dominating factor in society and the government, the turning of men’s thoughts away from the pursuit of the things of art and beauty and social beneficence into the one channel of making everything serve the military arm of the nation.