gold except as it can be
made useful. They prefer to hold interest-bearing promises to pay
gold. To-day England holds the keys to the world's gold outside of
Germany, and I have a suspicion that she is not averse to American
cotton going into Germany if it takes out the gold in return.

Germany is young as a banking, trading, and industrial nation. England
insists that both men and gold must be at work. In Germany the gold
reserve must be maintained and, with foreign trade cut off, men must be
idle. In England both the gold and the men are at work. Labor was
never better employed in England than to-day. The English policy in
this wartime is to fill every idle hand with productive industry; to
work the machinery day and night; and to keep the gold in England so
far as is necessary and to keep it circulating in England. The
national loss begins when you lose either the golden days of labor, the
gold of the sunshine that makes the harvest of the valleys or the gold
of finance and commerce.

When the Germans fought the French in 1870, 60 per cent of her people
lived on the land. Now, forty-four years later, she is fighting the
whole world, but only 30 per cent of her people live by the fruit of
the soil.

That is the simple answer as to why Germany, a country besieged, cannot
win against the world.

Germany has no sea-expansive ability, no foreign credit, no
international reserves to carry out an offensive warfare. Her only
possibility of success lay in a sudden and decisive march over the rich
territory of France, the possession of Paris, and a huge indemnity tax
levy as in 1871. The rest might have been easy. Hence the supreme
military necessity for a quick drive through Belgium, the only open
road to Paris. The size of the crime in Belgium has shown the supreme
financial necessity. There was no military necessity for the outrage
against the free Belgian people--only the economic necessity.

There is nothing left for Germany but a defensive warfare, a warfare
now conducted upon foreign soil just over her own borders--the burden
upon the enemy, the supply base near at hand.

Germany must reduce and conserve her shell-fire. The Krupp works have
no ability to turn out daily the number of shells that Germany was
exploding, and the United States in its own arsenals could not in a
year make a week's supply of shells at the rate at which they were
being exploded from Switzerland to the English Channel.

G