the lay observer
in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the
fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive
blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with
England still in command of the sea?

The significant generic lesson of the war is not in the power of
artillery, but the power of all material organization, when nations
set out to gain their ends by force: its military lesson was that
both sides had pretty well followed sound policy considering the
situation, despite armchair critics who knew nothing of inside
facts.

Europe was spending $100,000,000 or more a day in the business of
destruction--of life and of property. A broad belt of ruins spread
across France and Belgium for 450 miles; a broader one of 1,000
miles across Galicia and Russia. No nation engaged could be said to
be victorious except the Japanese. Japan had gained Kiao-chau;
strengthened her influence in China enormously, and was making
immense profits by working her arsenals and every plant at full
speed making munitions for Russia.

The United States at peace, preparing to make munitions as fast as
she could, and able to produce only 3,000 rifles a week for the
Allies on the 1st of December, 1915, and 5,000 a week March 1, 1916,
was enjoying an era of "boom" prosperity, thanks to the eager market
of nations whose own production was arrested while their workers
were at war. From the gloom of London and Paris, where men and women
had given up all luxuries, the transatlantic voyage brought you to
New York, which was the only gay capital in the world, enjoying all
the privileges of extravagance when money is plentiful.

WAR BY MACHINERY

This has been a war of machinery; but the old rule has been true
that development in any weapon of offense has been countered by
further development of means of defense. Nor is the theoretical
power of weapons ever equaled by their actual power when the test of
war comes. With self-preservation remaining the first law of nature,
man is in nothing so skillful as in avoiding the enemy's blows.

When one watches a 15-inch gun fired and hears its 2,000-pound shell
go screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action
is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that
shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But
the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and
merely make a crater in t