utbreak of
this horrible war. She has no more right to make a grievance of these
consequences than the Allies have a right to complain of Germany's
superior preparedness and the greater perfection of her instruments of
war.

To believe American public opinion influenced by the profits which
come to this country from the supply of arms, is to misunderstand
completely the American mode of thought and feeling. Moreover these
profits go to very few pockets, and public opinion here being anything
but unduly complacent towards large corporations and capitalists is by
no means inclined to view with favour the gathering in of these huge
profits by a very limited number of individuals and concerns.

You quote with approval General von Schlieffen's remark that "in war,
after all, the only thing that matters is those silly old victories."

You would surely not say that in the individual's daily struggle for
existence or in competitive industrial strife, "the only thing that
matters" is success. Rather you would be the first to grant, as you
have always demonstrated in your acts, that there are certain ethical
limitations laid down by the conscience and the moral conceptions of
humanity, which must be respected in the struggle for success, however
keen, even though the very existence of the individual and the
maintenance of wife and child be at stake.

Schlieffen's utterance, in the meaning which your quotation gives it,
throws overboard everything that civilization and the humanitarian
progress of centuries has accomplished towards lessening the cruelty,
the hatred and the suffering engendered by war, and towards protecting
non-combatants, as far as possible, from its terrors. It is tantamount
to the doctrine of the fanatical Jesuit: "The end justifies the
means."

And it is something akin to this very doctrine which Germany has made
her own and applied in her conduct of this war as she has done in none
of her previous wars. _The conviction that everything, literally
everything, which tends to ensure victory is permitted to her, and
indeed called for, has now evidently assumed the power of a national
obsession._ Thus, the violation of innocent Belgium in defiance of
solemn treaty; the unspeakable treatment inflicted on her people; the
bombardment, without warning, of open places (which Germany was the
first to practise); the destruction of great monuments of art which
belonged to all humankind, as in Rheims, and Louvain; the