nnot
be qualified without epithets which it had better be understood than
expressed.

Looking back upon the results of the first twenty months of the war
and upon the more obvious causes to which they may fairly be
ascribed, one is struck less forcibly by the military and economic
unpreparedness of the Allies for the inevitable conflict than by their
inaccessibility to the ground ideas on which Germany set her hopes of
success. The two groups of belligerents stood intellectually on
different planes. The Teuton's faith was implicit in the law of
causality, in the necessity of contemplating the vast problem as a
whole, of adjusting means to ends, of co-operation at home and
co-ordination of means abroad. The methods of the Allies were drawn
from a limited range of experience which was no longer applicable to
the new conditions, and their hopes rested on a series of isolated
exertions put forth temporarily under stress of exceptional pressure.

They made noble sacrifices for the cause of liberty and justice.
Pacific by temperament and conviction, they resignedly accepted
military discipline as a temporary expedient, a purgatorial ordeal,
and went about the while with a sense of displacement, the longing of
exiles to get back. Spurred by stress of circumstance, they achieved
more than foresight and insight had led them to design but far less
than their optimism had encouraged them to anticipate. Step by step
they were driven by hard reality to widen their angle of vision, to
extend their schemes, and to concert certain measures in common. The
meeting of the three Finance Ministers in Paris was followed by the
Councils of the allied generals, by the combined expedition to the
Dardanelles, and by the nationalization of the manufacture of
munitions in each of the allied countries. And all these innovations
were moves in the right direction. But they were made as temporary
expedients under pressure of outward events, and it is still to the
future that one looks for tokens of statesmanlike intuition which from
a comprehensive survey of the problem in its entirety will draw the
materials wherewith to weave a coherent scheme of general action and
permanent co-operation.

Events travelled fast in the month of July 1915, and their effect on
the Allies was depressing. In Russia the Austro-Germans were advancing
steadily against Riga and Warsaw, where a battle which experts
accounted the most sanguinary and momentous in the war wa