ned by the 15-inch guns of the
_Queen Elizabeth_ moved the German Admiralty to substitute these for
the 12-inch guns already adopted. Two swift cruisers, 12 small
submarines and 24 larger ones of 1200 tons displacement, with a speed
of 16 knots under water, 20 on the surface and a radius of action of
3000 miles--were among the results of a single year's activity.

CHAPTER XVII

GERMANY'S RESOURCEFULNESS

And our enemies' resourcefulness and power of adaptation is of a piece
with their capacity for work. When war was declared and foreign trade
arrested, numerous German factories underwent a quick transformation.
Silk-works began to turn out bandages and lint; velvet works produced
materials for tents; umbrella makers took to manufacturing rain-proof
cloth; the output of sewing-machine factories was changed to shrapnel;
piano manufacturers became makers of cartridges. Paper producers
supplied the War Office with paper-made blankets. For copper, when the
supply began to grow short, nickelled iron was quickly substituted.
Sugar was employed to obtain the spirit which had to take the place of
benzine. And the upshot of these transformations is that the orders
received for military needs exceed those which would in normal
conditions of exportation have been placed by foreign customers with
German industry. The goods traffic on German railways, which had
fallen to 41 per cent. during the first month of the war, has since
gone up to 96 per cent. Those achievements are not merely noteworthy
in themselves, they are ominously symptomatic.

A German professor, writing to a friend imprisoned in France,
commented in passing upon these qualifications of his countrymen in a
letter which M. Joseph Reinach soon afterwards gave to the public. One
passage in that document is worth quoting. The professor holds that
even if the worst comes to the worst, Germany can always conclude a
"white peace" which will leave her the formidable glory of having held
the whole world in check, will consolidate her prestige in Europe and
enable her, twenty years hence, when she has made good her losses, to
establish permanently her dominion. "My confidence is based on German
patriotism, on German sense of discipline, on German genius for
organization. But it is founded above all else on our enemies'
incapacity for organization. Ah, if our adversaries could enhance the
worth of their resources by acquiring our gifts of initiative and
method, we s