is to these permanent qualities, more even
than to their thirty years' military and economic preparation, that
they owe their many successes. The cynicism and ruthlessness of our
arch-enemy should not be allowed to blind us to his enterprise, his
stoicism, his meticulous applications of the law of cause and effect.
These are among his most valuable assets, and unless we have solid
advantages of our own to set against and outweigh them, our appeals to
the justice of our cause and our denunciations of his wicked designs
will avail us nothing. It is to our interest to seek out and note
whatever strength is inherent in himself or his methods and to
appropriate that. The struggle will ultimately be decided by the
superiority of equipment, material and moral, which one side possesses
over the other. As for the conceptions of public law and international
right which the antagonists severally stand for, they must be gauged
by quite other standards than heavy guns and asphyxiating gases. It is
not impossible that in the course of time, and by dint of reciprocal
action and reaction, the German views may be sufficiently modified and
moralized to render possible the usual process of assimilation with
which the history of speculative ideas and social movements has
rendered us familiar. Meanwhile, truth compels us to admit that part
at least of the western system is being overtaken by decay, and stands
in need of speedy and thorough renovation.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FINAL ISSUE

To come victorious out of the present ordeal--if, indeed, that be
possible with the leaders, principles, methods and strivings that
still characterize us--will not suffice to effect the triumph of our
cause. The present, momentous though it be, cannot with safety be
separated in thought or action from the future. The struggle will go
on relentlessly after this campaign until one side has worsted the
other definitively. And it is for that struggle that it behoves us to
prepare while the war is still at its height.

The Germans, true to their practice, have set us the example. Their
curious combinations for dividing the Allies while negotiating their
own schemes for reorganizing political Europe have been worked out in
almost every detail. Their projects for creating a vast and powerful
economic organization, to be known as Central Europe,[144] with its
first appendix in the Balkan Peninsula, have been carefully woven, and
will be duly embellished whe