. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped,
by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath
they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their
own country. And I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and
Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many
years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as
the dominant military power in the world. No doubt the heroic remedy for
this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their
officers and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and
make a revolution in the towns; and though this is not at present a
practicable solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or
something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army
if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are
opening to the fact that in murdering its neighbours it is biting off
its nose to vex its face, besides riveting the intolerable yoke of
Militarism and Junkerism more tightly than ever on its own neck. But
there is no chance--or, as our Junkers would put it, no danger--of our
soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense. They have enlisted
voluntarily; they are not defeated nor likely to be; their
communications are intact and their meals reasonably punctual; they are
as pugnacious as their officers; and in fighting Prussia they are
fighting a more deliberate, conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent,
and dangerous Militarism than their own. Still, even for a voluntary
professional army, that possibility exists, just as for the civilian
there is a limit beyond which taxation, bankruptcy, privation, terror,
and inconvenience cannot be pushed without revolution or a social
dissolution more ruinous than submission to conquest. I mention all
this, not to make myself wantonly disagreeable, but because military
persons, thinking naturally that there is nothing like leather, are now
talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution like the
Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's, forgetting, I think, that the
rate of consumption maintained by modern military operations is much
greater relatively to the highest possible rate of production
maintainable under the restrictions of war time than it has ever been
before.

*The Day of Judgment.*

The European settlement at the end of the war will be effected, let us
hope, not by