At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is feeling the
pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitually
parsimonious, and instinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which
is hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only begun to feel
the stress. She has probably suffered economically no more than have
Holland or Switzerland, and Italy and Japan have certainly suffered
less. All these three great countries are still full of men, of gear, of
saleable futures. In every part of the globe Great Britain has colossal
investments. She has still to apply the great principle of conscription
not only to her sons but to the property of her overseas investors and
of her landed proprietors. She has not even looked yet at the German
financial expedients of a year ago. She moves reluctantly, but surely,
towards such a thoroughness of mobilisation. There need be no doubt that
she will completely socialise herself, completely reorganise her whole
social and economic structure sooner than lose this war. She will do it
clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, with much
trickery on the part of her lawyers, and much baseness on the part of
her landlords; but she will do it not so slowly as a logical mind might
anticipate. She will get there a little late, expensively, but still in
time....

The German group, I reckon, therefore, will become exhausted first. I
think, too, that Germany will, as a nation, feel and be aware of what is
happening to her sooner than any other of the nations that are sharing
in this process of depletion. In 1914 the Germans were reaping the
harvest of forty years of economic development and business enterprise.
Property and plenty were new experiences, and a generation had grown up
in whose world a sense of expansion and progress was normal. There
existed amongst it no tradition of the great hardship of war, such as