1916-26 openly and controllably. The current bankruptcy and liquidation
and the coming reconstruction of the economic system of Europe will go
on in a quite unprecedented amount of light. We shall see and know what
is happening much more clearly than anything of the kind has ever been
seen before.

It is not only that people will have behind them, as a light upon what
is happening, the experiences and discussions of a hundred years, but
that the international situation will be far plainer than it has ever
been. This war has made Germany the central fact in all national affairs
about the earth. It is not going to destroy Germany, and it seems
improbable that either defeat or victory, or any mixture of these, will
immediately alter the cardinal fact of Germany's organised
aggressiveness.

The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany, That will
only end when the results of fifty years of aggressive education in
Germany have worn away. This will be so plain that the great bulk of
people everywhere will not only see their changing economic
relationships far more distinctly than such things have been seen
hitherto, but that they will see them as they have never been seen
before, definitely orientated to the threat of German world
predominance. The landlord who squeezes, the workman who strikes and
shirks, the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that
most people know, that what he does is done, not under an empty,
regardless heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy and in
disregard of a continuous urgent necessity for unity.

So far we have followed this speculation upon fairly firm ground, but
now our inquiry must plunge into a jungle of far more difficult and