68,000,000. In the years immediately preceding the war the annual
increase was about 850,000, of whom an insignificant proportion
emigrated.[1] This great increase was only rendered possible by a
far-reaching transformation of the economic structure of the country.
From being agricultural and mainly self-supporting, Germany transformed
herself into a vast and complicated industrial machine, dependent for
its working on the equipoise of many factors outside Germany as well as
within. Only by operating this machine, continuously and at full blast,
could she find occupation at home for her increasing population and the
means of purchasing their subsistence from abroad. The German machine
was like a top which to maintain its equilibrium must spin ever faster
and faster.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which grew from about 40,000,000 in 1890
to at least 50,000,000 at the outbreak of war, the same tendency was
present in a less degree, the annual excess of births over deaths being
about half a million, out of which, however, there was an annual
emigration of some quarter of a million persons.

To understand the present situation, we must apprehend with vividness
what an extraordinary center of population the development of the
Germanic system had enabled Central Europe to become. Before the war the
population of Germany and Austria-Hungary together not only
substantially exceeded that of the United States, but was about equal to
that of the whole of North America. In these numbers, situated within a
compact territory, lay the military strength of the Central Powers. But
these same numbers--for even the war has not appreciably diminished
them[2]--if deprived of the means of life, remain a hardly less danger
to European order.