from an economic standpoint. All these specious arguments on the
precipitating causes of the war can be but for the display of brilliant
forensic oratory and matchless diction. Let us thrust aside in these
dark moments of peril and horror all subterfuge.

England, overburdened with taxation, was on the verge of civil war.
Russia, whose masses were overridden roughshod by a bureaucracy
weighting down the peasants with onerous national burdens, expected
sooner or later the cataclysmic upheaval with which the Nihilistic
societies have long been threatening its tyrannical Government. France,
seriously financially embarrassed because of crop impoverishment and
bad foreign investments in Brazil, Russia, and the Balkans, was subject
to continued internal political upheavals, with ever-changing Ministries
and a growing Socialist Party.

Austria, "the ramshackle empire," was in danger of disintegrating from a
variety of causes, not the least of which was the infusibility of its
racially different elements. Germany, in a blind race for commercial
supremacy, suffered from industrial overproduction, thus creating an
unhealthy financial condition which fortified the Socialist Party to an
extent which threatened her imperialistic form of government itself.

So these monarchies whose days were numbered, because of dissatisfaction
at the waste and extravagance of a world gone mad with national excesses
committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our
modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning
fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war
in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine.

GEORGE E. BERNHEIMER.