suppressed. Moreover, that he may be impoverished once and for all and
the aggressor enriched, his towns must be put to ransom, pillaged, and
burned. Above all must the war be short, not only in order that the
economic life of Germany might not suffer too much, but further, and
chiefly, because her military power lacked that consciousness of a
right superior to force by which she could sustain and recuperate her
energies. Her moral force, being only the pride which comes from
material force, would be exposed to the same vicissitudes as this
latter: in proportion as the one was being expended the other would be
used up. Time for moral force to become used up must not be given. The
machine must deliver its blow all at once. And this it could do by
terrorizing the population, and so paralysing the nation. To achieve
that end, no scruple must be suffered to embarrass the play of its
wheels. Hence a system of atrocities prepared in advance--a system as
sagaciously put together as the machine itself.

Such is the explanation of the spectacle before us. "Scientific
barbarism," "systematic barbarism," are phrases we have heard. Yes,
barbarism reinforced by the capture of civilization. Throughout the
course of the history we have been following there is, as it were, the
continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and
mechanism, of debased moral materialism.

Many years hence, when the reaction of the past shall have left only
the grand outline in view, this perhaps is how a philosopher will
speak of it. He will say that the idea, peculiar to the nineteenth
century, of employing science in the satisfaction of our material
wants had given a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts
and had equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he
had made during the thousands of years he had lived on the earth. Each