treaties, protective tariffs, and financial progress.

It may be wondered that in our country, which is the home of the
protective tariff system and boasts its great prosperity therefrom,
there has been as yet no presentation of the business causes beneath
this war. Our great journalists are trained to find interesting,
picturesque, and saleable news features from big events. Details of
war's atrocities and destructions are to most people of the greatest
human interest, and rightly so. As a country we have no international
policy, and European politics and policies have never interested us.

Germany is buttressed by tariffs and commercial treaties on every side.
Years ago I was told in Europe that the commercial treaties wrested
from France in 1871 were of more value to Germany than the billion
dollars of indemnity she took as her price to quit Paris. But I did
not realize until I was abroad this winter how European countries had
warred by tariffs, and that Germany and Russia were preparing for a
great clash at arms over the renewal of commercial and tariff treaties
which expire within two years, and which had been forced by Germany
upon Russia during the Japanese War.

German "Kultur" means German progress, commercially and financially.
German progress is by tariffs and commercial treaties. Her armies, her
arms, and her armaments, are to support this "Kultur" and this progress.

I believe I have told the story as it has never been told before. But
the facts cannot be drawn forth and properly set in review without some
presentation of the spirit of the peoples of the European nations.

If all the nations of Europe were of one language, the spirit, the soul