democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive
ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of
entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to remove
democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is
appallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for national organization
socializes the nation capable of it; or, to put the matter more truly,
if the socializing process had anticipated the war--as it had in Great
Britain--the ability to complete it under stress is the test of a
democratic nation; and hence the test of democracy, since the socializing
process becomes international. Britain has stood the test, even from the
old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent that no
democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is socialized. After
the war she will probably lead all other countries in a sane and
scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that not in spite of
her liberalism, but because of it, she has met military Germany on her
own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her one better. In
1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a mere handful of men
whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men and brave
officers, indeed! But at present it is a war organization of an
excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no space to enter
into a description of the amazing system, of the network of arteries
converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it feeds and
clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with newspapers and
tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentment compatible with the
conditions under which he has to live. The number of shells flung at the
enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that fire them. I should
like to tell with what swiftness, under the stress of battle, the wounded
are hurried back to the coast and even to England itself. I may not
state the thousands carried on leave every day across the channel and
back again--in spite of submarines. But I went one day through Saint