parties. Should Germany prevail in her contest with England, the result
would certainly be to draw the centre of exchanges to the eastward, and
thereby to throw the United States, more or less, into eccentricity; but
were England to prevail the United States would tend to become the centre
toward which all else would gravitate. Hence, perfectly automatically,
from a time as long ago as the Spanish War, the balance, as indicated by
the weight of the United States, hung unevenly as between Germany and
England, Germany manifesting something approaching to repulsion toward the
attraction of the United States while Great Britain manifested favor. And
from subsequent evidence, this phenomenon would seem to have been thus
early developed, because the economic centre of gravity of our modern
civilization had already traversed the Atlantic, and by so doing had
decided the fortunes of Germany in advance, in the greater struggle about
to come. Consider attentively what has happened. In April, 1917, when the
United States entered the conflict, Germany, though it had suffered
severely in loss of men, was by no means exhausted. On the contrary, many
months subsequently she began her final offensive, which she pushed so
vigorously that she penetrated to within some sixty miles of Paris. But
there, at Chateau Thierry, on the Marne, she first felt the weight of the
economic shift. She suddenly encountered a division of American troops
advancing to oppose her. Otherwise the road to Paris lay apparently open.
The American troops were raw levies whom the Germans pretended to despise.
And yet, almost without making a serious effort at prolonged attack, the
Germans began their retreat, which only ended with their collapse and the
fall of the empire.

A similar phenomenon occurred once before in German history, and it is not
an uncommon incident in human experience when nature has already made, or
is on the brink of making, a change in the seat of the economic centre of
the world. In the same way, when Constantine won the battle of the Milvian