* * * * *

"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the
lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish
babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates
humanity. All these are changing ideas."

The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with
him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a
reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into
a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts
and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor
his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the
world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly
souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war,
it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear
so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed,
to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is
greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared
army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism
of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic
echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness
and barbarism.

* * * * *

One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less
than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the
French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German