that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.

The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have
compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable
of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months
Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable,
even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the
German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane
than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has
replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies.
One of the astonishing revelations of national psychology unfolded in
the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.
For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an
ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has
come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or
energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their
home and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the menace of his
barbarism.

That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German
lesson faster than his allies.

* * * * *

What everybody knows by this time, and in America is repeating with
sickening fluency, is that Germany is "efficient," not only militarily
efficient, but socially and economically efficient--which these days
amounts to the same thing. Germany is "organized" both for peace and
war more efficiently than any other nation in the world. The two terms
that this war has driven into all men's consciousness are "efficiency"