and "organization." We in America, prone to admire the sheen of tin,
have bowed down in greater admiration than any other people to German
"efficiency." For efficiency values in the operations of life are just
the ones we are most capable of appreciating, although our government
and general social organization remain as lamentably inefficient as,
say, the English. But being a business people we are fitted to admire
business qualities above all others. The German army, the German state
are magnificently run businesses! To some of us, however, the term
"efficiency" has become nauseating because it has been associated with
so much else that we loathe from the bottom of our souls. If we cannot
have an "efficient" civilization without paying the price for it that
Germany has paid,--the price of humanity, of beauty, the price of her
soul,--let us return to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian
village!

Germany under a highly autocratic system of government has created
a social machine of unexampled and formidable efficiency. The German
realized before his rivals that war had become, like all other human
activities, a matter of business on a huge scale. And he had prepared
not merely the special instruments of war, but also the tributary
business on this scale of modern magnitude: he had converted his state
into a powerful war machine. All this which is now commonplace has
become more glaringly evident to us onlookers because of the lamentable
failure of England and Russia especially to meet the requirements of
the new business. So incapable do they seem of learning the German
lesson that to some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed already
to disaster. Certainly the English and the Russians have justified many
of those bitter German taunts.

It has not been so with France. The French also were caught