miles away and therefore as not demanding any specially energetic or expeditious efforts. Not until we had been engaged in it all but a year did we begin to make our presence really felt. It was on March 21, 1918, that the Battle of Picardy, the Beginning of the End, began; and one week later General Pershing placed under Marshal Foch's command all the American forces then in France. They were not many, but they counted; and thereafter their numbers were swiftly swelled, as the "bridge of ships," protected by the British fleet and by our own, bore an incessant stream of American soldiers flowing eastward, ever eastward. The summer saw scenes of glory: Belleau Wood, ChateauThierry, the second Marne, the St. Mihiel salient; until American guns were thundering at the walls of Metz, and from the Alps to the Silver Streak the "long battle came rolling on the foe." At the beginning of November there were 750,000 American soldiers fighting in the Argonne, and a million more behind their lines. On the morning of November 11, 1918, the Day of Days in the world's modern history, the United States had in France 78,391 officers and 1,881,376 men.

On that day, Germany surrendered.

It had cost us approximately 55,000 men killed and 180,000 wounded and missing; lighter losses by far than even little Belgium or Serbia suffered. Great Britain's casualties were more than thirty times as great as ours—3,049,991, of whom 658,665 were killed outright. French casualties were 2,719,642, of whom 559,612 were killed. The losses of Germany are still largely a matter of estimate. Well informed and conservative reckoning puts the total in killed, wounded and prisoners at nearly if not quite 7,000,000, of whom at least 1,800,000 were killed. The money cost of the war to all the belligerents has thus far been approximately $200,000,000,000, or fifty times that of our Civil War. Of this cost probably one-eighth has fallen upon the United States, and by the time the treaty of peace is signed and all our troops are brought back home, our expense account will probably equal thirty billions.

A stupendous cost, that, in life and treasure; from one point of view to gratify the insane ambition of a criminal paranoiac, from another to abolish the fiction of "divine right" and to confirm forever the rights of man. Are they confirmed forever? We shall see what answer the Peace

Conference essays to make to that question. "Go forth, my son, and see with what wisdom the world applies its greatest and its costliest lesson."

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE

SCARCELY any phase of the post-bellum situation in Central Europe is more auspicious than the impending dissolution of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the formation in their stead of a more or less numerous group of separate states. We refer now not to the creation of independent states from the non-Teutonic and non-Magyar peoples long held in bondage, but to the division of Teutonic Germany and perhaps of Austria, too, into such commonwealths. Such a consummation is devoutly to be desired, for generous as well as for retributive and prudential reasons.

Without mere exultation over the internecine quarrels among our enemies, however, there is this serious and important cause for gratification, that the dissolution of the German Empire abates the chief menace to the peace of the world. We must now recognize the fact, which formerly we tried so hard not to perceive, that from the very beginning that empire meant war. It had its origin in war. The war was provoked and fought for the sake of forming the empire, and then reciprocally the empire was formed and maintained for the sake of war. It is aggressive war of conquest and rapacity, too, with which the empire and before it the Prussian kingdom have been intimately and inseparably identified. We must bear in mind the historic fact that every war waged by Prussia or by the empire of which Prussia has been the head, from the time of Frederick miscalled the Great to the present has been a war deliberately and treacherously begun by that Power for the sake of seizing a neighbor's territory or exacting tribute, or both.

It is an interesting historical fact that Prussia, or the Hohenzollerns, did not seek and indeed would not accept the headship of the German Empire until that kingdom had grown so strong as to be able completely to dominate that organization. We must remember that away back in 1848 the German people through their chosen representatives offered the imperial crown to the King of Prussia, and that he declined it. Why? For two reasons. One was that the offer

came from the people and therefore if he had accepted it he would have been recognizing the right of the people to select their own rulers. He preferred to wait until he, or his successor, could take the crown without reference to the people, and could claim a "divine right." The other reason was, that Prussia was not yet big enough and strong enough to dominate the empire. He preferred to wait until in a couple of wars waged for the purpose Prussia could be aggrandized by the annexation of the Danish Provinces, Hanover, part of Saxony, and various other states, so that "German Empire would be merely a euphemism for "Greater Prussia." It is interesting to recall that the then King of Prussia was the crowned criminal who distinguished himself with the official dictum: "All written constitutions are only scraps of paper "; thus giving to his last successor the cue for applying to international treaties the same contemptuous epithet.

But we must not blind ourselves to the great achievements of Germans in past generations and the immense contributions which they have made to human knowledge, human progress and human pleasure. But neither must we forget the fact that these things were done, and the great men who performed them were born and flourished, during the ages when there was a German Empire in name only, and when the Teutonic race was divided into a multitude of small states. Petty and contemptible as were those Dukedoms and Principalities from a military or political point of view, they developed culture, they developed men of spiritual vision, they achieved those deeds which caused it to be said that while France (under Napoleon) ruled the empire of the land and England (under Nelson and his successors) the empire of the sea, God had given to Germany the empire of the air— that is, of the mind and spirit. But those days passed with the coming of the empire.

The last of the true intellectual and spiritual leaders of Germany disappeared at the middle of the last century; some dying and leaving no successors, others fleeing from the hardening hand of despotism and finding refuge in America, where many of them contributed an element of sterling worth to our mixed population. Not in threescore years has Germany produced one great spirtual leader or indeed one great and free intellectual leader. Her achievements in material science, industry and commerce have indeed been enormous; yet in them she has chiefly appropriated and

adopted as her own the inventions and discoveries of others, her own original work and initiative being contemptibly small. We venture to hope that, freed from the deadly incubus of the sordid, predatory and despotic Hohenzollern empire, the German mind and soul will have "a new birth of freedom" and will measurably regain that former high estate which once made them no small part of the light of the world. If so, the dissolution of the Empire will be no less beneficent to the Germans themselves than to the rest of the world which it frees from the menace of further attempts at conquest.

But whatever is done will not and cannot alter to the extent of one iota the relations between Germany and the rest of the world arising out of the war, nor lessen by so much as the small dust in the balance the responsibility of Germany for the crimes against international law and against humanity that have been committed. The indictment rests, and the judgment will stand, against Germany as it existed at the beginning of and through the war. It will make no difference whether Germany remains a unit as an empire or a republic, or is dissolved into a number of separate states. The penalty of the war must be paid just the same. No state can escape its share by seceding from the empire, any more than the Kaiser could escape responsibility by absconding and abdicating.

Nor can any German state or any part of the German people by leaving and repudiating the empire establish any valid claim to moral sympathy or to rehabilitation in the esteem of mankind. We may recognize a difference between Bavaria and Prussia in favor of the former; we may agree that the Bavarian Government in charging the Imperial Government with lying at the outbreak of the war; and we may regard with approval and with hope the withdrawal of Bavaria and other states from the empire, if they do withdraw. The damning fact remains, however, that Bavaria and all the rest stood firmly with Prussia in the empire during the war; that the Bavarian Government was privy to and acquiesced in the Prussian lies which it now denounces; that Bavaria and all the German states shared willingly in the war and shared eagerly in its loot; and that not one of them would have thought of withdrawing from the empire if the empire had been victorious in the war. So too Hungary stood with Austria in the war, and would have stood with her to the end if Austria had been successful.

We shall welcome the disappearance of the despotic and militaristic German Empire and the rise of a group of free and independent German states, and we shall hope that thus the Germany of the Hohenzollerns and Bernhardis and Tirpitzes and Hindenburgs will be transformed into the Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing and Richter. But the former is the Germany with which we have practically to deal, and we shall deal with it inexorably, regardless of whether it mends its ways or remains incorrigible and contumacious in its sins. Repentance might indeed command consideration and commutation of sentence if our policy toward Germany were merely punitive. But it is not. It is not intended to demand one cent of punitive fine, but merely reparatory indemnity. The purpose is to restore the victim, not to punish the criminal, and that purpose cannot be balked in any degree by any eleventh hour reformation on the part of Germany or of any of its members. On the contrary, we must hold it to be essential, in order to make Germany's repentance real and worthy of recognition, that she "bring forth fruits meet for repentance"; and such fruits must comprise not merely renunciation of the criminal empire but also payment of the fullest possible indemnity for the empire's crimes.

ARE WE TO HAVE A "REPTILE PRESS"?

THE question should be uncalled for. It should be so superfluous as to be offensive. But it has been forced upon us by recent incidents and utterances in a way which it is impossible to ignore. Hint after hint has been given, step after step has been taken, until at last the culmination is seemingly reached in the direct suggestion-from a source which we are not prepared to identify but which was certainly not devoid of plausibility of the organization of an "official press." Are we, then, to have a "reptile press as the consummate flower of a paternal government?

We cannot ignore the significance of the President's action more than two years ago, when he abandoned the long established and salutary practice of giving collective interviews to the representatives of the press in Washington. His predecessors had been glad to show themselves to the assembled correspondents, sometimes as often as every day, and to