spinning and weaving industries. During the four years of their occupation the Germans willfully and methodically destroyed all that was in their power to destroy. In the cotton industry, the French lost more than two and a quarter million spindles and twenty thousand looms. Iron works, machine works also, were looted, the useful equipment engines, rolling mills, machine tools, even structural steel - having been taken away and utilized again in the iron works in Germany. Mines were flooded, the surface plants dynamited, the workmen's dwellings destroyed. It was estimated that altogether four billion dollars' worth of machinery would be needed to replace that destroyed or carried away.

Another two billion dollars would be required to replace the 250,000 destroyed buildings in France and to repair the 500,000 damaged buildings. Yet another two billions would have to be spent in repairing and replacing the used or destroyed public works in northern France: the Northern Railway alone had lost 1731 bridges and 338 stations. According to figures submitted by the Budget Committee to the Chamber of Deputies in December, 1918, the total damage in the north of France, including public works, buildings, furniture, industry, agriculture, and forestry, was estimated at sixty-four billion francs, or close to thirteen billion dollars.

Little Belgium had suffered at least two billion dollars' worth of outright destruction, and in addition there were two billions in thefts and taxes imposed by Germany. Of this amount, one and one-half billions represented the loss of machinery, tools, and stock. And if to the special losses of France and Belgium were added those of Poland, Russia, Rumania, Serbia, and Italy, a financial amount could be computed that would surpass human powers of comprehension. No financial amount could compensate the world for the destruction of such monuments as the cathedral of Rheims or the library of Louvain.

Finally, in sketching the cost of the Great War, we must not lose sight of the enormous destruction of the world's shipping. The total losses of the world's merchant tonnage from the beginning of the war to the end of October, 1918, through belligerent action and marine risk, was 15,053,786 gross tons, of which 9,031,828 were British. In December, 1918, Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the British Admiralty, stated that 5622 British merchant ships had been sunk during the war, of which 2475 had been sunk with their crews still on board and 3147 had been sunk and their crews set adrift. Fishing vessels to the number of

670 had been destroyed, and more than 15,000 men in the British merchant marine had lost their lives through enemy action. Emergency building had contributed much to the replacement of lost tonnage, but it had been accomplished at heavy expense. The United States bore its share of the losses. According to official figures published by the Bureau of Navigation, a total of 145 American merchant vessels, of 354,449 gross tons, with 775 lives, was lost through enemy acts from the beginning of the war to the cessation of hostilities on November II. Nineteen of the 145 vessels and sixty-seven of the 775 lives were lost through German torpedoes, mines, and gunfire prior to the entrance of the United States into the Great War.

LANDMARKS OF THE NEW ERA

The Great War could not do otherwise than close one era in human history and inaugurate another. Its expenditure of man-power and of natural resources was too prodigious to allow the world to be the same in 1920 as it had been in 1914. To be sure, much remained unchanged, for the human animal is too instinctively conservative, too naturally a victim of habit, to permit even a cataclysm like the Great War to wrench him quite loose from the institutions and customs of the past. Besides, many of the changes which attracted most attention during the five years' conflict were destined possibly to be only temporary, and others would seem perhaps to future generations humorously insignificant.

Yet after making full allowance for the numerous and important respects in which the world was not changed by the Great War, or was altered only temporarily, sufficiently striking novelties had already appeared in society and in government in 1920, as a direct or indirect outcome of the struggle, to justify us in describing them briefly as landmarks of a new era. these landmarks is found the significance of the Great War.

In

What was accomplished by five years' unprecedented outpouring of blood and treasure? The most obvious achievement, certainly the most universally impressive to contemporaries, was the staggering defeat of Germany and her associates. Germany, a militaristic Power par excellence, after frightening Europe for two generations by swashbuckling words and rattlings of heavy armor, had finally essayed by dint of methods most truly anarchic and by aid of confederates most terribly unscrupulous to impose her will and her Kultur upon the world; she had

ultimately taken the sword and sought to substitute for the system of free sovereign states and for the Balance of Power a world-order established and maintained on the basis of a Pax Romana Germanica. She had failed. The slogan of her Bernhardi - Weltmacht oder Niedergang - had been answered with Niedergang. Her dream of a Teutonized Mittel-Europa was dispelled. Turkey and Austria-Hungary were disrupted; Bulgaria and Germany herself were overwhelmed and crushed. The Great War, in this respect, confirmed an historical lesson of modern times, that no one state could or would be suffered to revive a Roman Empire; and William II of Germany proved to be but a shadow following the fated footsteps of Emperor Charles V, of Philip II of Spain, of Louis XIV of France, and of Napoleon Bonaparte. And with the downfall of the German Empire in the twentieth century, the free nations of the world breathed more easily.

Other achievements, incidental to this major one, deserve more extended consideration, for they, in the main, are positive and constructive, while the defeat of Germany in itself was merely destructive and negative. If we contrast the world in 1919 with the world in 1914, we discover the following facts and tendencies, significant outgrowths of the Great War and prophetic landmarks of a new era:

I. Nationalism. The Great War marked the all but universal triumph of the principle of nationalism, the doctrine that people who speak the same language and have the same historic traditions shall live together under a common polity of their own making. This principle, this doctrine, made rapid headway during the five years' strife; the Germans utilized it against Russia, and the Allies invoked it against the Central Empires. Generally the prophets and seers of the new era, unlike those of the eighteenth century, did not decry nationalism in behalf of an utopian "cosmopolitanism"; they extolled nationalism alike as desirable in itself and as a starting-point on the promised road to "internationalism.” Nor did the peacemakers of 1919-1920 repeat the mistake of their predecessors at Vienna a century earlier and ignore the unmistakable popular longings for national self-determination; on the other hand, they consecrated nationalism and wrote it into the public law of Europe.

Four great non-nationalistic states were dismembered Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and Germany, and one small state Montenegro disappeared. From the ruins

emerged nine newly independent national states — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hedjaz, Armenia, Finland, Ukrainia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Esthonia, while, through annexations and consolidations, the national unification was virtually completed of Italy, of Jugoslavia (Serbia), of Rumania, and of Greece; and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and of the Danishspeaking portion of Schleswig to Denmark redressed longstanding national grievances. Germany, deprived of Danes, French, and Poles, became for the first time in history genuinely a national state. Similarly, Russia became a homogeneous state of Great Russians; Hungary, a national state of Magyars; the Ottoman Empire, a small national state of Mohammedan Turks; and Austria, a minor but homogeneous Teuton colony on the Danube. Had German Austria been permitted to unite formally with Germany, all central Europe, except Switzerland, would have been completely reorganized on a national basis.

In recognizing the new nationalistic order of things, the diplomatists had the farsightedness to try to correct its intolerant tendencies by eliciting pledges from the new national states to preserve and respect religious, cultural, and economic rights of dissentient nationalities within their territories. In this war the Jews especially were, in Central Europe, placed more or less under international protection. What with the encouragement of Zionism in Palestine and with the international guarantee of their status in Europe, the Jews were signal gainers by the Great War.

In certain quarters of the world, particularly in Allied territories, national self-determination was temporarily checked or suppressed. Such was the situation in Ireland, where, though conditions were not essentially different from those in Czechoslovakia, the British Government thwarted the undoubted desire of the majority of the people to found a national republic and successfully combated their every effort to obtain a hearing at the Peace Congress. In Egypt, too, the British suppressed a national insurrection by force of arms in the spring of 1919. And in Albania the Italians set to work deliberately to stifle the spirit of independent nationalism. Yet in all these regions nationalistic agitation went forward; it troubled to an unusual degree the British in India and in Persia, the Japanese in Korea, and to some extent the Americans in the Philippines.

II. Change in Relative Importance of States. As an outcome of the Great War there was, on the one hand, a considerable increase in the number of small independent states in the world,

and, on the other, a reduction in the number of Great Powers. Of the eight recognized Great Powers in 1914, Austria-Hungary had ceased to exist by 1919, and Germany and Russia, at least temporarily, had been outclassed. Russia had become a pariah among the nations, thanks to her embracing of extreme socialism; and Germany had lost her navy, her colonies, and her merchant marine and had declined from a position as the foremost military state in the world to virtual disarmament and impotence.

In theory at any rate the new state-system was unlike the old. The old, as was pointed out in the opening pages of this book, was essentially anarchic; it rested on the fancied self-sufficiency of each of its members, on series of alliances and ententes formed for selfish ends, and on balances of power and threats of war. The new system had gradually evolved from the exigencies of the Great War and had been enshrined in the Covenant of Versailles; it was based on the concept of a League of Nations in which no state should presume to set its own interests above those of mankind at large, and on a contract according to which certain activities were recognized as of international concern rather than as within the restricted purview of individual nations. If the League of Nations flourished, if the new order became a reality, and only the lapse of many years could tell, then the old ascription of absolute and unrestricted sovereignty to each and every independent state would in time be revised, and out of the anarchic welter and chaos of modern times would succeed an organized Inter-Nation capable of preserving the peace of the world and of promoting the orderly development of human life. To the realization of such a dream the Great War pointed posterity.

Without some sort of a League of Nations, the growth of nationalism during the war and its recognition by the Peace Congress might readily become a curse rather than a blessing. Merely to add ten or a dozen new national states to forty or fifty already existing, merely to "Balkanize" Central Europe, would render confusion worse confounded, if the new ones like the old should not receive a striking object-lesson, which unfortunately at the outset they seemed all too prone to ignore, in the necessity of restraint and humility and coöperation, in uprooting the weeds of nationalism and cultivating only its best fruits.

The League of Nations, as actually established in 1920, was none too strong. Excluded from its membership were not only Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, but also