The Audacious War | Page 2

rightly so. As a country we have no international policy, and European
politics and policies have never interested us.
Germany is buttressed by tariffs and commercial treaties on every side.
Years ago I was told in Europe that the commercial treaties wrested
from France in 1871 were of more value to Germany than the billion
dollars of indemnity she took as her price to quit Paris. But I did not
realize until I was abroad this winter how European countries had
warred by tariffs, and that Germany and Russia were preparing for a
great clash at arms over the renewal of commercial and tariff treaties
which expire within two years, and which had been forced by Germany
upon Russia during the Japanese War.
German "Kultur" means German progress, commercially and
financially. German progress is by tariffs and commercial treaties. Her
armies, her arms, and her armaments, are to support this "Kultur" and
this progress.
I believe I have told the story as it has never been told before. But the
facts cannot be drawn forth and properly set in review without some
presentation of the spirit of the peoples of the European nations.
If all the nations of Europe were of one language, the spirit, the soul of
each in its distinctive characteristics might stand out even more

prominently than to-day.
Then we could see even more clearly the spirit of brotherhood and
nationality that stands out resplendent as the soul of France. We should
see the spirit of empire and of trade, interknit with administrative
justice, as the soul of Great Britain. We should see Germany an
uncouth giant in the center of Europe, viewing all about him with
suspicion, and demanding to know why, as the youngest, sturdiest, best
organized, and hardest working European nation, he is not entitled to
overseas or world empire.
But few persons on this side have comprehended the relation of this
great war to the greatest commercial prizes in the world; the shores of
the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, with its Bagdad Railroad headed for
the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia with its great oil-fields, undeveloped
and a source of power for the recreation of Palestine and all the lands
between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and Asia.
The greatest study for Americans to-day is the spirit of nations as
shown in this war, and great lessons for the United States may be found
in the finance, business, patriotism, and justice that stand forth in the
British Empire as never before. She is rolling up a tremendous
war-power within her empire and throughout Europe, encircling the
German war-power. But she is likewise looking to her own people and
her own workers, filling her own factories and every laboring hand to
the full that she may keep her business and profits at home, and with
her business and profits and accumulated capital and income prosecute
the greatest war of history.
She is not unmindful in any respect of what the war may send her way.
In the breaking-away and the breaking-up of Turkey, she sees a clear
field for Egypt, the realization of the dream of Cecil Rhodes of the
development of the whole of Africa by a Cape to Cairo Railroad, and
she sees her own empire and peoples belting the world in power,
usefulness, and justice, and with a sweep and scope for enterprise and
development beyond all the previous dreams of this generation.
The United States, with hundreds of millions of banking reserves

released and giving base for a business expansion double any we have
had before, seems suddenly paralyzed in its business activities and,
comprehending only that the loaf of bread is a cent higher and a pound
of cotton a few cents lower, it is wondering on which side of its bread
the butter is to fall.
Meanwhile, it talks politics, asks if prosperity here is to come during or
after the war; and having little comprehension of the meaning of the
national throbs that on the other side of the globe are pulsating the
world into a new era of light, liberty, and expansion by individual labor,
it refuses to take up its daily home-task and go forward.
In the hope that these pages may be useful to my fellow countrymen in
giving them the facts of this war, its commercial causes, its financial
progress, its sacrifice in humanity,--sacrifice that could not be
demanded but for a greater future,--these papers are taken, as
completed in my financial publications in this month of February, and
placed before the reading community in book form, as requested in
hundreds of personal letters.
They were never conceived or written with any idea of their permanent
preservation. They were prepared for the banking community, which
demands news-facts and figures discriminatingly presented. The banker
wants the truth; he will