A prophet is nearly always a bore. He is apt to be tiresome when expounding his predictions, and likely to become a common nuisance should his predictions come true. Indeed, the I-told-you-so person is oftentimes a worse pest than the I-am-now-telling-you-so individual. I have no desire to assume either rÔle; but here lately I have not been able to restrain my satisfaction at finding, as I believed, that two of my own private convictions are about to be justified by the accomplished fact. As a result of all that I saw and heard in the war zone, more than two years and a half ago, I made up my mind to the probable consummation of these contingencies—namely:

First: That, despite her earlier successes, despite all her preparedness and all her efficiency and all her valour, Germany eventually would be defeated as the Southern Confederacy was defeated—by being bled white and starved thin.

Second: That when to Germany's rulers this prospect became certain they would with deliberate intent embroil the United States in the conflict as an avowed and declared enemy, in order that the men who drove Germany to the slaughter might save their faces before their own people, at the front and at home, by saying to them in effect: "We were strong enough to beat all Europe and all Asia; we were not strong enough to beat the supreme Power of the New World too; we, with our allies, could not withstand the combined forces of the whole earth."

Though Germany is still very far, one imagines, from the point of complete exhaustion, it is not to be denied that she is bleeding white and starving thin. And, as all fair-minded patriotic men on this side of the ocean agree, she did, by a persistent campaign of aggressions against our flag, and by murdering our people on the high seas, and by plotting against our industries and our national integrity, finally force us into the war.

Having been forced into the war, as we are, it is well that our people should know to the fullest possible degree not only what they are fighting for—the preservation of democracy in the world, for one thing—but that likewise they should know and in that knowledge recognise the danger to us, of the mental forces operating behind the military arm of our national enemy.

I think they should know that in the minds of these self-idolaters, who have laid claim to Creator and to creation as their own ordained possessions, we shall stand in no different light than the Belgians stand, or the Serbians, or the Poles, or the people of Northern France. Upon us, if the chance is vouchsafed them, they would visit a heaping measure of the same wrath they poured on those invaded and broken nations of Europe, showing to Americans no more mercy than they showed to them.

I deem it my duty, therefore, to write what already I have written in this little book, and, before closing it, to append certain quotations, as particularly illuminating evidences of the besetting mania that has been fastened upon the brains of an otherwise rational race of our fellow beings through two generations of crafty implanting and fostering by greater maniacs, wearing crowns and shoulder straps, and—yes, the livery of Our Lord and Master.

For the quotations from the poetic utterances of the Reverend Doctor Vorwerk, which appeared in preceding paragraphs of this article, the writer is indebted to a documentation compiled from authentic German sources by a Dane, the Reverend J. P. Bang, D. D., professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, a famous Lutheran institution, under the title of Hurrah and Hallelujah—which, incidentally, was a title borrowed from the published poetic works of this same Doctor Vorwerk. Doctor Bang's symposium has lately been published in English by the American publisher, Doran, with an introduction by "Ralph Connor," the Canadian novelist, otherwise Major Charles W. Gordon, of the Canadian Overseas Forces.