There will be a considerable productive loss because the killed men were, as a rule, the best men; but the white man's control of the world hasn't depended on any few million of males.

This speculation is far up in the clouds.

If Russia and Germany really be liberated from social and political and industrial autocracy, this liberation will bring into play far more power than all the men killed in the war could have had under the pre-war regime.

I observe this with every year of my observation--there's no substitute for common-sense.
The big results of the war will, after all, be the freedom and the stimulation of men in these weary Old-World lands--in Russia, Germany itself, and in England.

In five or ten years (or sooner, alas!) the dead will be forgotten.
If you wish to make a picture of the world as it will be when the war ends, you must conjure up such scenes as these--human bones along the Russian highways where the great retreat took place and all that such a sight denotes; Poland literally starved; Serbia, blasted and burned and starved; Armenia butchered; the horrible tragedy of Gallipoli, where the best soldiers in the world were sacrificed to politicians' policies; Austria and Germany starved and whipped but liberalized--perhaps no king in either country; Belgium--belgiumized; northern France the same and worse; more productive Frenchmen killed in proportion to the population perhaps than any other country will have lost; Great Britain--most of her best men gone or maimed; colossal debts; several Teutonic countries bankrupt; every atrocity conceivable committed somewhere--a hell-swept great continent having endured more suffering in three years than in the preceding three hundred.