The English policy in this wartime is to fill every idle hand with productive industry; to work the machinery day and night; and to keep the gold in England so far as is necessary and to keep it circulating in England.

The national loss begins when you lose either the golden days of labor, the gold of the sunshine that makes the harvest of the valleys or the gold of finance and commerce.
When the Germans fought the French in 1870, 60 per cent of her people lived on the land.

Now, forty-four years later, she is fighting the whole world, but only 30 per cent of her people live by the fruit of the soil.
That is the simple answer as to why Germany, a country besieged, cannot win against the world.
Germany has no sea-expansive ability, no foreign credit, no international reserves to carry out an offensive warfare.

Her only possibility of success lay in a sudden and decisive march over the rich territory of France, the possession of Paris, and a huge indemnity tax levy as in 1871.

The rest might have been easy.