Dr. Kaempf, President of the Reichstag, declared that President Wilson would "bite marble" before the war was over. And the success of submarine warfare during April and the first part of May was such as to arouse the whole world to the almost indefinite possibilities of this means of fighting. The real crisis of the war has not been reached. We are approaching it. The Allies have attempted for two years without much success to curb the U-boat danger. They have attempted to build steel ships, also without success, so that the real burden of winning the war in Europe falls upon American shoulders.
Fortunately for the United States we are not making the blunders at the beginning of our intervention which some of the European nations have been making since August, 1914. America is awakened to the needs of modern war as no other nation was, thanks to the splendid work which the American newspapers and magazines have done during the war to present clearly, fairly and accurately not only the great issues but the problems of organisation and military tactics. The people of the United States are better informed about the war as a whole than are the people in any European country. American newspapers have not made the mistakes which English and French journals made--of hating the enemy so furiously as to think that nothing more than criticism and hate were necessary to defeat him. Not until this year could one of Great Britain's statesmen declare: "You can damn the Germans until you are blue in the face, but that will not beat them."
Professor Charles Gray Shaw, of New York University, stated before one of his classes in philosophy that there was a new "will" typified in certain of our citizens, notably in President Wilson.
"The new psychology," said Professor Shaw, "has discovered the new will--the will that turns inward upon the brain instead of passing out through hand or tongue. Wilson has this new will; the White House corroborates the results of the laboratory. To Roosevelt, Wilson seems weak and vacillating; but that is because T. R. knows nothing about the new will. T. R. has a primitive mind, but one of the most advanced type. In the T. R. brain, so to speak, will means set teeth, clenched fist, hunting, and rough riding.