"Today all Europe fights," he said to me, "but, also, today all Europe thinks."
That is an impressive sentence, with which he concluded our long talk, and with which I begin my record of it.
He believes that this thinking of the men who crouch low in the drenched trenches and of the women who tragically wait for news of them will fashion a new Europe.
He agrees with the remarkable opinions of President Butler, that that new Europe will be marked by the rise of democracy.
He sees the probability of broadened individual opportunity in it, accompanied by the breaking down of international suspicions; and he thinks that all these processes, which surely make for peace, will surely bring a lasting peace.
In the following interview, which Prof. Giddings has carefully reread, will be found one of the most interesting speculative utterances born of the war.
"The immediate economic cause of the war," said Prof. Giddings, "lay in the affairs of Servia and Austria. Servia had been shut in. She had been able to get practically nothing from, and sell practically nothing to, the outside world, save by Austria's permission, while Austria, with Germany professing fear of Slavic development, for years had been taking every care to prevent the Balkan peoples from having free access to the Adriatic.
"Some financial profit arose from this interning of the little States, but it is probable that the desire for this was all along entirely secondary to the fear of Balkan, especially Servian, political and economic development.
"In the larger economic question Germany felt especial interest.
"In a comparatively few years she had made the greatest progress ever made by any nation in an equal time, with the possible exception of that made by the United States in a similar period after our civil war, and it is probable that not even our own advance has equaled hers in rapidity or extent, if all could be tabbed up.