class="tdr"/>

————— Balance at end of 1916 -433,374 1917. Built 1,163,474 Total losses 4,000,537 Captured from enemy 11,500 Total gains 1,174,974 ————— ————— Total gains 1,174,974 Balance in1917 -2,834,563 Brought down from 1916 -433,374 ————— Balance at end of 1917 -3,267,937

During the first three months of 1918 the net losses were 367,296 tons; 320,280 tons were built and 687,576 were lost, bringing the adverse balance on April 1, 1918, to 3,635,233 tons.

Great Britain's War Expenses

The British Government has issued a White Paper estimating the cost of the war for Great Britain in the year ending March 31, 1919, at $12,750,000,000, of which $9,305,000,000 is allocated to navy, army, air service, munition and ordnance factories, $205,000,000 to pensions, $750,000 to National War Aims Committee; services not specified, (presumed to include shipping,) $500,000,000; Treasury loans, $1,750,000,000; Board of Trade, $265,000,000; wheat supplies, $230,000,000, of which $200,000,000 is the estimated loss on the sale of the 18-cent loaf of bread. Subsidies toward the sale of potatoes are estimated at $25,000,000; purchases of wool and other raw materials are put at $40,000,000, payment to railways at $175,000,000, and $25,000,000 for timber.

Hatred Between Italians and Austrians

The implacable hatred which has developed between Italians and Austrians is illustrated by the following Italian communiqué, issued in Rome on Feb. 11, in reply to the Austrian Supreme Command's denial that the Austro-Germans were first to bombard cities from airplanes. It points out that the Austro-Germans first bombarded Udine, Treviso, Padua, Verona, Venice, Ravenna, &c., massacring defenseless and innocent populations and ruining valuable art treasures, and adds:

The Italians went to Trieste not to bombard citizens and private houses, but the hydroplane stations in which are sheltered the assassins of Venice, and the two vessels of the Monarch type which were kept by the Imperial and Royal Navy behind the dyke, in the hope that the Italian elements of the city would help to protect them and afterward enable them to set out on some heroic enterprise against the defenseless localities on the Adriatic Coast. Immediately the hydroplanes, yielding to the indignation of the whole world, ceased bombarding Venice, and immediately the two vessels of the Monarch type were removed from Trieste, our aerial raids ceased, since an understanding was proposed.

We wage war against the enemy's armed forces, and not against women, children, monuments, and hospitals. In spite of the most solemn denial issued by the Austrians of the acts which, after the first bombardments of Padua, Treviso, and Vicenza at the end of December and the beginning of January, they declared to be a question of reprisals for bombardments, carried out by Franco-British aviators on German towns, the Germans, in substance, gave to be understood what the Austrians hypocritically wished to hide, that is, that the pretext of reprisals enabled them to persevere with their nameless atrocities, which had been imposed upon them by some of their leaders having yielded to the impulses of a criminal mentality. Thus it happened that the Austrian Catholic command, bowing to the orders of the German Lutheran pastors, bombarded Catholic churches in the Italian cities. And so we see the Austro-Hungarian Government—so solicitous for peace and love between nations—sowing hatred which nothing can quench.

---

The Origin of the Irish

Perhaps some light may be shed on the internal divisions which make the solution of the Irish question so nearly impossible by a realization of the fact that the population of Ireland consists of an unassimilated congeries of races, every element of which except one represents foreign invasion and conquest.

The earliest race, short, round-headed, dark, appears to be akin to the Ligurian race of the Mediterranean; this race hunted the huge Irish elks with flint arrows and axes, and may claim to be the real indigenous stock, still surviving in the west. The second race, tall, dark, long-headed, was akin to the Iberians (Basques) of Spain, who also invaded Western France, and who probably built the cromlechs and stone circles, since these are also found in Iberian Spain and Western France, as at Carnac in Brittany. The third race, tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed, came from the Baltic, bringing amber beads, and building chambered pyramids, such as are also found in Denmark. The fourth race to arrive included the Gaels, tall, round-headed, with red hair and gray eyes; they came from Central Europe, probably by way of France.

Each new arrival was followed by wars of conquest, the Gaels finally making themselves predominant, but not exterminating the older races, examples of whom may still be found, with unchanged race characteristics. In 1169 Norman French and Welsh came, as mercenaries in the army of the King of Leinster. The Burkes are descended from the Normans, the Fitzgeralds from the Welsh.

---

Battles in Picardy and Flanders

Military Review of All Fronts from April 17 to May 18, 1918.

In order to obtain a view of the situation of the German offensive on April 17, which forms a background for the events to be related in this review, it is necessary to point out a few controlling facts and conditions—some long obvious, some recently revealed.

Ludendorff's major plan, based on the assumed shortness of vision on the part of the Allies, to separate the British from the French and, by isolating the former in the north and driving the latter toward their bases in the south, thereby reach the mouth of the Somme, had failed. It had failed, just as did the plan of Napoleon at Charleroi in 1815 to separate the English from the Prussians. It failed because the military genius of the British General Carey and the French General Fayolle on two separate occasions had closed up gaps in the line of the Allies, and because the vast masses of German troops were incapable, on account of their demoralization, of making the fractures permanent.

It is now evident that the demoralization of General Gough's 5th Army, which began on March 23, not only threatened his junction with Byng's 3d Army, by forming an eight-mile gap between the two—into which, as has already been related, Carey moved his hastily gathered nondescript detachment—but as the 5th Army retreated another gap, gradually lengthening to nearly thirty miles, was opened between its right wing and the 6th French Army. Here General Fayolle, who had just appeared on the field from Italy, did with organized divisions what Carey had done with his scratch volunteers further north.