Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all.  I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the educational institutions of these “Huns” were in any way in danger.  It was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria, yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their advantage to observe it.

And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.

No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that afforded by these moral forces.  Sixty years ago Britain had as against Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of the latter’s policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats of “consequences” could not prevent British travelers being murdered by Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces—­the recognition by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well—­had already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country as in their own.

In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics, or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large measure enjoy.  So indeed with the more material things, France, Great Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere to financial obligations.  Englishmen do not even pretend that the security of their investments in a country like the United States or the Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is able to exercise over these communities.