Just as the nations have by forces stronger than their own volition been brought into industrial and commercial co-operation, so, strangely enough, have they been brought by those same forces into military co-operation.  While the warrior and militarist have been talking the old jargon of nationalism and holding international co-operation up to derision as a dream, they have themselves been brought to depend upon foreigners.  War itself has become internationalist.

There is something of sardonic humor in the fact that it is the greatest war of history which is illustrating the fact that even the most powerful of the European nations must co-operate with foreigners for its security.  For no one of the nine or ten combatants of the present war could have maintained its position or defended itself alone.  There is not one nation involved that would not believe itself in danger of destruction but for the help of foreigners; there is not one whose national safety does not depend upon some compact or arrangement with foreign nations.  France would have been helpless but for the help of Britain and of Russia.  Russia herself could not have imposed her will upon Germany if Germany could have thrown all her forces on the eastern frontier.  Austria could certainly not have withstood the Russian flood single handed.  Quite obviously the lesser nations, Serbia, Belgium, and the rest, would be helpless victims but for the support of their neighbors.

And it should be noted that this international co-operation is not by any means always with similar and racially allied nations.  Republican France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of autocratic Russia.  Australia, that much more than any other country has been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese.  And as to the ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation, there are fighting together on the soil of France as I write, Flemish, Walloons, and negroes from Senegal, Turcos from Northern Africa, Gurkhas from India, co-operating with the advance on the other frontier of Cossacks, and Russians of all descriptions.  This military and political co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary—­there seems hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in the way of rapid and effective co-operation in the common need.

Thus the soldier himself, while defending the old nationalist and exclusive conceptions, is helping to shrink the spaces of the world and break down old isolations and show how interests at the uttermost ends of the earth react one upon the other.

But even apart from this influence, as already noted, America cannot escape the military any more than she has escaped the commercial and financial effects of this war.  She may never be drawn into active military co-operation with other nations, but she is affected none the less—­by a demand for a naval programme immensely larger than any American could have anticipated a year since, by plans for an enormously enlarged army.