Yet we propose to fight if necessary in order to prevent fighting, and to this end maintain the second strongest and, for its size, the most efficient fleet in the world.  This is our militarism; that of Great Britain has been to maintain a fleet double our own or any other in size, for it is her basic principle to maintain an unquestioned supremacy on the highways of commerce.  To this we have meekly assented, while other nations absorb our carrying trade and our flag waves over a fleet of perhaps a dozen respectable oceangoing trading and passenger ships.  It is under her rather patronizing protection that we fight our foreign wars and by pressure from her that we manage the Panama Canal with nice and honorable attention to her interpretation of a treaty capable of quite a different one.  Whether or not this be “militarism” of the utmost efficiency by sea is not difficult to decide.  But we have never styled it infamous.

While I am writing, Germans, whose basic principle is the most efficient “militarism” by land, are publishing all abroad that the “militarism” of France must be forever stamped out, so that they may dwell at peace in the lands which are their home.

Within a generation France has accumulated a colonial empire second only to that of Great Britain, while she has incessantly demanded the reintegration of German lands, and especially a German city which she arbitrarily annexed and held by “militarism” for about five generations.  The “militarism” of a republic and a democracy which retains the essential features of Napoleonic administration has been quite as efficient as that of a monarchical democracy like Great Britain, and may easily prove more efficient than that of a monarchy like Germany.

Why should it be more infamous or barbarous in one case than the other?  And with what is this efficient military democracy allied in the closest ties?

With Russia, an Oriental despotism which by the aid of French money has developed a “militarism” by land so portentous in numbers, dimension, and efficiency that its movements are comparable to those of Attila’s Huns.  Escaped Russians in Western lands are denouncing German “militarism” as the incubus of the world.

Which of the two should Americans regard as the greater danger?

Menaces to Our Neutrality.

It has wrung our hearts to consider the violation of Belgian neutrality, for which both France and eventually even Great Britain have long been prepared, but the latter has with little or no protest arranged with the “bear that walks like a man” to disregard contemptuously the neutrality of Persia in arranging spheres of influence, exactly as Japan, another ally, is contemptuously disregarding the neutrality of China, the new “republic” we were in such haste to recognize that we had to use the cable.  And what about Korea?  It is a Japanese province in contravention of the most solemn guarantees of its integrity.