Suppose now that Russia should succeed in establishing the protectorate over all Slavs which she desires, and at the same time should press back the Germans on that border line, something very closely approximating a new migration of peoples in Europe will take place.

As far as I know the German feeling, expressed both privately and publicly, officially and unofficially, they have hoped to maintain their complete consanguinity, if not homogeneity, within the lands they regard as their home; and their preparations for war, their increase of their military strength, have been made, professedly at least, solely in the interest of defense.  Americans can simply not realize—­it is impossible for them to realize—­the difference in the degree of civilization and culture on either side of a purely artificial boundary line.

Very fortunately it has entered the minds of several people lately to write to the newspapers about the unhappy confusion that comes from the use of words in a meaning which at home they do not connote at all.  Take, for example, the whole question of militarism.  As we see it, it is a matter altogether of degree.  For defense against what the German considers the most terrible danger that he personally has to confront, it has been necessary from time to time to change both the size and the composition of his forces, whether offensive or defensive, and they therefore have introduced compulsory military service, an idea which has always been very offensive to Anglo-Saxons, but which in cases of dire necessity they have been compelled to utilize themselves, as, for example, during our own civil war, the abandonment of voluntary enlistment and the introduction of the draft.

Now, the compulsory military service of the German means that every man is for a period of his life drafted and trained as a soldier.  Forty years ago there were a great many men who escaped by reason of one or another provision of the law.  That number was steadily diminished until within eighteen months, when finally it was proclaimed that every German who could endure the severity of that training must undergo it, and that was due to the fact that the military balance of power of which I spoke had been so completely changed by the re-armament of Russia and by the formation of the South Slav armies in the Balkan Peninsula.

As a parallel we might imagine, not one troublesome neighbor, but four.  We might imagine a tremendous military power developed in Canada, and we might imagine a hostile military power on the Atlantic side and another one on the Pacific side, in which case we would beyond a question have to expand our inchoate militarism, just in proportion as we came to feel the necessity for a strong physical defensive or offensive in the way of a great standing army, and we probably would do it without any hesitation.

Now, Germany has not any really bitter foe on the north, although there is no love lost between the Germans and the Scandinavians; but it has an embittered foe on the east, and another one on the west, and what has proved to be an embittered foe upon the water and a very lukewarm neutral State on the south, a State which had joined in alliance with her.