“I was the last man to get on the last train leaving Burkes Station, after Bull Run, and, now, if the country ever should be invaded, I would be, I hope, one of the first to rush to meet the enemy—­but I think my haste would be to convert, not to kill, him.

“The man who has done well in business, however, learns to abhor all waste, and I must admit that it does pain me to see hundreds of millions of our dollars spent on battleships which will but rust away, and thousands of our able men vegetating on them or in an army.

“The men who urge this vast waste of our money and men mean well, no doubt, but they do not know the nation of which they have the good fortune to be citizens—­they do not realize how very potent a force we have become in the wide world, nor the fact that one of the great reasons why we have become a force lies in the circumstance that our national development has not been hampered by the vast expense of militarism.”

Mr. Carnegie paused.

Some weeks ago, in an interview granted me for publication in THE NEW YORK TIMES, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, predicted that the present war would find its final outcome in the establishment of the United States of Europe.  I asked Mr. Carnegie to express his view upon this subject.

“Nothing else could occur which would be of such immense advantage to Europe,” he replied.

“United we stand, and divided they fall.  If the territory now occupied by the homogeneous and co-operative federation known as the United States of America were occupied instead by a large number of small, independent competitive nations, that is, if each section of our territory which now is a State were an independent country, America would be constantly in turmoil.

“Europe has been set back a century because she substituted the present war of nations for the promotion of a federation plan.  The latter would have meant peace and prosperity, the former means ruin.

“If in Europe this year such a federation as Dr. Butler regards as a future probability had been a present actuality, 1914 would have left a record very different from that which it is making.

“For instance, it would have been as difficult for the State of Germany to fight the State of Russia, or the State of France, or that of England, or all of them, and to trample neutral Belgium, as it now would be, here, for the State of Pennsylvania to declare war on the States of New York and Connecticut and to wreck New Jersey as she sent her troops to the invasion.

“Originally we had thirteen States, and thirteen only, but there was other territory here, and the attractive force of the successful union of the thirteen States brought the other territory in as it was organized.

“Thus we started right.  Europe had begun before men had become so wise, and, having begun wrong, has found herself, through the centuries, unable to correct old errors.”