before he sent the Lusitania notes, he had called Congress together and submitted his notes to Congress.  But, as the matter stands, the Germans are merely encouraged to blow up factories and practically to carry on war in the United States, because they know we can (or will) do nothing.  Mere notes break nobody’s skin.

We don’t seem to have any machinery to bring any influence to bear on foreign governments or on foreign opinion; and, this being so, it is little wonder that the rest of the world does not follow our republican example.

And this sort of impotence in influence has curious effects at home.  For example, the ship-purchase bill, as it was at the last session of Congress, was an economic crime.  See what has happened:  We have waked up to the fact that we must have a big navy.  Well, a navy is of no far-fighting value unless we have auxiliary ships and a lot of ’em.  Admiral Jellicoe has 3,000 ships under his command; and he couldn’t keep his fleet on the job if he didn’t have them.  Most of them are commandeered merchant, passenger, and fishing ships.  Now we haven’t merchant, passenger, and fishing ships to commandeer.  We’ve got to build and buy auxiliary ships to our navy.  This, to my mind, makes the new ship-purchase bill, or something like it, necessary.  Else our navy, when it comes to the scratch, will be of no fighting value, however big it be.  It’s the price we’ve got to pay for not having built up a merchant marine.  And we haven’t built up a merchant marine because we’ve had no foreign consciousness.  While our Irishmen have been leading us to twist the Lion’s tail, we’ve been depending almost wholly on English ships—­and, in late years, on German ships.  You can’t cross the ocean yet in a decent American ship.  You see, we’ve declared our independence; and, so far as individual development goes, we’ve worked it out.  But the governmental machinery for maintaining it and for making it visible to the world—­we’ve simply neglected to build it or to shape it.  Hence the President’s notes hurt nobody and accomplish nothing; nor could our navy put up a real fight, for lack of colliers and supply ships.  It’s the same way all around the horizon.  And these are the reasons we haven’t made our democracy impress the world more.

A democracy is not a quick-trigger war-engine and can’t be made into one.  When the quick-trigger engines get to work, they forget that a democracy does not consider fighting the first duty of man.  You can bend your energies to peaceful pursuits or you can bend them to war.  It’s hard to do both at the same time.  The Germans are the only people who have done both at the same time; and even they didn’t get their navy big enough for their needs.

     When the infernal thing’s over—­that’ll be a glad day; and the
     European world won’t really know what it has cost in men and money
     and loss of standards till it is over....