Preparedness and Democratic Discipline

I

‘THE great word of the present day,’ said Emerson in 1838, ‘is Culture.’ It was the same word with a different meaning with which the war began. Some of the defenses of Germany by which her statesmen and professors sought then to justify her in the eyes of the world raised not merely issues of right and wrong as to the war itself, but issues as to fundamentals in civilization.

The Germans asserted a high claim for world-power for the Teutonic race, based upon a superior Kultur, a civilization which Germany has evolved and which they declared demands through its success, through its practical results, a far wider sphere of power and influence in world-civilization than it has yet received.

Some of these claims of Kultur we have forgotten, as they were not often repeated after the first few months of the war.

The Germans said, in effect: We alone of the great nations of modern times have succeeded in evolving a great organization of government, a perfection of administration, unequaled in the whole history of the world. We have done it against tremendous odds and in an incredibly short time. France is a decadent and corrupt bureaucracy, masquerading as a democracy. England is a patchwork of disorganized law, feudal survivals, and precedents patched with clumsy adaptations of transplanted modern German ideas — a civilization gone to seed. What right, docs her civilization give her to the choice place in the sun? What is there about the organization of English government which justifies its continuance except on the basis of sea-power and force? Rome lived and spread her eagles through the ancient world by the superior genius of Roman law, by the civilizing power of that law which lived even after the barbarian laid his hands upon the city of the Cæsars. The Teutons, declared the German professors, are the successors of the Cæsars. The right to world-dominion belongs and rightly belongs to this race, the race alone capable of evolving a superior world-civilization.

So we in America were compelled to think hurriedly, and for too short a period, of world-civilization. The train of our reflection — if we reflected — was not entirely pleasant. We remembered that ours is not the youngest, but the oldest of modern democracies. We remembered that many, if not most, of the general principles of democracy were born, or first practiced, on our soil; that these ideas were, a hundred years and less ago, the great contribution of America to the transformation of Europe. The revolutionary principles which Metternich and the concert of Europe a hundred years ago strove to stamp out had thriven on the new and favored soil. We had no feudalism to overcome. Our press was not fettered; our religion was free. No bonds of caste and heredity gripped us to the past. We had no white peasants attached to the soil. We had a new rich continent of unlimited wealth. We preached to the world the promise of democracy. All the handicaps from which we were free bound Germany, and many more beside. Yet, at the beginning of this great war, she was claiming in sincerity and good faith the right to a world-domain as justified by the results of a superior world-civilization.

This is no place to consider the accuracy of the Teuton’s prefatory estimate of his civilization. No other country has made a similar contention. No other nation has sufficient confidence and pride in its accomplishments in the organization of national life to make such a boast, even if, indeed, it would be willing to concede that such a standard alone is a sufficient test for civilization. Last of all would democratic America make such a claim.

Yet the issue is one which we cannot blink, and which has not changed simply because we have ceased to think about it. The fundamental postulate of this war is the failure of democracy as a system of human government; that we need in place of it, in place of its wasteful, shiftless, haphazard character and methods, a civilization of intense and practical efficiency based upon autocracy and to the existence of which autocratic discipline is essential. This issue should make us, even in the midst of the smoke and thunder of war, self-critical. On the accuracy of this fundamental postulate the future history of democracy will largely be determined — our own as well as the democratic spirit in other lands.

When we marvel at Germany in this war, at her wonderful capacity for carnage, at the terrible efficiency and completeness of her mechanism for destruction; when we see the disorganization of England, the long wait for the development of sufficient ammunition, the attitude of the trade-unions, the strikes of the workers, the fumbling with the drink problem in a national crisis, the lack of adequate enlistments — the claims of the German professors come back to us; for in the final analysis this war is between the soulless Great State and democracy. Those who believe in democracy in our own land should not be blind to this issue. Drifting along as we are in America to-day, without moral leadership, with public opinion a perpetual pendulum between sentimentalism and materialism, with one class so filled with the horror of bloodshed as to want peace at any price and another counting its riches in war-stocks and war-orders and reaching out for South American trade, we need to be made to see the issue as it affects ourselves,—not in our pockets, but in our principles of government, — to see that the war, whatever its outcome, is bound to influence profoundly, for good or for ill, our national life.

We cannot keep out of this war. We may avoid the conflict in arms, but the question whether the democratic principle deserves to live remains ours, at least. Whether it can live is the problem of England and France.

Unless we can do one of two things, this war must mean moral loss to America: unless we can enter it as a participant for something more than a trade reason; or unless, while keeping out of it, we can prevent the soil of America from becoming engulfed in a morass of materialism, by finding an issue upon which the moral forces of this country can unite.

It is to make clear that issue, that fundamental issue of the permanence of democracy, that America to-day needs leadership.

II

We need to be made to see our own stake in this war. In 1815, the concert of the powers expressed by their joint action a final determination as to what the crushing of France should mean to the intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. It was that the last ember of the French Revolution should be relentlessly extinguished. It meant for forty or more years the triumph of reaction, the sterilization of life, the suppression of freedom of thought, of action, of everything remotely resembling the democratic impulse in every country in Europe. In no country was the power of that reaction stronger than in Germany and in Austria under Metternich. Upon it Bismarck built the modern Germany. The conception of the Great State—the state as power; the subordination of the individual wholly to the state, his rights considered as derivative and not innate; the state as the autocrat, the individual as vassal; the new feudalism headed by a divine-right monarch whose conception of power was such as died in England nearly three centuries ago with the axe which beheaded Charles the First—this became Germany’s new principle of civilization. On it she has built a powerful, a highly organized, an immensely efficient government. The German militaristic government has made modern bureaucratic Germany what she is to-day — a menace to the spiritual future of the world. It was the remorseless logic of the new Jesuitism, the conception of the state as power, superior and unconstrained by law, by duty or plighted word, which marched through devastated Belgium and closed the sea over the drowning women and children of the Lusitania.

What is to be the final effect of Germany successful or Germany defeated upon American opinion and upon American life? For forty years history traces upon Europe the reaction of European thinking on the French Revolution. It was for the most part a reaction against democracy, against the bloody shibboleth of Freedom, Equality, Fraternity. What will the present war do to American opinion? The character and the future of democratic government will depend for many years upon the lines of thinking set in motion among our people by this war. What will they be? Will they be such as to send us forward as a nation, or set us back?

It is a time in which Americans should consider anxiously their own country. Peace has its dangers no less menacing than war. Even in the midst of war, we can but see certain spiritual gains in the countries which are pouring out their blood and treasure. The development of national consciousness, the establishment in tears and sorrow of the spiritual unity of a great people, is the thing which comes to us from France, reborn in her resolve to make the France of her children free from the menace of militarism. England, with her prosperous and self-satisfied bourgeoisie, her sporting-squire government, her terrible and inexcusable poverty unrelieved except by the silly shifts of Lady Bountifuls and poor rates, her discontented and jealous working classes; England, stale with an unequal and unjust prosperity, is breaking up a caste system and reorganizing and revitalizing a national life. Belgium, devastated and exploited by barbarous invasion, will send down to generations yet unborn the thrill of her King’s rejoinder to menacing Germany, that ‘ Belgium is a country and not a road.’ The national consciousness born of war, the precious by-products of sacrifice, of tears, of common and united effort for victory in arms, is not to be denied, even to Russia. The dreaming Slav sees the beginnings of a new era in Holy Russia. Germany holding a world at bay and waging war with a relentless and deadly efficiency, such as the world never saw, girding her loins for fresh aggression, at once the menace and the marvel of our time, shouts her ‘Deutschland über Alles,’ the hymn of a nationalism which threatens civilization itself. The war means, not the destruction of national spirit, but the creation of newer and perhaps finer diversities, the finding of the common soul of varied peoples, the finding in common sacrifice and effort of the spiritual basis for national life.

I am not glorifying war; but, hate war as we may, it does these things. The Nelson monument set among the lions at Trafalgar Square, the tattered battle-flags in the church of St. Louis almost touching the tomb of Napoleon, the trophies of war treasured in public galleries in all great nations of the world, are not symbols of victories, or of heroes and conquerors, but expressions of that unity of spirit which makes the soul of a nation. There is no true patriotism, no true love of country, without this unity of spirit. No true nation exists or can exist without it. It is a thing which money cannot buy, or mere natural wealth create.

This is something which we Americans should remember. We hope for the day when there shall be what William James calls a moral substitute for war, that is, the attainment of true unity of national spirit, without blood, without the tears of widows and the fatherless. What will this world-war do to the largest country except China now enjoying peace? Can we endure the hardships of a mean prosperity and keep our soul? Can we evolve, from and by peace, this moral substitute for war? Can we so revitalize democracy that when the war is over America will mean to Europe something else than the land which fattened on warorders and the trade salvage of distress?

Suppose we stop for a moment our everlasting talk about the prospect of being the money market of the world, of being a creditor nation, about opportunities for South American trade and the perpetual ticker talk and the new nabobism of the war-stocks. Suppose we consider the demands which this war makes upon American patriotism. It is only a larger and finer democracy which can produce a moral substitute for war.

The President’s addresses in his recent speaking tour have been admirable in tone and have lifted the purely military aspects of preparedness to a high ethical plane where they belong. But what we have to deal with is not mere military and naval preparation in this narrow sense. The main problem with which we have to contend, and for which we must find a solution, if we are to be anything better than a South African millionaire among the nations, is the problem of democratic discipline. The wise editor of Life has put it so well, that I can do no better than quote him: —

' It is Prussian discipline that is crowding the world so hard, and the question is whether democracy can produce a discipline to match and overcome it. If it cannot, Prussian discipline based on autocracy seems likely to possess the earth. So the war seems still to be a contest between absolutism and democracy, its main errand being to compel democracies to develop and maintain an effective discipline. Collectivism may be the result from the war, but it will be a by-product. The main asset will be democratic discipline.’

Where? Where else than on our own soil? Are we producing it? Are we thinking about it at all? Is this new militarism, this clamor for armaments, for a bigger navy, for a larger army, this jockeying for position among the politicians, in the name of preparedness, the best we can do? A mean pacificism feebly denounces the principle of preparedness. A stupid and blustering militarism talks about preparedness with a tone of finality as though a bigger navy and army for America were all that was needed for the apotheosis of a shiftless, undisciplined democracy, for its transformation into something which will fill the eye and sicken the soul.

III

We are in a perilous period of American democracy; we are threatened with what bankers and fools call prosperity; we are threatened with wealth which we have not earned and do not deserve. What will it do to us? Can we evolve the higher democracy? No boy is proud of his father simply because he is rich; no man is proud of his country simply because it is prosperous. This war is creating in every European country a flood of new and finer loyalties, patriotic affections born of sacrifice and tears. Will the sea which separates us from the war separate us from these finer things also? Can we attain the high patriotism without war?

A former hifalutin period in our country was vocal with manifest destiny. The slogan has not been heard among thoughtful Americans for a generation. It was based upon our natural resources, boundless opportunities, the contributions, not of man, but of nature. In the wasteful and orderless exploitation of these natural resources, a lawless, undisciplined, and formless type of government followed. At a moment when the necessity for a democratic discipline comes home to us, we are forced to realize some of the ugly things which come in our own country from the absence of that discipline. Take first the ‘hyphen.’

What is there about the much berated hyphenated American which irritates us? Is it not first and foremost a feeling of failure at a point wdiere we had always blissfully assumed success? We had assumed that, having carefully inspected the immigrant for contagious diseases and a few other matters, before letting him loose upon our soil to be exploited and to struggle with that new and pervasive lawlessness which we called American opportunity, he would straightway, certainly after a few years, become an American.

The menace of non-assimilated masses in our undisciplined democracy has taken a new meaning in the presence of the possibility of our own participation in the war. The disturbances in Lawrence, Paterson, Colorado, were mere labor troubles a few years ago. We are uneasily conscious now of a new element of danger. We reflect upon it from a new angle of vision to-day. Unamericanized America is a new aspect of the discontent which we had repressed with martial law and which flamed forth in the I.W.W., the Socialists, the Syndicalists, and the dynamiters. What could we expect for the defense of our institutions from those who are taught by Socialism to-day that our constitution was formulated by grafters, to make money out of the depreciated paper currency which they had bought up in anticipation of a rise after a more stable government had been adopted? What could we expect from those who are taught by the same teachers that patriotism is folly and that government is the mere expression of conscious and purposeful class-selfishness in its effort to exploit the worker—the worker, moreover, who in turn is urged to grasp for government, to rule in turn by making laws, not for the general good, but for his own immediate and selfish interest?

What will democratic discipline do with the American immigrant after the war? Will it continue as before to consider him merely as a human mechanism, an asset for industrial exploitation, or as a man, a potential unhyphenated American ? Shall we wait until after the war to begin to formulate a programme, wait until the flood-gates are open and the inundation begins? Shall we content ourselves with abusing our foreign-born as though the love of the old country were not a virtue, a potential benefit to the new? There are no hyphenated gypsies. Do we want more of them?

Shall we organize our army under the stimulus of the clamor for preparedness on a basis hostile to, or auxiliary to democracy? An army may be a menace to democracy. Many European armies are of this character. An army may also be a training-school for democratic discipline, a means for the union of all classes and conditions of men for service on the basis of a common duty to the state in such fashion as to create new and desirable conceptions of national unify; a means, moreover, of creating a closer association of men from different walks of life, as good for democratic government as ploughing is for the soil. Shall the army for preparedness be made an instrument of democracy, or a menace to it, a sheer adventure in militarism foreign to our traditions and repugnant to our ideals?

The ‘ hyphen,’ the immigrant, and the army are in the foreground. But the great America — the America large enough to meet the obligations of a new world — must respond to new reactions which will result either in a larger and finer conception of democratic discipline, or a humiliating failure to attain a triumph for democratic ideals which will mean loss, not merely to us, but to the whole world.

One of the first problems which will come to us will be a result of certain new reactions due to a confusion of militaristic Germany with German social and industrial organization. A considerable part of the industrial legislation which Germany had adopted for the physical well-being of her people is associated now in our country with a conception of the state which is distasteful to us and wholly foreign to our own ideas, — a conception of the state in which the worker is a feudal dependent upon an autocratic, militant, but otherwise benevolent overlord, and under which, as we are now told, his individual initiative and personal freedom have been so fully suppressed that the average workman is unconscious of their absence. Industrial Germany conserves her human resources. Militant Germany to-day uses those resources. This principle of conservation is new with us, is practically untried and much needed. Individual initiative and personal freedom as political rights are our oldest and most cherished doctrines. The wreckage occasioned by our failure to work out effective modifications of our individualism to meet a new industrialism had in recent years inclined many of us to experiments with German industrial legislation for the conservation of human resources to meet our own economic conditions. The workmen’s compensation laws of recent years are of German origin. They have taken firm root and are not likely to be dislodged in the near future by any reaction against what is now called the German conception of the Servile State. But the compulsory pensions, the occupational-disease, old-age and sickness insurance plans, the state-controlled housing systems, all of which are parts of German social legislation and which honest and efficient management have there brought to a high degree of perfection, are already being considered with critical eyes and their availability in a democracy is being questioned. The logic involved seems to be this: German social legislation has produced a vast number of physically fit soldiers for the German armies. Therefore, the system which makes them fit as soldiers is evil and should be avoided in a democracy. The startling figures on the unfitness of the English as soldiers, shown by the percentages of rejections for physical reasons, which Price Collier¹ gave us a few years ago, do not disturb us. We dislike to think of our own workers as possible soldiers.

We prefer to ignore the great fact of modern warfare, that war to-day is no longer the mere putting into battle array of a small percentage of the population, leaving the great majority of citizens to their ordinary employment. The war which is going on in Europe is a war, not merely of soldiers but of nations. Every particle of economic power is being invoked to make military success. It will not be soldiers, but the discipline of nationality, expressed in countless ways, which will triumph. In such a warfare, how would the discipline of American life, of American government, of American industrial and social organization stand the test which would be placed upon them?

In the report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1915 occur some wise words on this subject, which will bear repetition : —

‘ Some months since I sought to learn what I could of the assets of this country as they might be revealed by this department, where we were in point of development, and what we had with which to meet the world which was teaching us that war was no longer a set contest between more or less mobile armed forces, but an enduring contest between all the life forces of the contesting parties — their financial strength, their industrial organization, and adaptability, their crop yields, and their mineral resources; and that it ultimately comes to a test of the very genius of the peoples involved. For to mobilize an army, even a great army, is now no more than an idle evidence of a single form of strength, if behind this army the nation is not organized.’

Our crop yields, our mineral and financial resources are doubtless excellent and satisfying. I have given in a footnote some statistics on the unfitness of the English worker for service in the army. What are the American statistics on the same subject? I have before me as I write the statistics compiled by the United States Marine Corps for the year 1915, showing the number of applicants examined, those accepted for enlistment, and the percentage accepted. For the whole United States, the applicants were 41,168 in number. Of these 3,833, or 9.31 per cent were found physically fit for the service; in other words, one man out of every eleven examined. Eleven thousand and twelve men applied in New York City, and of these 316 were found fit for service, or 2.869 per cent. Those who find themselves now suddenly interested in physical fitness as a great element in military preparedness may profitably consider these statistics. Industrial anarchy in peace does not make for physical preparedness in war.

IV

It is because the organization of national life is so eminently important, because its absence is one of the main sources of our peril, that we should be interested primarily in the development of a national consciousness and a discipline, which are good for peace, and which can be forwarded now by the peril of war if statesmen of vision can be found to give the movement leadership. Any reaction of opinion which tends to retard or frustrate that development is a national peril. The lack of just that kind of leadership today is conspicuous. The time is ripe for the development of a discipline adapted to and expressive of the philosophy of democracy for a definite and concrete programme. Instead of such statesmanship, we have nothing as yet which is constructive, unless a propaganda for large expenditures on purely military and naval matters deserves the name.

There is with us, moreover, now as always, a type of mind which is not entitled to leadership, which often successfully claims it, which learns nothing and forgets nothing, which for the needs of a far-reaching future has nothing but a morass of learning and a perpetual appeal to the traditions of the past, which clamors for the revival of the eighteenth-century philosophy of an agricultural democracy, for ' a return to those principles of individual liberty on which our country was founded ’ — principles truly American, but which need now as never before expansion and adaptability to new and changed surroundings. These men are proclaiming to slightly bored listeners, at countless public dinners, the desirability of teaching the foreigner coming to our shores eighteenth-century individualism as an essential and precious American doctrine, peculiarly desirable for the underfed and the overworked. This type of preaching, together with the reorganization of our views on the adaptability to our soil of German conceptions of social legislation, has brought industrial legislation nearly to a standstill.

A reaction against all social legislation has begun. The manufacturers’ organizations are already soliciting funds from one another to wipe out social legislation; to prevent the continuance or extension of the new type of law for the improvement of the condition of the worker. A new ally has joined them. The selfish desire artificially to stimulate the growth of labor unions by taking away from all working people every other form of protection from exploitation has induced Mr. Gompers to announce recently a campaign by the American Federation of Labor against such legislation throughout the country. He is against industrial boards and commissions even more than the manufacturers’ organizations. ‘ Repeatedly,’ he declares, ‘ the warning has been given that these numerous attempts to regulate industrial conditions and evils by law are insidious dangers to the best interests and welfare of the wage-earners.’

This reaction is not confined to the field of labor legislation. The existence of war affords an opportunity for Toryism, half-stupid and half-cunning, to clamor against ‘regulation,’ against meddlesome government clogging the wheels of industry, throttling industry, and so forth. There is a very considerable class in America of those who are against democratic discipline, because they can make money or attain power by its absence. Industrial feudalism, well-established, does not wish to be disturbed by the law. If the Tory reaction against German industrial legislation can be extended to cover the whole field of social and economic legislation, the future of American democracy will be seriously and injuriously affected.

Will it succeed? It is perhaps too early to say. Recent years have made revelations which are too fresh to be forgotten and which ought to make the reaction less extreme. It was only a few years ago, for example, that the principle of government regulation of railway securities was declared an outrageous interference with individual and corporate rights. Recent railroad history has thrown a flood of light upon the true motives of those who led the clamor against this kind of legislation. It is not likely that the exposures of Rock Island, Frisco, New Haven, and half a dozen similar but smaller scandals, will be readily forgotten. The Toryism which is against interference and regulation is largely stupid, but it also is largely selfish and dishonest. Will the anti-Servile-State propaganda be effective to thwart or delay genuine and needed reform on lines consistent with American principles?

German ideals are largely expressed in making the bottom of the social scale comfortable and, still worse, contented; ours, until quite recently, in more or less ineffective attempts at making the top of the social scale uncomfortable, leaving the bottom to seethe with all the justified discontent which industrial feudalism generates in a politically democratic state. The fact that our anti-trust acts, like the English penal laws of a century ago, have been both drastic and ineffective, is beside the mark. The point is that, however stupid the effort may have been, American democracy aimed to limit the undue wealth of the powerful rather than the undeserved poverty of the poor.

Social legislation in America is likely to receive a new turn as a by-product of the war. It may for a time cease altogether. The cost of government has increased enormously in recent decades. The clamor for efficiency in the past few years has been largely a demand for the elimination of ‘regulatory’ legislation of all kinds. This clamor will increase. The thinking behind it, real or alleged, is for the most part a composite of the views of those who believe in the economic gospel of Herbert Spencer and of those whose conservatism is social blindness carried to the point of stupidity. It is this combination which is far more dangerous to the future of America than the Socialists, who are teaching the immigrant that ours is and from the beginning was a purely capitalistic government, cunningly devised for the purpose of sucking his blood.

The conflict in America will be intensified in the next few years between those who believe in the evolution of American law adequate to meet, not merely political, but economic and social demands, to which it must respond or fail, and those who believe in Mr. Carnegie’s gospel of wealth — anarchistic individualism tempered by ostentatious philanthrophy; the philosophy whose fullest practical expression is recorded in the Pittsburg Survey — a hideous cartoon on Democracy.

The next few years will require from most of us a deal of thinking to know in which camp we belong. Great changes of one sort or another are coming. The anti-German sentiment is being utilized by those who hope to develop, not only a hatred of Prussian autocracy and despotism, — against which the German people themselves were struggling before the war and which they must meet after it is over,— but an equal prejudice against the wonderful system of government by which in spite of militarism Germany has evolved in less than forty-five years an intelligent, coördinated, intensive, highly educated, and efficient nationalism such as the world never knew before.

Those who just now are talking almost hysterically about a policy of preparedness are making certain false assumptions. They are advocating a national policy which, if adopted in the one-sided and incomplete way in which it is at present being presented, will set us back fifty years in possibility of true progress. The notion that preparedness is a mere military thing, to be had by superimposing upon the most wasteful, extravagant, and inefficient army and navy establishment in the world a new mass of similar expenditures, is a delusion. If we are so insistent upon preparation for war, and if we are, as we say, still unprepared after spending on such preparations over three billion dollars in the last twenty years, exclusive of pensions, let us at least in our preparation recognize an essential part of its true basis. The power behind military Germany is industrial Germany. The organization of German life is doubtless extreme, but the current preparedness doctrines, however much they may differ on military or naval estimates, agree at least in this: they ignore absolutely every necessity for improving the industrial organization, the economic basis for national unity. Sweat-shops, child-labor, industrial anarchy held in check by martial law, the exploitation of the worker, lack of an intelligent policy in handling the immigrant, industrial accidents crippling and burdening the worker, industrial diseases unregulated and unprevented, the almost total absence of effective labor legislation on the side of inspection and regulation, the exploited tenant farmer, the stupid chaos of liquor legislation, the whole mass of haphazard, slipshod laws which seem to defy all attempts at coordination and economy of administration — all these and a hundred others are true problems of preparedness which are today ignored.

It is a disciplined democracy which America needs, a democracy disciplined to a capacity for true leadership such as will effectuate a Pan-American federation, as a new world-contribution of democracy toward the foundations of peace. The strident patriots who are expounding crude preparedness propagandas, in principles and purposes identical with all the armed peace propagandas which have proved wrong in a hundred years, ignore all such considerations. If they have their way, there may be an additional reason for ignoring the economic basis of national unity, the plea of poverty: that we can’t afford it. The propagandists of preparation seem ready to do anything but improve the quality and character of our democracy. To them it is all a matter of guns, soldiers, submarines, and huzzas for the flag; not the establishment of a democracy supremely worth fighting for.

True preparedness calls, not merely for an external, but for an internal and industrial programme. The national defense orators who to-day fill the papers with their speeches seem to have in mind only enormous naval and military expenses — a programme which leaves pressing industrial problems as usual to private initiative and to philanthropy. Already, for example, one organization of public-spirited citizens is planning a programme for the alien which ought in its essential features to have been a governmental policy expressed in effective law at least twentyfive years ago.

Every destructive and disintegrating force in America is logically and by instinct on the side of the militant, for the militant programme retards the normal development of a sane industrial programme, an effective government, an organized democracy. Most of us, except the extreme pacifists, are entirely willing to have our government expend all the money which may be reasonably necessary for national defenses and the protection of our national honor. We are also willing and quite anxious to have the funds provided, in part at least, by cutting millions out of the fraudulent pension rolls, out of the impossible naval stations and absurd army posts, out of the countless lootings of the pork barrel of Congress for extravagant and unnecessary public buildings, and the endless appropriations for river and harbor improvements, which improve nothing but the political fences of statesmen. No country in the world has so little to show for her enormous expenditures on military and naval establishments as our own. A timely and patriotic programme of preparedness might well begin with a policy of retrenchment against waste and extravagance, an expression of self-denial akin to self-discipline. Nothing so revolutionary and so desirable has as yet been more than suggested. There are pending as I write, thus early in the session of Congress, bills involving the expenditure of $300,000,000, for munition factories where they will do local political interests the most good.

How can a sane programme for the perfection of a democracy of peace be even thought of in the midst of such a clamor for military preparedness — and appropriations? Yet that programme must be considered. The danger to America to-day is the ascendency at this time of shortsighted men, unduly excited over preparation for war, who cannot visualize the America whose great need is preparation for peace, for the evolution by patient labor and infinite pains, by the love and loyalty and wisdom of her freemen, of that difficult and ideal democracy, which harmonizes and blends political and industrial freedom — the only liberty which can enlighten the world.