United States, with all of our American
progressiveness, had no general staff at all until Secretary Root
prevailed upon Congress to provide one. These general staffs plan,
during the long years of peace, every possible conflict. They map out
with absolute accuracy every imaginable field of operations in the
country of every possible enemy; they equip the general in the field
with information on all subjects, perfect to the smallest detail.

Japan's general staff has been preparing day and night for the present
war for every month of every year of an entire decade. Oyama's
victories were ripening in the brain of this modern Attila for ten
long years. Von Moltke had thought out the conquest of France years
before fate blew the trumpet that set the tremendous enginery of his
plans in motion. Yes, but these men kept thinking, thinking.

Nobody heard _them_ saying that all great wars had been fought.
Perhaps they did not know whether all wars had been fought or not; but
they knew this: That if any future wars were to be fought, those wars
would be bigger than any conflict that had gone before, and that their
armies would have to be handled with greater precision, and their
tactics would have to be more daring than even those of Napoleon, or
Hannibal, or Caesar.

Very well, the Franco-Prussian War did come. The Russo-Japanese War
did come. And when the time for these dread duels between peoples
arrived, those men were in the saddle. Battles whose red desperation
have made the world's historic combats look small, have within a year
taught all men that the art of war requires as much original thinking
as it did when the Corsican overwhelmed the muddled military minds of
Europe, weakened and palsied by the belief that nothing more was to be
learned in warfare.

Manchuria's awful lesson teaches you, young man, that the profession
of arms, dreadful as it is honorable, holds out to you all the
possibilities by which every great captain of history made his name
immortal.

"I think the statesmanship of Joseph Chamberlain is the most
comprehensive and instructive since that of Bismarck," said a
passenger on an ocean steamer to an Englishman of considerable
distinction in the world of letters.

"I fail to see the statesmanship," said the latter; "will you kindly
point it out?"

"Why," said the admirer of Chamberlain, "the British Empire needed
unifying; it needed to be bound together by ties of sentiment, by all
those means