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