o this end maintain the second strongest and, for its size, the most
efficient fleet in the world. This is our militarism; that of Great
Britain has been to maintain a fleet double our own or any other in
size, for it is her basic principle to maintain an unquestioned
supremacy on the highways of commerce. To this we have meekly assented,
while other nations absorb our carrying trade and our flag waves over a
fleet of perhaps a dozen respectable oceangoing trading and passenger
ships. It is under her rather patronizing protection that we fight our
foreign wars and by pressure from her that we manage the Panama Canal
with nice and honorable attention to her interpretation of a treaty
capable of quite a different one. Whether or not this be "militarism" of
the utmost efficiency by sea is not difficult to decide. But we have
never styled it infamous.

While I am writing, Germans, whose basic principle is the most efficient
"militarism" by land, are publishing all abroad that the "militarism" of
France must be forever stamped out, so that they may dwell at peace in
the lands which are their home.

Within a generation France has accumulated a colonial empire second only
to that of Great Britain, while she has incessantly demanded the
reintegration of German lands, and especially a German city which she
arbitrarily annexed and held by "militarism" for about five generations.
The "militarism" of a republic and a democracy which retains the
essential features of Napoleonic administration has been quite as
efficient as that of a monarchical democracy like Great Britain, and may
easily prove more efficient than that of a monarchy like Germany.

Why should it be more infamous or barbarous in one case than the other?
And with what is this efficient military democracy allied in the
closest ties?

With Russia, an Oriental despotism which by the aid of French money has
developed a "militarism" by land so portentous in numbers, dimension,
and efficiency that its movements are comparable to those of Attila's
Huns. Escaped Russians in Western lands are denouncing German
"militarism" as the incubus of the world.

Which of the two should Americans regard as the greater danger?

Menaces to Our Neutrality.

It has wrung our hearts to consider the violation of Belgian neutrality,
for which both France and eventually even Great Britain have long been
prepared, but the latter has with little or no protest arranged with the
"bear that