policy because of the dangers and duties incurred through her
relations with foreign countries.

The increasingly strenuous nature of international competition and the
constantly higher standards of international economic, technical, and
political efficiency prescribe a constantly improving domestic political
and economic organization. The geographical isolation which affords the
United States its military security against foreign attack should not
blind Americans to the merely comparative nature of their isolation. The
growth of modern sea power and the vast sweep of modern national
political interests have at once diminished their security, and
multiplied the possible sources of contact between American and European
interests. No matter how peaceably the United States is inclined, and no
matter how advantageously it is situated, the American nation is none
the less constantly threatened by political warfare, and constantly
engaged in industrial warfare. The American people can no more afford
than can a European people to neglect any necessary kind or source of
efficiency. Sooner than ever before in the history of the world do a
nation's sins and deficiencies find it out. Under modern conditions a
country which takes its responsibilities lightly, and will not submit to
the discipline necessary to political efficiency, does not gradually
decline, as Spain did in the seventeenth century. It usually goes down
with a crash, as France did in 1870, or as Russia has just done. The
effect of diminishing economic efficiency is not as suddenly and
dramatically exhibited; but it is no less inevitable and no less severe.
And the service which the very intensity of modern international
competition renders to a living nation arises precisely from the
searching character of the tests to which it subjects the several
national organizations. Austria-Hungary has been forced to assume a
secondary position in Europe, because the want of national cohesion and
vitality deprived her political advance of all momentum. Russia has
suddenly discovered that a corrupt bureaucracy is incapable of a
national organization as efficient as modern military and political
competition requires. It was desirable in the interest of the Austrians,
the Hungarians, and the Russians, that these weaknesses should be
exposed; and if the Christian states of the West ever become so
organized that their weaknesses are concealed until their consequences
become irremed