largest and most
immediately concerned of the neutral nations, should afford more
significant evidence of the changes in the popular attitude likely to
follow from a growing realisation of this state of the case, that the
advantage has passed definitively to any well prepared and resolute
offensive, and that no precautions of diplomacy and no practicable
measures of defensive armament will any longer give security,--provided
always that there is anywhere a national Power actuated by designs of
imperial dominion.

It is, of course, only little by little that the American people and
their spokesmen have come to realise their own case under this
late-modern situation, and hitherto only in an imperfect degree. Their
first response to the stimulus has been a display of patriotic
self-sufficiency and a move to put the national defense on a
war-footing, such as would be competent to beat off all aggression.
Those elements of the population who least realise the gravity of the
situation, and who are at the same time commercially interested in
measures of armament or in military preferment, have not begun to shift
forward beyond this position of magniloquence and resolution; nor is
there as yet much intimation that they see beyond it, although there is
an ever-recurring hint that they in a degree appreciate the practical
difficulty of persuading a pacific people to make adequate preparation
beforehand, in equipment and trained man-power, for such a plan of
self-sufficient self-defense. But increasingly among those who are, by
force of temperament or insight or by lack of the pecuniary and the
placeman's interest, less confident of an appeal to the nation's
prowess, there is coming forward an evident persuasion that warlike
preparations--"preparedness"--alone and carried through by the Republic
in isolation, will scarcely serve the turn.

There are at least two lines of argument, or of persuasion, running to
the support of such a view; readiness for a warlike defense, by
providing equipment and trained men, might prove a doubtfully effectual
measure even when carried to the limit of tolerance that will always be
reached presently in any democratic country; and then, too, there is
hope of avoiding the necessity of such warlike preparation, at least in
the same extreme degree, by means of some practicable working
arrangement to be effected with other nations who are in the same case.
Hitherto the farthest reach of these pacific s