chemes for maintaining the
peace, or for the common defense, has taken the shape of a projected
league of neutral nations to keep the peace by enforcement of specified
international police regulations or by compulsory arbitration of
international disputes. It is extremely doubtful how far, if at all,
popular sentiment of any effectual force falls in with this line of
precautionary measures. Yet it is evident that popular sentiment, and
popular apprehension, has been stirred profoundly by the events of the
past two years, and the resulting change that is already visible in the
prevailing sentiment as regards the national defense would argue that
more far-reaching changes in the same connection are fairly to be looked
for within a reasonable allowance of time.

In this American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto
is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The
first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national
self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate,
expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and
less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to
anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, or less
exclusively national footing in matters of the common defense.

The national administration has been moving at an accelerated rate in
the direction not of national isolation and self-reliance resting on a
warlike equipment formidable enough to make or break the peace at
will--such as the more truculent and irresponsible among the politicians
have spoken for--but rather in the direction of moderating or curtailing
all national pretensions that are not of undoubted material consequence,
and of seeking a common understanding and concerted action with those
nationalities whose effectual interests in the matters of peace and war
coincide with the American. The administration has grown visibly more
pacific in the course of its exacting experience,--more resolutely, one
might even say more aggressively pacific; but the point of chief
attention in all this strategy of peace has also visibly been shifting
somewhat from the maintenance of a running equilibrium between
belligerents and a keeping of the peace from day to day, to the ulterior
and altogether different question of what is best to be done toward a
conclusive peace at the close of hostilities, and the ways and means of
its subsequent perpe