large reflects
on any matters of such gravity and urgency as to force themselves upon
the attention of the common man.

Two main lines of reflection have visibly been enforced on the
administration by the course of events in the international field. There
has been a growing apprehension, mounting in the later months to
something like the rank of a settled conviction, that the Republic has
been marked down for reduction to a vassal state by the dynastic Empire
now engaged with its European adversaries. In so saying that the
Republic has been marked down for subjection it is not intended to
intimate that deliberate counsel has been had by the Imperial
establishment on that prospective enterprise; still less that a
resolution to such effect, with specification of ways and means, has
been embodied in documentary form and deposited for future reference in
the Imperial archives. All that is intended, and all that is necessary
to imply, is that events are in train to such effect that the
subjugation of the American republic will necessarily find its place in
the sequence presently, provided that the present Imperial adventure is
brought to a reasonably auspicious issue; though it does not follow that
this particular enterprise need be counted on as the next large
adventure in dominion to be undertaken when things again fall into
promising shape. This latter point would, of course, depend on the
conjuncture of circumstances, chief of which would have to be the
exigencies of imperial dominion shaping the policy of the Empire's
natural and necessary ally in the Far East. All this has evidently been
coming more and more urgently into the workday deliberations of the
American administration. Of course, it is not spoken of in set terms to
this effect in official utterances, perhaps not even within doors; that
sort of thing is not done. But it can do no harm to use downright
expressions in a scientific discussion of these phenomena, with a view
to understanding the current drift of things in this field.

Beyond this is the similar apprehension, similarly though more slowly
and reluctantly rising to the level of settled conviction, that the
American commonwealth is not fit to take care of its own case
single-handed. This apprehension is enforced more and more unmistakably
with every month that passes on the theatre of war. And it is reenforced
by the constantly more obvious reflection that the case of the American
commonwealth in th