build railroads to India?

It is such quite simple questions as these, and the quite plain facts
which underlie them which will lead to sounder conceptions in this
matter on the part of the peoples.

It is not we who are the "theorists," if by "theorists" is meant the
constructors of elaborate and deceptive theorems in this matter. It is
our opponents, the military mystics, who persistently shut their eyes to
the great outstanding facts of history and of our time. And these
fantastic theories are generally justified by most esoteric doctrine,
not by the appeal to the facts which stare you in the face. I once
replied to a critic thus:--

In examining my critic's balance sheet I remarked that were his
figures as complete as they were absurdly incomplete and
misleading, I should still have been unimpressed. We all know that
very marvellous results are possible with figures; but one can
generally find some simple fact which puts them to the supreme test
without undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever
happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the
gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a
financial genius present weird columns of figures, which
demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which
they embody one can break the bank and win a million. I have never
examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the
genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for
twenty francs. Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested
in his figures. If they were worth examination they would not be
for sale.

And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the
adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy
which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to
the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the
fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with
the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that
philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time. It requires
an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies,
whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty
experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the
same time. It is so much easier to seize on one fact a