nd forget the
other. Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered
Alsace-Lorraine she has "captured" a province worth, "cash value,"
in my critic's phrase, sixty-six millions sterling. What we
overlook is that Germany has also captured the people who own the
property and who continue to own it. We have multiplied by _x_, it
is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide
by _x_, and that the resultant is consequently, so far as the
individual is concerned, exactly what it was before. My critic
remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the
division.

Just think of all the theories, the impossible theories for which the
"practical" man has dragged the nations into war: the Balance of Power,
for instance. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief
of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute
folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to
fight--and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate--Great
Britain, in the interests of the Monroe Doctrine (which is a form of the
"Balance of Power"). I do not think any one knew what the Monroe
Doctrine meant, or could coherently defend it. An American Ambassador
had an after-dinner story at the time.

"What is this I hear, Jones, that you do not believe in the Monroe
Doctrine?"

"It is a wicked lie. I have said no such thing. I do believe in the
Monroe Doctrine. I would lay down my life for it; I would die for it.
What I did say was that I didn't know what it meant."

And it was this vague theory which very nearly drove America into a war
that would have been disastrous to the progress of Anglo-Saxon
civilization.

This was at the time of the Venezuelan crisis: the United States, which
for nearly one hundred years had lived in perfect peace with a British
power touching her frontier along three thousand miles, laid it down as
a doctrine that her existence was imperilled if Great Britain should
extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South
American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent
and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be
involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and
America. The present writer happened at that time to be living in
America, and concerned with certain political work. Night after night he
heard these fulminatio