like the nations of Europe to-day, but still nations of
warriors, ready by training and habit to strike for their rights, and,
if need were, to die for them. In the providence of God, along with
the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and mental luxury,
brought by this century, there has grown up also that counterpoise
stigmatized as "militarism," which has converted Europe into a great
camp of soldiers prepared for war. The ill-timed cry for disarmament,
heedless of the menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly
against a great fact, which finds its sufficient justification in
present conditions, but which is, above all, an unconscious
preparation for something as yet noted but by few.

On the side of the land, these great armies, and the blind outward
impulse of the European peoples, are the assurance that generations
must elapse ere the barriers can be overcome behind which rests the
citadel of Christian civilization. On the side of the sea there is no
state charged with weightier responsibilities than the United States.
In the Caribbean, the sensitive resentment by our people of any
supposed fresh encroachment by another state of the European family
has been manifested too plainly and too recently to admit of dispute.
Such an attitude of itself demands of us to be ready to support it by
organized force, exactly as the mutual jealousy of states within the
European Continent imposes upon them the maintenance of their great
armies--destined, we believe, in the future, to fulfil a nobler
mission. Where we thus exclude others, we accept for ourselves the
responsibility for that which is due to the general family of our
civilization; and the Caribbean Sea, with its isthmus, is the nexus
where will meet the chords binding the East to the West, the Atlantic
to the Pacific.

The Isthmus, with all that depends upon it,--its canal and its
approaches on either hand,--will link the eastern side of the American
continent to the western as no network of land communications ever
can. In it the United States has asserted a special interest. In the
present she can maintain her claim, and in the future perform her
duty, only by the creation of that sea power upon which predominance
in the Caribbean must ever depend. In short, as the internal
jealousies of Europe, and the purely democratic institution of the
_levee en masse_--the general enforcement of military training--have
prepared the way for great national armies