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Show 302 303 see all this achieved by this May, 1909, we could none of us, the most optimistic of us, have believed it. Yet all this we see. What of it? What is the logic of it? The logic of it, the thing clearly prescribed, is the gradual decrease of the machinery for the settlement of international diti'erences by war correspond- ing to the steady and now so wonderfully great increase of the machinery for their settlement by arbitration and the courts. This is perfectly clear. The way-faring man. though a fool, cannot err in this. And the wayfaring man does not err. It is so clear that. seeing the nations do not respect the logic, he promptly pronounces the Hague conventions waste paper and ---.pqu 1 \ mm It the whole l-lague movement a lnnnbug, In this he does err seriously: but it is because he does not take into account the extent to which vested interests, commercial greed, selfish national ambitions and the pride and pervasive inlluence of entrenched military classes hinder straight logical operations. The sophisticated politician is reckoning with a mass of premises not down in the books of the plain people. The plain people are right on the main point. The failure to decrease the machinery of war as we increase the machinery of law. above all the actual enormous increase of armaments at such a time by the very nations party to the Hague conventions, is rank infidelity to the spirit and purpose of those conventions. One thing alone could justify or excuse it-sonie obvious new danger. Is there any such new danger? \l'e need not now meddle with other peoples affairs. How is it with ourselves? Our increase in naval armament in these ten years has been something portentous. No nation has a worse record; perhaps no other has so bad a record, since we, unlike England and Germany, have no provocation or excuse. \\'e have no jealous neighbors, no great merchant marine to guard, no concern about food supply, no exposure to invasion or attackhwe are in no danger whatever if we behave ourselves. There is none from Europe; there is none from Asia the periodic trumped-up visions of Japanese armies advancing through the mountains upon Salt Lake are worthy only of the type of anlishmen whom Cohden dealt with in his "Three Panics" and who are thriller] by Du Maurier's cheap melodrama. At this very time Japan is cutting down her naval budget while we are pushingr up ours. And South Amer- icaishe needs our help no more. Ten years ago our loudest apology for battleships was that they might be needed down there in behalf of the Monroe Doctrine, to stop some despotism in col- lectiiig debts. But the last Hague Conference made. all that forcible collecting of debts henceforth illegal and impossible, removing at one stroke half of our hitherto professed occasion for a big navy. Does all this have any effect on the Navy League or on the people at Washington who settle these things? Not the slightest. Why? Because the plain people are asleep and have not spoken. The plain people read the newspapers. They have plenty of opportunities to know what the positive damages are which our own present naval excesses are doing to other peoples. They know what impulse they have given to similar furore in South America and in Australia; they know that they have furnished arguments in the French Senate for the increase of the French navy; they know what bitter disappointment and setback they have given to the brave champions of international reason and justice in every European nation. working at such terrible odds against the appalling and increasing burdens there. M r. Birrell, of the British ministry, spoke for all that is enlightened in Europe when he exclaimed concerning the "words of doom." as he called them, in the section of Mr. Taft's inaugural relatingr to this subject: "They have shattered some of the best hopes of humanity. It is a miserable pity, it is a miserable pity that these hopes should be shattered and that we now have to deal with the United States as a fully equipped military and naval nation," He might have added that the most pitiful fact of all is the fact that in the present y ‘ar the United States, hitherto boasting~ that it but followed the lead of England and Germany in building Dreadnoughts, and that its anxiety was to limit the size of battleships, now takes the lead in buildingr larger ships than any now existing, thus forcing up the standard for all nations. That an English minister, a conspicuous friend of America, should have to speak a word like that of Mr. lirrell about us today seems the veriest irony as we hark back thirty years to a speech about us by John Bright, our most eloquent English friend of the last generation. It was exactly thirty years ago, on a Fourth of July, our natal day, that in a powerful speech in HIM" MM. L'tr |