get the real thing. The soldiers do not pass their lives in practising the goose-step, cleaning harness, pipeclaying belts, but in giving and taking hard pounding. Several of these progressive republics have never known a year since they declared their independence from Spain in which they have not had a war. And quite a considerable proportion of the populations spend their lives in fighting. During the first twenty years of Venezuela's independent existence she fought no less than one hundred and twenty important battles, either with her neighbors or with herself, and she has maintained the average pretty well ever since. Every election is a fight—none of your "mouth-fighting," none of your craven talking-shops for them. Good, honest, hard, manly knocks, with anything from one to five thousand dead and wounded left on the field. The presidents of these strenuous republics are not poltroons of politicians, but soldiers—men of blood and iron with a vengeance, men after Mr. Roosevelt's own heart, all following "the good old rule, the simple plan." These are the people who have taken Carlyle's advice to "shut up the talking-shops." They fight it out like men; they talk with Gatling-guns and Mausers. Oh, they are a very fine, manly, military lot! If fighting makes for survival, they should completely oust from the field Canada and the United States, one of which has never had a real battle for the best part of its hundred years of craven, sordid, peaceful life, and the other of which Homer Lea assures us is surely dying, because of its tendency to avoid fighting.
Mr. Lea does not make any secret of the fact (and if he did, some