THE HUMAN NATURE AND MORALS OF THE CASE

of his rhetoric would display it) that he is out of sympathy with predominant American ideals. He might emigrate to Venezuela, or Colombia, or Nicaragua. He would be able to prove to each military dictator in turn that, in converting the country into a shambles, far from committing a foul crime for which such dictators should be, and are, held in execration by civilized men the world over, they are, on the contrary, but obeying one of God's commands in tune with all the immutable laws of the universe. I desire to write in all seriousness, but, to one who happens to have seen at first hand something of the conditions which arise from a real military conception of civilization, it is very difficult. How does Mr. Roosevelt, who declares that "by war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life"; how does Von Stengel, who declares that "war is a test of a nation's health, political, physical, and moral"; how do our militarists, who infer that the military state is so much finer than the Cobdenite one of commercial pursuits; how does M. Ernest Renan, who declares that war is the condition of progress, and that under peace we should sink to a degree of degeneracy difficult to realize; and how do the various English clergymen who voice a like philosophy reconcile their creed with military Spanish America? How can they urge that non-military industrialism, which, with all its shortcomings, has on the Western Continent given us Canada and the United States, makes for decadence and degeneration, while militarism and the qualities and instincts that go with it have given