adapted to meet the obvious responsibilities which that crisis had imposed upon it.

The vastness of America tends to the localization of its thoughts and activities. When the Republic was born, and only extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Alleghanies, it was believed by many responsible statesmen that it could not possibly long exist over so great an area as even the eastern border of the continent. Frederick the Great had said in 1772 that history could be searched in vain for a single instance where a Republican form of government had long existed over an extended area of territory. It is altogether probable that if it had not been for the steamship, the telegraph, the railroad, and the printing press, weaving together by the centripetal influences of steam and electricity the scattered communities of our country, that the prediction of Frederick the Great would have been justified.

These elemental economic forces have created a reasonable unity of spirit in America's domestic problems, but in the matter of exterior relations, many of its people still take in the full noontide of the twentieth century a very parochial view of world politics.

One result of the wide variety of local conditions is its dual form of government, which seeks to

decentralize authority and carry the principle of local autonomy to the furthest possible limit. In practice, if not in theory, the United States has been in the past a congeries of nations. A conglomeration is not necessarily a unit, as it has found to its cost in the last two fateful years.

The heterogeneous character of its population, representing as it does the blood of all the great European nations, necessarily impairs that sense of homogeneity, without which the unity of a people cannot be fully developed. The United States has given hostages to every civilized nation, whose subjects have crowded to its shores and become citizens, that it will not antagonize the land of their nativity even in a just cause, and while this makes for peace, yet its influence as a world power thereby suffers an inevitable emasculation in power and dignity.

A striking evidence of the parochial character of American politics is shown by the indifference with which, until recent months, the American people evaded the subject of military preparedness.

At the end of the Civil War the United States was the first military power of the world. It had at that time a trained and equipped army of a million men. Few armies of equal size could at that time be instanced, but the great army of

Grant, after the final review in the city of Washington, quietly melted into civil life and thereafter and until the Spanish-American War, the United States had an army which barely exceeded in numbers the police force of New York. Its navy, too, was almost non-existent until in Mr. Cleveland's Administration its rebuilding began.

This policy of unpreparedness was the more extraordinary as the history of the United States was replete with instances which demonstrated its folly. One of the gratifying evidences that America is at last awakening from its dream of isolation is the swift development of the present move towards military preparedness; but it has not been sufficiently rapid to prepare the nation adequately for the possible eventualities of the coming years. Moreover, may it not be as evanescent as an emotional religious revival? Unless America shall gain a wider vision of its duties and potentialities as a world power, the reply must be in the affirmative.

The fact that the United States was for nearly a year on the very brink of war with Germany and that it did not lie exclusively in America to determine whether peaceful relations should continue, did not give to the movement for preparedness the impetus which could be reasonably expected in a

nation which is not introspective. The indifference to external danger made our Government indifferent to the necessity of preparation. When the clouds had commenced to gather and a war with Germany was possible any day, President Wilson for a time belittled the movement for preparedness and denied its necessity, and it was not until the crisis had lasted for some months that he suddenly shifted his position and advocated the movement for preparedness.

That preparedness is an indispensable policy, if America is to discard its policy of isolation and play the part in the great drama of history to which its greatness entitles it, is clear to those who, with expert knowledge, have considered the ability of the United States to defend itself from attack.

To these it is clear that its navy cannot alone relieve the United States from the necessity of military preparation. The fact that it is in the most favourable view the third navy of the world in itself shows that at least two nations could attack the United States with superior force at sea. It must guard two oceans and 21,000 miles of coast line, and as the invader could probably select the time and place of the invasion, it is obvious that America could not safely rely upon its full naval strength at any one point of attack.

What then as to its land defences?

Fourteen years ago the then Secretary of War appointed a General Staff for the Army. This General Staff, composed of experts who had given their lives to a careful study of the problem and who first sought the opinion of nearly every officer of the Army, formulated a report in the year 1912, which until the present time has made little, if any, impression upon the American people, and, but for the events of the last two years probably never would have.

This report showed, among other things, that it was possible for at least three of the great nations of the world, within ten to thirty days, to put an army ranging from 100,000 to 200,000 men upon the shores of America, and in that they were confirmed by the ablest military authorities of the world, namely, the German General Staff, who in their unceasing study of military problems before the present war, had, let us hope as a purely academic problem, reached the conclusion that they could put within ten days approximately 200,000 men upon the Atlantic Coast.

In 1916, the experts of the United States War College made a much more specific calculation, based upon the existing tonnage of the two nations, which were taken to work out the problem.