has been domineering and exasperating, and being an island kingdom she might be starved to death if she did not have command of the sea. But why should the United States have a colossal navy? No one outside the militarists can answer. Because there is no ascertainable reason for this un-American policy, the other American countries are becoming frightened. Brazil has just laid down an extravagant naval programme, for the proud Republic of the South cannot consent to lie at the mercy of the haughty Republic of the North. The new departure of Brazil has bewitched Argentina from the vision which came to her before the statue of Christ, which she erected high up amid the Andes, and has fired her with a desire to rival in her battleships her ambitious military neighbor. We first of all have established militarism in the Western world, and are by our example dragging weaker nations into foolish and suicidal courses, checking indefinitely the development of two continents.

Our influence goes still further. It sets Australia blazing, and shoves Japan into policies which she cannot afford. But we cannot harm foreign nations without working lasting injury on ourselves. The very battleships which recently kindled the enthusiasm of children in South America, Australia, and Japan, also stirred the hearts of American boys and girls along our Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, strengthening in them impulses and ideals of an Old World which struggled and suffered before Jesus came. It is children who receive the deepest impressions from pageants and celebrations; and who can measure the damage wrought upon the world by the parade of American battleships? Children cannot look upon symbols of brute force, extolled and exalted by their elders, without getting the impression that a nation's power is measured by the calibre of its guns, and that its influence is determined by the explosive force of its shells. A fleet of battleships gives a wrong impression of what America is, and conceals the secret which VOL. 103-NO. 3

has made America great. Children do not know that we became a great worldpower without the assistance of either army or navy, building ourselves up on everlasting principles by means of our schools and our churches. The downpulling force of our naval pageant was not needed in a world already dragged down to low levels by the example of ancient nations, entangled by degrading traditions from which they are struggling to escape. The notion that this exhibition of battleships has added to our prestige among men whose opinion is worthy of consideration, or has made the world love us better, is only another feature of the militarist delusion.

There are delusions which are fatal, and this may be one of them. The most important drama to be acted within the next five hundred years will be played around the Pacific. In this drama our republic is destined to take an important part. At present we are the most influential nation bordering on its waters. It is for us chiefly to determine what the future shall be. We can make the Pacific what it is in name, a peaceful sea. Both the Japanese and the Chinese are peace-loving peoples. They will not fight unless driven to it. They need all their money for schools and internal improvements. We can make treaties with both countries which will render war an impossibility. The Philippines can be neutralized as Switzerland has been neutralized, so that they shall be safe without the protection of a single gun. Why not do this? We cannot flourish a deadly bludgeon without Japan doing the same. What Japan does, China must do also. She is already adding yearly twenty-five thousand soldiers to her army, and by and by she will build a fleet which will rival those of the United States and Japan combined. An empire of four hundred million people will not lie supine indefinitely, allowing armed nations to trample upon her at their own sweet pleasure. Our present policy will compel China to build battleships, and into these ships will go the

bread of millions of Chinamen, and the education of tens of millions of Chinese boys and girls. And then what? One never knows what a peaceable nation may do when once the slumbering devils of the heart are stirred to action by the sight of guns and the thought of blood. China has suffered grievous wrongs. She, like other nations, may find that revenge is

sweet.

Militarists assure us that some day a clash between the white and yellow races is inevitable. They say, "Whet your swords, multiply your battleships, prepare your shells, get ready for the fateful hour." The militarists have good reason to be frightened if America must meet the Orient on the battlefield. Gunpowder and lyddite obliterate social and racial distinctions, and put men on an equal footing. The Chinese coolie can, after a little practice, shoot a gun as accurately as can the graduate from Yale or Harvard. The follower of Confucius is the peer of the follower of Jesus when both men are armed with rifles. In the realm of force intellectual distinctions count for little, and spiritual attainments are less than nothing. If the Christian West consents to fight the Pagan East with swords and guns, she abdicates the advantage which she has won by the struggle of a thousand years, and comes down to fight upon the same level on which men stood in the days of Cæsar. Array a thousand Christian boys against a thousand Confucian boys, give the order," Fire!" and when the smoke has cleared away you will find among the dead as many Christian boys as boys whose skin is yellow. In the realm of carnage, victory goes to superior numbers, and not to character and culture. We have the culture, China has the numbers, but numbers outweigh the virtues and graces of a Christian heart.

The yellow peril is indeed portentous if we propose to meet China on the battlefield. Why not make such a meeting an impossibility? Why not do for the Pacific what our fathers did for the Canadian border? They prepared for

peace

and got it. Why not spend millions of dollars in cementing the friendship of Orient and Occident, and work without ceasing to keep the temper of the two worlds fraternal and sweet? Instead of sending on battleships, at an enormous cost, a few thousand young men who represent neither the brain nor the culture of our country, why not send to China and Japan at governmental expense delegations of teachers and publicists, editors and bankers, farmers and lawyers, physicians and labor leaders, men who can give the Orient an idea what sort of people we are? We can send a thousand such representatives across the Pacific every year for the next hundred years for less money than we are spending this year on our navy. No such blundering and extravagant method of exchanging international courtesies has ever been devised as that of sending to foreign cap itals naval officers and sailors on battleships and cruisers.

Countries never fight whose influential citizens know one another. Why not get acquainted with our Eastern neighbors? In the arts of peace we are their superior. In the art of war China can become our equal in a single generation, just as Japan in one generation has risen to the military level of Russia. Military virtues are simple, and can be rapidly developed. They run through the stages of their evolution swiftly and come to perfection early. The virtues of a Christlike spirit are the beautiful growths of a thousand years, and we are insane if we are willing to jeopardize what we have gained by infinite sacrifice and effort, by entering a field upon which victory depends upon neither beauty of spirit nor nobility of heart, but upon the shrewd manipulation of physical forces. The thing we ought to say to the Orient again and again, both by word and by deed, is, "We believe in peace! We abhor war! It is contrary to our nature, opposed by our religion, hostile to our ideals and traditions. We do not believe in settling disputes by force. We believe in reason.

See our hands, we carry no bludgeons. Search us, we own no concealed weapons. Trust us, for we are going to trust you. Let us work together for our mutual advantage, and the progress of humanity!"

But, delusion or not, can one nation hold aloof from this dance of death so long as other nations keep on dancing? Of course, America will limit her armament provided other nations do the same. But we are asked - is it wise or safe for our republic, isolated and alone, to say boldly," We will go no further in this business. Let other nations do what they will, America at any rate is going to pour her gold hereafter into the channels of education and economic development." Why not say this? To be sure it would be a risk, but why not run the risk? We are incurring far greater risks by our present policy. We are running the risk of changing the temper of our people, introducing structural changes in our form of government, and embroiling ourselves with nations which are now friendly. Preparing for war is hazardous business. It is not time, we all admit, for disarmament. America must do her part in the policing of the seas. It is not the hour to discuss even a reduction in armaments. Our battleships are not going to be sold at auction. We all agree that America must have a navy adequate to her needs. But has not the time arrived to call a halt in this indefinite expansion of an ever bigger navy? The militarists are just now asking Congress for 26,000-ton battleships carrying 14-inch guns, and a high naval authority says that the advisability of building even 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000-ton battleships is" the mature opinion of many of the ablest and most conservative officers of our navy to-day." What the radicals want is not yet disclosed.

Much has been written about the horrors of war; the time has come to write of the horrors of an armed peace. In many ways it is more terrible than war. War is soon over, and the wounds heal. An armed peace goes on indefinitely, and its wounds

gape and fester and poison all the air. War furnishes opportunity for men to be brave; an armed peace gives rise to interminable gossip about imaginary goblins and dangers. In war, nations think of principles, but in an armed peace the mind is preoccupied exclusively with devising ways of increasing the efficiency of the implements of slaughter. War develops men, but an armed peace rots moral fibre.

It is possible to buy peace at too high a price. Better fight and get done with it than keep nations incessantly thinking evil thoughts about their neighbors. Playing with battleships is a sorry business. The magnetic needle, disturbed by metal, loses its fidelity to the north, and the ship may go to pieces on the rocks. The heart of a nation, pressed close to steel armor, becomes abnormal in its action. Battleships blind the eyes to ideals which are highest. They draw the heart away from belief in the potency of spiritual forces. They quench faith in the power of justice, mercy, love. They minister to the atheism of force. They blur the fact that America became a world-power without a navy. They educate men to put reliance on reeds, which will break when the crisis comes. They fan the flames of vanity and self-seeking. They are deceivers. They seem to be the dominating forces of history, when in fact they are bubbles blown on a current which they did nothing to create. They delude men by inducing them to accept them as solutions of problems, whereas they create problems more serious than any already on hand. They strain international relations and fill the papers with gossip, debilitating to adults and demoralizing to the young. They feed the maw of panic-mongers, and darken the heavens with swarms of falsehoods and rumors.

Militarism has foisted upon the world a policy which handicaps the work of the church, cripples the hand of philanthropy, blocks the wheels of constructive legislation, cuts the nerve of reform, blinds statesmen to dangers which

are imminent and portentous, such as poverty and all the horde of evils which come from insufficient nutrition, and fixes the eyes upon perils which are fanciful and far away. It multiplies the seeds of discord, debilitates the mind by filling it with vain imaginations, corrodes the heart by feelings of suspicion and ill-will. It is starving and stunting the lives of millions, and subjecting the very frame of society to a strain which it cannot indefinitely endure. A nation which buys guns at seventy thousand dollars each, when the slums of great cities are rotting, and millions of human beings struggle for bread, will, unless it repents, be overtaken soon or late by the same divine wrath which shattered Babylon to pieces, and hurled Rome from a throne which was supposed to be eternal.

The world is bewildered and plagued, harassed and tormented, by an awful delusion. Who will break the spell? America can do it. Will she? To ape the customs of European monarchies is weakness. Why not do a fine and original thing? Our fathers had an intuition that the New World should be different from the Old, that it had a unique destiny, and that it must pursue an original course. That is the spiritual meaning of the Monroe doctrine that no foreign influence shall be permitted to thwart the development of America along original lines. Alas, the Old World has broken into our Paradise, and we are dethroning ideals for which our fathers were willing to die.

"Peace hath her victories No less renowned than war," said Milton to Cromwell long ago, and humanity is waiting for a nation which will win the victories that Milton saw. Will America devote herself to the work of winning these victories of peace? WI she spend half as much the next ten years in preparing for peace, as she has spent the last ten years in preparing for war? Experience has demonstrated that swollen navies multiply the points of friction, foster distrust, foment suspicion, fan the fires of hatred, become a defiance and a menace, and lie like a towering obstacle across the path of nations toilsomely struggling along the upward way. The old policy is wrong. The old leaders are discredited. The old programme is obsolete. Those who wish for peace must prepare for it. Our supreme business is not the scaring of rivals, but the making of friends.

Will America become a leader? At present we are an imitator. How hu miliating to tag at the heels of Great Britain in the naval procession, haunted always by the fear that we may fall behind Germany! Why not choose a road on which it will be possible to be first? Why not head the procession of nations whose faces are toward the light? This is America's opportunity. Will she, by setting a daring example, arrest the growth of armaments throughout the world? The nation which does this is cer tain of an imperishable renown.

DURING the past decade, newspaper and magazine articles galore, and not a few books, have been written on what is called the "Race Problem," the problem caused by the presence in this country of some ten millions of black and variouslyshaded colored people known as Negroes. But, strange as it may sound, the writer has no hesitation in saying that at this date there appears to be no clear conception anywhere, on the part of most people, as to just what the essential problem is which confronts the white inhabitants of the country because they have for fellow-citizens (nominally) ten million Negroes. Ask the average man, ask even the average editor or professor anywhere, what the race problem is, the heart of it; why, in this land with its millions of foreigners of all nationalities, the race problem of problems should be caused by ten million Negroes, not foreigners but native to the soil through several generations; and in all probability you will get some such answer as this:

"The Negroes, as a rule, are very ignorant, are very lazy, are very brutal, are very criminal. But a little way removed from savagery, they are incapable of adopting the white man's moral code, of assimilating the white man's moral sentiments, of striving toward the white man's moral ideals. They are creatures of brutal, untamed instincts, and uncontrolled feral passions, which give frequent expression of themselves in crimes of horrible ferocity. They are, in brief, an un

civilized, semi-savage people, living in a civilization to which they are unequal, partaking to a limited degree of its benefits, performing in no degree its duties. Because they are spatially in a civilization to which they are morally and intellectually repugnant, they cannot but be as a foreign irritant to the body social. The problem is, How shall the body social adjust itself, daily, hourly, to this irritant; how feel at ease and safe in spite of it? How shall the white inhabitants of the land, with their centuries of inherited superiority, conserve their civilization and carry it forward to a yet higher plane, hampered by ten million black inhabitants of the same land, with their centuries of inherited inferiority?"

To the foregoing answer, this might now and again be added, or advanced independently in reply to our question: "Personal aversion on the part of the white person for the Negro; personal aversion accounted for by nothing the individual Negro is, or is not, intellectually and morally; accounted for by the fact, simply, that he is a Negro that he has a black or colored skin, that he is different, of another kind."

Now, certainly, there are very few average men or philosophers, to whom the answer given to our question would not seem to state, or at any rate fairly indicate, the race problem in its essence. But, however few they be, I do not hesitate to align myself with them as one who does not believe that the essential race pro