Page 283 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

264 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by
internal discords and strife, like the nations of
Europe to-day, but still nations of warriors,
ready by training and habit to strike for their
rights, and, if need were, to die for them. In
the providence of God, along with the immense
increase of prosperity, of physical and mental
luxury, brought by this century, there has
grown up also that counterpoise stigmatized as
u
militarism," which has converted Europe into
a great camp of soldiers prepared for war. The
ill-timed cry for disarmament, heedless of the
menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly
against a great fact, which finds its sufficient
justification in present conditions, but which
is, above all, an unconscious preparation for
something as yet noted but by few.
On the side of the land, these great armies,
and the blind outward impulse of the Euro-
pean peoples, are the assurance that genera-
tions must elapse ere the barriers can be
overcome behind which rests the citadel of
Christian civilization. On the side of the sea
there is no state charged with weightier re-
sponsibilities than the United States. In the
Caribbean, the sensitive resentment by our