CHAPTER II

NATIONAL DANGERS AND NATIONAL DEFENCE

THE

HE kind of defence and the amount of defence needed anywhere depend upon the kind of danger and the amount of danger existing. A rocky coast needs many lighthouses; a safe coast, few. Berlin, which is practically fire-proof, requires few fire-engines and is proud of having fewer than our flimsily-built cities necessitate. A nation that has little danger from without should exult if it needs few battleships; nothing except dire danger can excuse the taxation of toilers of the world for dreadnoughts. Some years ago, an American Admiral, resenting protests against spending money on the navy, asked, "Why does not the speaker turn his attention to the waste of six hundred million dollars in fires which a proper civilisation would prevent? Expenditure upon the navy is but a triviality in comparison with that." A singular comparison indeed! One may compare one evil with another or one preventive with another-fire-engines with navy, fire with war; but if a navy is a preventive of war, as it is claimed, its cost can only be compared with the

cost of the preventives of fire, not with the loss by fire. If they can command more power of logic than the Admiral's, there would be nothing more profitable for Americans than to consider carefully their dangers in connection with the respective preventives which they have supplied for them.

In arraigning our extravagance and waste, the Admiral might have gone further and reminded us that we are the most homicidal of civilised nations. We murder, out of every million citizens, 129 every year, while just across the border, in Canada, only three out of every million are slain. We are the most wasteful and extravagant people on earth. We have destroyed in four recent years of peace at least 60,000 more precious lives by accident than perished by bullets on both sides in the whole four years of our bloody Civil War. In one year, New York City alone lost three thousand more American lives by violent deaths than were slain in three years of the Philippine War. We destroy by fire about seven times as much annually as does all Europe. This is said to be equal to the cost of half the new buildings erected in the United States every year. Said Professor Giddings of Columbia University: "For three hundred years we have been a herd of wild asses in the wilderness. There have been other herds in other lands in all ages, but no other has accomplished an equal amount of damage in so short a time." Our civic corruption and gigantic land thefts, sugar frauds, and insurance graft have astounded Europe, and

made it a common question whether the Americans do not care most of all for money. We have still about 6,000,000 illiterates and we pay our average school-teacher less than an average street-sweeper; yet with ignorance, recklessness, waste, preventable disease, accident, and crime attacking our fair land on every hand we are spending our chief thought on possible enemies over seas.

Since our republic was founded, it has never been attacked. We ourselves began all our three foreign wars: the War of 1812, which would probably not have occurred if we had had an Atlantic cable and known of England's concession in withdrawing the Orders in Council which were the main cause of the war; the Mexican War, which was primarily fought in the interests of the slave power and, in the words of Hon. John W. Foster, was a war of "conquest and injustice"; the Spanish War, which would probably not have opened, in the opinion of our then minister to Spain, General Woodford, had Congress waited forty-eight hours. In all these three foreign wars combined, including the Philippine adjunct to our Spanish War, we lost less than fifteen thousand men by foreign bullets. For these past wars and for preparation for future wars, the United States, protected by two oceans, without an enemy in the whole world, is paying about seventy cents out of every dollar of its income, leaving only thirty cents of every dollar to spend on all national necessities and constructive work. Imagine, my dear house

holder, spending seventy per cent of your family income on stone-walls and moats, burglar alarms and bull-dogs, and having only thirty per cent left for the housing, clothing, and education of your family. For the national family, Uncle Sam has thirty cents on the dollar left for the payment of Congress, the President, Cabinet, all the federal courts, federal prisons, custom house buildings and officers, post-office buildings, coast-guard, lighthouses, census, printing, diplomatic and consular service, forestry, waterways, quarantine, irrigation, agricultural and other departments, mints,

etc.

It requires more imagination to enable us to absorb and digest these simple facts than most intelligent Americans seem to possess. Is not the logic of our losses and expenditure precisely the reverse of our worthy Admiral's? If all these dangers mentioned above and the many not mentioned exist within our midst, against which we are spending but a fraction for defence compared with our expenditures on armaments and pensions, are we not reversing the normal order and putting our greatest defence where it is least needed and our least defence where it is most needed? It is a state of mind very much to be dreaded, said John Ruskin, for a man not to know the devil when he sees him. It is a state of mind still more to be dreaded when a nation does not know its real enemies from bogeys.

Despite the fact that for thirty years before the

Civil War and from 1872 to 1898 we had a small navy, we were a world power; our democracy, as Lowell said, was undermining every monarchy in Europe. Our beloved land did not first become a world power when Dewey sank a few old Spanish ships. Ever since the Constitution was ratified and began to serve as the basis of the dozens of national constitutions written since, we have been a world power, and have been recognised as such. It was once our pride and glory that we need not burden ourselves with the millstone of militarism that the great powers of Europe have hung around their necks. To-day with our new militarism and big navy craze and under the clamour of certain vested interests which want contracts for military equipments, we are following Old World methods and follies without the Old World's excuse. A spirit of vain emulation has been goading us to economic madness. Though we are comparatively rich, we can ill afford the gigantic price we are paying for this either real or assumed new timidity and this humiliating scare which our huge navy implies. Since Washington's time, our population has increased about 23 times and our area perhaps three times; we have increased our naval expenses alone over 120 times! Our armaments have increased five times as fast as our population.

We are told periodically, just before the vote on the naval budget, that Japan has so many hundred thousand soldiers that she can land upon our shores, and that we are unprepared for possible