appointed by the President of the United States to consider the expediency of utilising existing international agencies for the purpose of limiting the armaments of the nations of the world by international agreement, and of constituting the combined navies of the world an international force for the preservation of universal peace, and to consider and report upon any other means to diminish the expenditures of government for military purposes and to lessen the probabilities of war.

But the American Navy League itself is perhaps chiefly responsible for the fact that our strong, self-contained, and well-protected republic has not the courage to take the lead in the limitation of its own navy and to invite others to follow suit. Our timidity and continued increase have furnished the explicit argument for increase by other nations, and our huge navy, so much larger than our needs, has become an obstacle to the world's progress. "Battleships are cheaper than battles” is the sophistical alternative presented by the League's motto. "Statesmanship is cheaper and more efficacious than battleship" is the proper retort of the practical business man to-day, who knows why Germany and France did not range their battleships against each other in the summer of 1911. This statesmanship is the function of the banker and economist as well as of the legislator who votes appropriations.

The Navy League, in the programme of its last convention, to justify its claims, quotes without

context the words of Jesus, "I came not to send peace, but a sword." That sword of the spirit which made his teaching dirempt families, setting "a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother," it is needless to say, has as little to do with the weapons for which the Navy League is clamouring as Paul's “whole armour of God" has to do with armour-plate from Pittsburg mills.

The League declares itself to be based on the belief that if we are strong no one will attack us, and upon the "knowledge that we will never unjustly attack others." This latter assumption of our own just purposes is of course ridiculed by other nations with which we might have trouble. Possibly, however, it would not be so confidently asserted by the League if for the effusive and grandiloquent words in the building at West Point devoted to memorials of the Mexican War were substituted those words of General Grant, who fought in that same war: "For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker people." When one remembers that, as has previously been said, from 1872 to 1898 we were wholly "unprepared," with a tiny navy scarcely larger than China's, and that this was also our condition for thirty years before the Civil War, one sees why it was that we were so flouted, imposed on, and abused by the whole world

during that period of humiliation! The explan

ation is easy. During these disgraceful years,

when we were cowering in terror, we had no Navy League!

THE

CHAPTER V

THE NAVY AS "INSURANCE"

HE Secretary of the Navy has recently stated that our navy is the "cheapest insurance on our national wealth. Now "insurance" involves payment to make good a loss, which is something that navies never make; the term is misleading. If, however, we substitute the word "protection," which is probably what was meant, the Secretary's argument as to the cost of the navy relative to the wealth it protects is even more misleading. Taking the valuation of the total wealth of the country, he shows an average annual expenditure of only $.0012 on the dollar for the support of the navy. It is an ingenious statement, literally correct, but conveying a wholly false impression. It leaves the average reader, who knows nothing further on the subject, with the comfortable assumption that we are receiving an enormous degree of protection for a trifling sum. Naturally our annual outgo for the navy should be compared with our annual income, not with the total capital of the country.

The estimate of wealth of course includes all our

vast territory-forests, Dakota wheat fields, Pennsylvania oil-wells, Chicago sky-scrapers, Colorado silver mines, our lake shipping, and all wealth out of reach of an enemy's guns fired at sea. It implies also that all the seaboard wealth is exposed to bombardment. But at the Hague Conference, "the bombardment of undefended ports, towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings" was prohibited by unanimous vote. To-day, if an enemy's fleet were to approach our shores, the seaside cottagers need have no alarm, unless they were close to fortified places and had not availed themselves of the legal right to plant mines to prevent landing of troops.

Looking at the matter fairly, then, we perceive that, instead of comparing the cost of protection given by the navy to the colossal wealth of our wide domains, we should compare it merely with the fortified and therefore exposed points on the coasts, all of which compose but a small fraction of the total wealth. This fraction is all that a navy can protect from attack; for surely nobody imagines an invading force advancing with impunity from the coast to Chicago.

The Secretary's figures express the average cost of the navy through all our history as related to present wealth. The thoughtless reader needs to be reminded that the expense of the navy has recently increased enormously-the cost in the last twenty-five years having advanced six hundred per cent. In 1911 alone we spent about one hundred and twenty times as much as the average