Where are our devastated fields and ruined cities? Where our cathedrals destroyed, and homes profaned? Where our flooded mines and pillaged factories? Where our defiled women and starved children, and wrecked men? Where on this wide Continent does hunger stalk abroad, or pestilential disease claim its thousands of victims?'

Having driven home these 'negatives' with a passion equal to that of Maeterlinck's own Message from Belgium, Mr Secretary Glass passed to the 'positive' side, armed with astonishing figures.

'Our Allies,' he impressed upon his people, fought for nearly three years before we began to fight with them. For nearly that period of time the United States profited tremendously, in a commercial and industrial sense, by the European War. Immense fortunes were made: prosperity pervaded our land. Our domestic trade was almost past computing; our foreign trade in many lines was epochal. It reached the immense proportions of $23,462,191,652 of exports against $11,881,973,986 of imports-showing a balance in our favour of $11,580,217,666.

'We imported more than a billion dollars in gold from our debtor nations. France and Britain lost millions of men killed, and millions of others wounded. Less than 60,000 American heroes sleep beneath the sod of France. These men made the supreme sacrifice. Should we dishonour their memories, or diminish the glory of their service by pausing in the cheerful performance of our imperative duty?'

It is a mistake to suppose that no leaders of vision exist in that wonderful land, but it is with a far-off Demos that they have to deal; the slow, well-meaning Demos of Aristophanes-or rather the sturdy 'Rube' of the interior, who warns his guide amid the white lights of Broadway that: I'm from Missouri, an' ye mus' show me'! Unhappily, American men of vision defer too much to Rube, so that foreign policy is ever subordinated to domestic interests of a petty and provincial kind.

·

Meanwhile, the enormous wealth of the United States is a prime factor in her present apparently needless arming. For the first time the militarists are in control, and the Big Stick' of Theodore Roosevelt, prudently renamed America's "Great Wall"' by Warren Hardingthe U.S. Navy-goes ahead formidably with the technical aid of Admirals who served with our own Grand Fleet:

Benson, Mayo, and Sowden Sims. Here is a notable case of 'educating our masters'; and the technicians of all the Services take part in it. Even before the Great War, American statesmen and thinkers felt and expressed the pride of crescent power.

"The United States,' wrote Prof. Pease Norton of Harvard, is no longer an isolated country. To the West we have flung our battle-lines to meet the expansion of the Orient in the Philippines. At Behring Strait, our sentries watch the frontiers of the Czar. On the South, at Panama, we clutch by the throat the passageways for the Navies of two oceans. Our armies of Occupation are now holding by force of arms our outlying possessions.

'Like the Romans of old, we send forth our Governors to rule over the millions of our alien subjects. In this Imperial development-concerning which discussion no longer can exist, because the Flag once flying is not easily withdrawn-a greater care must be exercised, lest our defences prove unequal to the probabilities of future danger.'

Up to now the United States has been economically 'self-sufficient '-if not exactly in the sense that Pericles impressed upon Athens, as recorded in the Funeral Oration which Thucydides gives in his history. But everything in America is on a colossal scale-territory, population, energy, and ever-growing needs. Her natural resources, likewise enormous, have been harvested in that gay and reckless spirit which asks: What has Posterity done for me?'

Thus, States that formerly exported timber are now importing it. Tropical fruit is looked for in the five Central American nations. And the amazing growth of the motor industry has shown a real shortage in oil and rubber. So even America is not so 'self-sufficient' as she was. Hence new copper ventures in Chile on a vast scale. Hence Henry Ford's purchase of 8,000,000 acres of jungle land in Parà (Brazil), there to grow rubber for his tyres. For over there the mason or bricklayer (at 1000l. a year) can have his own car. It is a 'poor American family indeed that cannot whirl forth behind an oil engine, in the long quest for a patch of grass. There are to-day about 30,000,000 cars over there, or say one for every four persons in a continental population of 120,000,000 souls.

The new 'Big Navy' needs more oil; so does the new 'Mechanised' Army, with its curious reversion to men in armour-collectively in tanks, if not individually as courtly knights and esquires in medieval steel. Road transport calls for rubber and oil upon new 'highways' that run from New York to San Francisco-a road longer than from Liverpool over the ocean to Quebec or Montreal! Railway and stationary engines call for oil. So do big modern ships. So, also, do America's submarines, and the new Continental Air-Force which Colonel Lindbergh has been boosting' by means of his famous 'plane, and which undoubtedly influenced the recent naval manoeuvres of Japan, with enemy' aircraft-carriers met with town-darkening schemes of an elaborate nature. America's protection, then, with her economic self-sufficiency can (she believes) only be ensured by a bold claim to 'sovereignty' over the whole New World from Alaska to Patagonia-almost from Pôle to Pole. Over a century ago, upon Jefferson's advice, President Monroe proclaimed his famous 'Doctrine' against the supposed designs of the Holy Alliance:

...

'We owe it to candour . . . to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this Hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. . . . With the existing Colonies of any European Power we shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their Independence and maintained it. . . we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling their destiny, than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.'

This Imperial claim was pressed against France in Mexico after the American Civil War; against Spain in 1866, when she warred with Chile and Peru; against Great Britain in 1895; against Germany in Venezuela and Santo Domingo in 1902-5. The so-called 'Lodge Resolution' of 1912 further declared that the United States could not see without grave concern. . . any harbour or naval place so situated that the occupation thereof for naval or military purposes might threaten our communications or safety, passing into the possession of any alien corporation or Government.' This

was sharply enforced against Mexico, when a Japanese concern sought to get a lease of Magdalena Bay, in the desert peninsula of Lower California.

What is here at stake, then, is the destiny of twenty Republics, all the way from Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo in the Caribbean Sea, clear down to the 'A.B.C.' Powers (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), with their immense coast-lines upon the two oceans. These nations speak three languages, and in all comprise the last of the Empty Continents,' with untapped resources upon a scale which is but dimly apprehended, either by the people of the United States or those of Great Britainwho, by the way, have at least 1,000,000,000l. invested in Latin-America. A leisurely tour of three years and some 40,000 miles in the two Americas was a revelation to me in the potentialities of the new and largely unexplored world that begins just south of the Rio Grande, which forms part of the 2000-mile border between the United States and hapless Mexico, who is now so bitter against her northern neighbour. But this is only by the way. In all her public dealings the United States has used two Voices' when speaking of those southern brethren' whom James Monroe was so anxious to protect from the dark designs of a Holy Alliance, against which his adviser and predecessor at the White House actually urged an alliance with England. With her on our side,' old Jefferson wrote, we need not fear the whole world.'

In 1895 State-Secretary Olney declared to Lord Salisbury To-day the United States is practically paramount in this Hemisphere. And its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.' Nothing could be clearer. And the accomplished factsas I shall presently show-were soon to be louder than even these acrimonious words. Twelve years later we find that same Foreign Minister using what I may call 'Voice No. 2' before the American Institute of International Law.'

The United States' (Mr Olney laid down) under the Monroe Doctrine assumes no Protectorate over any other American State; attempts no interference with the external, any more than with the internal affairs of such a State; asserts no right to dictate the domestic or foreign policy of such a State; and claims no right to use force in the affairs

of such a State, except as against its enemies, and to aid it in defending its political and territorial integrity as against European aggression.'

Such is the theory. Yet the 'southern brethren' have been uneasy about it ever since large slices of Mexico were sheared off in the 'forties of last century. Thus in 1862 we find the Foreign Minister of Costa Rica addressing the Colombian Government in Bogotà as follows: 'If our Republics could have the guarantee that they had nothing to fear from the United States of North America, it is certain that no other Nation could be more useful to us.'

At various times, Latin-American statesmen and thinkers have tried to define and set bounds to the 'Keep-Off' policy of their northern neighbour, vis-à-vis the designs, real or imagined, of greedy European or Asiatic Powers. I refer to the views of such men as Emilio Mitre and Luis M. Drago, of Argentina; Alvarez, of Chile; Calderón, of Peru; Pesquiera, of Mexico; Fombona, of Venezuela; Prado, of Brazil; Argüedas, of Bolivia; Vargas Vila, of Colombia; Godoy, of Santo Domingo; Arias, of Honduras; and Urtecho, of Nicaragua. There is also a whole chorus of Cuban thinkers, who are at this moment discussing the unprecedented step which President Coolidge is about to take by attending in person the Sixth Pan-American Congress at Havana, early in the coming year.

To all these misgivings, American State-Secretaries, from Jefferson to John Hay, have replied with reassuring words. Thus Secretary Root in Rio:

'We wish for no victories but those of Peace, no territory but our own, no Sovereignty save the sovereignty over ourselves. We deem the independence and equal rights of the smallest and weakest member of the Family of Nations entitled to as much respect as those of the greatest Empire. We neither claim nor desire any rights or privileges or powers that we do not freely concede to every American Republic.'

That treasure-house of the earth, which is Mexico, claims to be a 'Sovereign Nation.' She has been four times invaded by the United States, with enormous annexations of territory after two wars. In 1913 President Wilson refused to recognise' Victorian o

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