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Show MUST THE UNITED STATES PREPARE FOR WAR. Dealinc with America's future position. posi-tion. Joseph H. Clioate. one of our greatest legal minds, an advocate of arbitration as a means of preventing war between nations, and recognized as a pacifist, ha3 written an article for Review of Reviews, in which he takes the ground that the United States must be better prepared to defend de-fend her rights He sa6; "A strong and increasingly strong navy, adequate to the defense of our enormous seacoast of the Panama canal, of our coastwise and rapidly growing foreign commerce, and ot the great cities on the seaboards, I seems to be assured. Exactly how President Wilson's suggestion of a I well-equipped and efficient militia Is to be arranged between the federal and state governments does not ap pear, but it ought to be so arranged thai every young man, somewhere between the agc3 of seventeen and twenty-one. shall be so trained as to be well developed physically and to learn to 6hoot which as Lord Rob- vru- taic. was a tundamenlal necessity, neces-sity, so that, i" necessary lor the defense de-fense of a nation they could at short notice be comerted into soldiers How this Is to be done I do not know, but certainly it must be done if we would be safe from attack For any other great nation will have at any time Just as much cause for attacking us as German had for attacking 1; I glum. If wp thus stand in Ihe posi tion of a mighty nation, always ready to defend itself and never willing to attack any other nation, we 6hall be able to speak with authority when the long ioetponed day of possible peace shall come. "It is a mistake to suppose that therp is any mania for militarism among our people They want nothing noth-ing but peace, but they do want and will insist upon our being ready to defend ourselves if attacked. "On these conditions I feel sure that we may count upon another hundred hun-dred years of lasting peace between all the English-speaking peoples, and also on a more effectual guarantee than we have heretofore had of peace.-between peace.-between the exhausted nations of Europe "Of course the rnd of this war will see us b far the mo3t powerful nation na-tion in tbe world, and if the policy pointed out b Secretary Daniels is pursued, wS Shall perhaps in the fullness full-ness of time becom ourselves the mistress of the eas without incurring 'hostility or attack from any nation, and 6hall be the great factor for preserving pre-serving universal peace "When we met at The Hague in June 1907, at the opening of the second sec-ond Hague conference, which was attended at-tended bv all the nations of the earih, universal peace prevailed all tho world over. 'No war or battle's sound Was heard the world around ' Now all the covenants and agree ments In which that conference result ed have been treated as scraps of pa per and scattered to the winds. But. perhaps the terrible distress and exhaustion ex-haustion brought upon all the great nations nf Europe by this destructive war will enable us. if we are in a position to exercise our rightful pow er as a nation, to secure the restora- tion of all those covenants, and to prevent their ever being broken again." We agree with Mr. Choatc on the necessity of training our young men In the fundamentals of war We do not want a large standing army with a military clique running our government govern-ment and Interfering with our domes tic affairs, but we desire and must have sufficient armed strength to resist re-sist Invasion from whatever source It may be directed, and that is what we do not possess today. We do not know, but it is our opinion, opin-ion, there arc not two million modern army rifles in the United States nor the machinery for making them short of a year Our artillery would not supply two army corps. We have no siege guns to stand against those now employed in Europe. Our powder pow-der factories all are within . a few miles of the Atlantic coast where an invading force might reach them before be-fore a defense could be made Looking back, we now realize that had the Japanese three years ago seen fit to make an attack on the United States, they could have overrun over-run much of the Pacific coast and r -nr-w. .?f. r. have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of properly before a semblance sem-blance ol a strong offensive could have been organized. This country 13 opposed to a large -standing army, but the people will insist in-sist on an adequate supply of rifles, heavy guns, ammunition and trained officers. West Point should be doubled dou-bled in size. We must have a suff icient number of officers with a knowledge knowl-edge of modern warfare to lead an 'army of at least two million men. As I to the rank and file, our confidence in even the untrained volunteer is supreme. su-preme. In America w here men must ; learn self-reliance and possess the j power of initiation, every man is bet ter qualified to be a soldier than the 1 best of European troops, except in marksmanship, although we know t.hi-rc arc critics who claim the American Ameri-can is physically unfit to cope with the European 00 |
