champagne; and, at dawn, the ships newborn from the harbor dark, and the German Emperor, his hand on the tiller of the smartest pulling boat in the fleet, out for an early inspection. A dangerous passion, this young Kaiser's fondness for his new navy, for blood is ever the price of admiralty.

At Whitehall ruled Lord Fisher, literally driving his hesitating designers to bigger guns and faster ships, with the armor cut dangerously thin-Nelsonic ships to act again the glory of the Nile and Trafalgar, to live but long enough to hold and destroy the enemy. In Wilhelmshaven they looked to better optical instruments, a deadlier aim for their smaller but quicker-firing guns, and to the dogged staying-power which underwater subdivisions give to ships in the long punishment of battle.

They lived, it seems, in another age, these men, for the most part genial, kindly, and honest, loving their wives and children, lonely on their long cruises at sea, building and planning for Armageddon, dancing up to the very last week in the shadow of the great guns. Many of them have passed from the stage of naval history. Some sleep with the ships they built and sailed, others, borne on the list of retired officers, read endless daily papers at the front windows of service clubs. Those of us who take up their work must at times pause to ask ourselves if it will of necessity lead us in the same paths, if, in truth, we are the militarists of the future.

Surely there perished in the sufferings of the last war the extreme militaristic philosophy that war is inevitable and even beneficial; that, in the stern ethics of conflict beyond good and evil, victory is the eternal justification of the will to power. Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Von Bernhardi are no longer read with sympathy. This generation is heartily sick of bloodshed, and will not lightly follow again the paths of glory that lead to horror, exhaustion, and disillusionment. If this revulsion against armed conflict be pacifism, then all thinking men are pacifists at heart. But to the practical question of how wars may be curtailed, restricted, and at last avoided altogether, civilization still seeks the answer. When

the impartial scholar has applied over long years of study the methods of scientific research in the fields of history, political economy, and military theory, we may be on the road to a clearer understanding. But until that day, the soldier's dangerous logic would seem to have as good a claim to credence as the reasoning of those who seek by emotional generalizations to solve this most complex of world problems.

The military man and military opinion are ever with us. A special pleader for his profession, cautious, conservative, unmoved by the impulsive idealism that would sweep the weapons of war into the discard, he is prone to doubt the efficacy of church movements for world peace or senatorial proposals to outlaw war. With such seeming perversity he negatives the idealist's enthusiasm that the reformer is tempted to cry out as the psalmist: "I labor for peace; but when I speak to them thereof, they make them ready to battle."

The defense of the country is the soldier's duty. Perfection of armies and navies is his life's work. Yet the weapons which he must ever sharpen for war find in peace a wide and merciful employment. The last and strongest bulwarks of the established order at home, a tried and trusted shield in a world of conflicting national interests, armaments stand ever ready to insure the steady flow of world trade in an age whose very life calls for the full productivity of mine and factory, of prairie and jungle. Untroubled the caravans go down. The lonely detachments of French African troops camped in the desert outpost, the gunboats of the Yangtze, the weary British regiments beneath the passes of the Himalayas, the garrisons of Suez and Panama keep silent watch over the commerce of the world.

From the age of discovery trade has followed the flag. Some of the early English captains were at one and the same time traders and commissioned officers of the Royal Navy, and perchance freebooters as well. The King's ship, the privateer, the vessel sailing under letters of marque and reprisal were not distinct types, but tended to merge. Wars were` frequent. Commerce destruction verged on piracy, and conquest on out-and-out loot. Admirals sought appointment to

the West Indian Station for prize-money that with luck meant wealth undreamed. Trade was a great adventure that led to sudden riches and retired opulence, or perhaps to a grave fathoms deep in the blue waters of the Windward Passage. Nor have conditions completely changed in the day of steamships and cables. The Companies of Gentlemen Adventurers trading and fighting in the far corners of the earth have been replaced by less romantic agencies, but something of the old reliance on the backing of the fleet persists in the policy of modern corporations. Where the Gospel is preached to the heathen and risky investments net far more than six per cent, missionary and trader alike look to the gunboat in the offing. In Nicaragua, in Haiti and Santo Domingo, business interests demand some measure of local security.

Concerning American "dollar imperialism," Mr. Kellogg and Mr. Borah hold widely divergent views. To the secretary of state the guarding of American commerce abroad seems a vital part of our insistence on business probity the world around. Mr. Borah, on the other hand, would subordinate commercial interests to the sacred rights of small nations, even to frequent revolutions at the expense of the American bondholder. What the sturdy young republicanism of America, tinged with the idealism of its own revolutionary struggle, voiced in the notes which John Quincy Adams composed for the dismay of the Holy Alliance, whose political commitments and business interests were endangered by revolution in South America, makes strange reading in contrast to our recent diplomatic correspondence. Have we sacrificed the idealism of our forefathers for a mess of commercial pottage?

If the policy of protecting business interests abroad is at best vague and tentative, even more indefinite is the naval function of showing the flag. It is idle ceremony, perhaps, signifying nothing. Yet while the poor starve in the London slums, hats go up to H. R. H. the Duke of York as the Renown puts out from Portsmouth to carry to the antipodes the White Ensign, symbol of Britain's power. In Batavia, a new destroyer out from

Holland brings encouragement to traders and officials, and, to the native, the warning that the white man still rules. No one can forget the thrill of seeing a cruiser, trim and handy to the helm, or a stately battleship with the Stars and Stripes at the gaff, come treading her way among the junks of Hong Kong harbor, or swing proudly past Seraglio Point, the crew drawn up at quarters, the guard and band paraded aft, and, backing full on both propellers, send her anchors clattering down in foreign waters. Some there may be of the perfect international mind; but in such a moment one wonders if there can live a man so dead of soul as an advocate of complete disarmament or a congressional sponsor for a little navy.

A foolish sentiment, perhaps, the cult of the flag, as a Columbia professor was pleased to call it. Yet forgotten for the instant is the deadly destructiveness of her guns and the sad calamity her misuse might entail. One feels only the natural surge of pride to be kin to those who serve under her flag, and what solemn witness history bears to the power of emotions such as these. For better or worse, man does not live by bread alone.

The central mission of the navy, however, is preparation for war. Obsolete cruisers may land marines to safeguard the property and lives of residents abroad, a foreign squadron may delight the American colony in some distant port, a battleship may transport travelling officialdom with impressive dignity, but these are at best relatively unimportant side-shows. In the main tent, we are always rehearsing for battle. If indeed the age of universal peace has dawned, and no longer need nations fear war or the threat of war, then the time has come to sell off the splendid paraphernalia and pension the last of the faithful actors.

If, however, there exist the remotest possibility of conflict, it is the navy's duty to prepare for victory. That is its raison d'être. If the acceptance of this simple. truth be militarism, then militaristic ideas are unavoidable. If, on the other hand, it be true that the possession of a military force ready to achieve victory is the best assurance against a threat which might lead to war, the advocate of adequate

armaments is in truth a pacifist. Adequacy, however, presupposed strength at least equal to the probable enemy and a definite plan of war. Navies to be sufficient unto their allotted tasks must be built with an eye to specific policies envisioning the purpose and extent of war at sea which each nation thinks best in its own interests to seek, be it the defense of limited regions or the greater world mission of victory on the high seas.

Ships are building to-day that embody the modern application of these ideas rooted in the warfare of past centuries; for France, submarines and powerful cruisers of great speed, designed to protect her coasts and keep open the sea lanes to North Africa, to forbid close blockade, and at the same time to harry the enemy's commerce. In England, on the other hand, we see the advent of a superoffensive battleship type, the Rodney and Nelson, carrying their nine sixteen-inch guns all forward, ships that will form the spear head of the British battleline, to win again her historic objective: smashing victory on the blue seas. The very essence of the immortal admiral's signal: "Engage the enemy closer," is indelibly wrought in the design of the ship that bears his name, while the flash and delicacy of seamanship, the gloire de manœuvre of the frigate captains that sailed the last ships of the Bourbon navy, live again in the latest types of the French fleet.

President Coolidge has often expressed the hope that the day of competitive armaments is passing. Yet the very essence of the naval profession is competition. In times of peace we vie with prospective enemies against the day of battle. Competition rules all human activity, be it in the search for what will best alleviate and ennoble life, or be it, alas, in the quest for better weapons of destruction. It is against and in competition with foreign ships that the naval designer must build. And were it possible to disarm by mutual agreement to the last few decrepit cruisers, if honesty and loyalty, or even pity for those who might be called on to man them in action, still inspire the last captain and the last constructor of the vanishing navy list, this remnant of our fleet will be designed and trained to be

at least equal to the last of foreign navies. The existence of war-ships, however few or limited in type, presupposes the possibility of battle, and no more cruel design can be conceived than the ship predestined to perish under the enemy's blows. Such was the sad fate of Cradock and later of his destroyer, Von Spee, vainly to attempt to close an enemy of superior range and speed, and, his own shots falling short, to await certain destruction. The gallant count well knew the helplessness of his armored cruisers against the faster, harder-hitting ships that would hunt him down long ere he could hope to break through eight thousand miles of hostile oceans, and steam in at dawn past the friendly ramparts of Heligoland. "I take these flowers," he said to the enraptured German colony at Valparaiso, gathered to fête his victory over Cradock's luckless squadron. "They are for my funeral." And he sailed next day toward the Falklands-and, let us hope, to those Elysian Fields beyond, where gather the brave sea-fighters of the ages, commanders who, through the welter of blood and passion, have kept untarnished the ideal of military chivalry that runs like a fine gold thread through the gruesome tapestry of war.

Ours is a crowded and grasping age, in which opposing fleets, despite the bonds by which the statesman would seek to restrain the naval expert's natural enthusiasm, tend to grow more powerful, ship by ship and gun by gun, following the quickening pace of modern life. And many are the hostages we as a nation have given to fortune. Our standard of living is the envy of the world. We have long since announced that the political affairs of the western hemisphere are peculiarly our concern. In forbidding entrance to those from less fortunate lands, who seek only to share our wealth of opportunity, we have used the dangerous formula of race discrimination despite a hint of serious consequences. Yet we demand economic equality in the Orient, and, unbound by military or political alliances, we insist on facing the world from a position of "glorious isolation."

On the ability of our navy to win the next war, if war there must be, rests the integrity of these basic tenets of our for

eign policy. To protect the national greatness which we sincerely believe dependent thereon, that, and that alone, is the central function of the navy.

To accept ability to win the next warand this is the inevitable point of view of the military profession, as the sole criterion of the navy's composition, training, and employment-brings one to the brink of dangerous logic. For just this was the ideal of the German army and navy of 1914, the militarism we fought to destroy, and on whose ruins we hoped to build a new world free from the foreboding of conflict that haunted the foreign office and admiralty during the first decade of the twentieth century. Each year then saw bigger guns, heavier armor, more powerful engines, the multiplication and improvement of flotilla types to carry deadlier torpedoes; patience, genius, loyalty, and devotion, bounded only by wealth of competing nations pledged to the creation of armaments instantly ready for attack. Those were the days of militarism rampant in the vicious circle of threat and counter-threat. The man-made monster bid fair to destroy all that was best in the civilization that gave him birth, and to blot out the beginnings of freedom of thought and action, and the gradual betterment of conditions for those who had so long been but hewers of wood and drawers of water. That other generations might build anew, secure from the menace of war, was the high hope of many a nameless comrade in arms, who gave and gladly gave to a cause that transcended national interests, implicit obedience, youth, and life itself. How can we best keep the faith with them that died, yet hold withal to the soldier's duty, preparation for war?

The Washington Conference was the first tentative and perplexed attempt to solve the problem of competing armaments. Through its work the navies of the world were so reduced that none could hope for easy and immediate victory. If in establishing naval equilibrium at the point chosen no vital national interest was jeopardized, the via media between

the pacifist, who calls for complete and immediate disarmament, and the equally sincere soldier, who prepares for victory, within the limits set by his country's policy, has been found.

It is said that in the German wardrooms before the war they drank to Der Tag. It was a soldier's toast, cruel and cynical, yet gallant almost to bravado, and, like so much German thinking, brutally honest. Must every soldier drink the same toast or be false to his calling? Our eager youth, our manhood is spent in preparation, and yet it is not for us to hope that the day of battle shall come. It is a long tour of duty from ensign to admiral, a life given to the dress rehearsal of war. We labor in the faith that our very readiness will make less likely a threat to those vital interests we hold in trust for our country. That is our justification. But unlike our brothers in civil life, we must not wish for the crowded hour that would be the tremendous realization of a life's work.

We leave Guantanamo Bay to-morrow. I go on deck. Below in the ward-room returning revellers are singing: "And we won't come back to Soubic any more." The winter cruise is nearly over. A gallant fleet indeed, these many vessels in port, the long rows of lights vaguely outlining the power and majesty of the ships we know so well.

Will we come back to the southern drill-grounds year after year, old men in command of other ships as different from these as the Colorado was from Dewey's Olympia? Or, bursting in on a busy life of military make-believe, will it come some day in earnest, and the decks where we have drilled and danced splinter under falling shells whose deadly destructiveness we can only imagine? Will the picture of one's wife, fastened above the desk in his cabin, be blown into eternity, and, down in the plotting-room, will he feel a great blow that has reached the ship's heart, then the gradual heel, with the telephone gone dead, and the lights out?

Shall we be ready then?

I

ARGARET would have known better what to say. I'm sure I wasn't much help to either of them. My talk with Waring this morning only brought out some very unpleasant truths. More unpleasant than the falsehoods he half believed. And as for little Rosa Trenór-I can never think of her as Waring's wife-there was no use in telling her anything. She knew. God, how she knew! You could see it when she crossed to the stairs with that uncertain broken droop, as if her heels were catching in the tiles, and from the way she turned and went down. And it's still here, that knowledge, she left it behind her like a deeper shadow in the corners of the tower, and a veil between me and the long white square that drops to the mountains and the sea.

There is always a veil, as if the dimension between us and beauty were always

peopled with memory, and human shadows were always crossing its depths. It lies between me and those weightless peaks, and that sun, and that sea like a scarlet step to the sky. Margaret has become a part of Altea and this unearthly Spanish coast. And to-morrow I'm going back to New York. But poor little Rosa and young Waring Guiness will have alien shadows of memory to haunt them for a long while, I'm afraid.

If I hadn't been so lonely in Valencia I wouldn't have come. Naturally I was anxious to see Waring's wife; Margaret and I were delighted when we heard he had married. The letter came last spring just before Margaret's illness. She'd always been interested in Waring; the Cynthia Cromartine affair was the beginning. Margaret had helped him through that when all New York was divided between pity and laughter. And the sight of him, walking down the Cathedral aisle with his straw hat crumpled in his hand, and his eyes turning from niche to niche, as if he were measuring the saints, gave me a shock.

"You must come to Altea with me," he said. "I want you to see Rosa. I'm