ey have poured into South
America, building docks and railroads and opening up the country, and
that development of South America has been to our advantage because
quite frequently these enterprises were under the actual management of
Americans, using to the common advantage the savings of the thrifty
Frenchman and the capital of the wealthy Englishman.

For, of course, as between the older and the newer worlds there has gone
on this very beneficent division of labor: the Old World having
developed its soil, built its cities, made its roads, has more capital
available for outside employment than have the population of newer
countries that have so much of this work before them. And now this
possibility of fruitful co-operation is, for the time being, and it may
be for many years, suspended. I say nothing of the loss of markets in
the older countries which will be occasioned by sheer loss of population
and the lower standard of living. That is one of the more obvious but
not perhaps the most important of the ways in which the war affects us
commercially.

Speaking purely in terms of commercial advantage--and these, I know, do
not tell the whole story (I am not for a moment pretending they
do)--the losses that we shall suffer through this war are probably very
much more considerable than those we should suffer by the loss of the
Philippines in the event, say, of their being seized by some hostile
power; and we suffer these losses, although not a single foreign soldier
lands upon our soil. It is literally and precisely true to say that
there is not one person from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn that will not be
affected in some degree by what is now going on in Europe. And it is at
least conceivable that our children and children's children will feel
its effects more deeply still.

Nor is America escaping the military any more than she has escaped the
commercial and financial effects of this war. She may never be drawn
into active military co-operation with other nations, but she is
affected none the less. Indeed the military effects of this war are
already revealing themselves in a demand for a naval programme immensely
larger than any American could have anticipated a year ago, by plans for
an enormously enlarged army. All this is the most natural result.

Just consider, for instance, the ultimate effect of a quite possible
outcome of the present conflict--Germany victorious and the Prussian
effort next directed at, say, the