ependent of their policies.

We may refuse to co-operate with them, to have anything to do with them.
Even then our military policy will be guided by theirs, and it is at
least conceivable that in certain circumstances we should become
thoroughly militarized by the need for preparing against what our people
would regard as the menace of European military ambitions. This
tendency, if it became sufficiently acute, would cause neglect of
domestic problems hardly less mischievous than that occasioned by war.

In my last article I touched upon a quite possible turn of the alliance
groupings in Europe--the growing influence of Russia, the extension of
that influence to the Asiatic populations on her borders, (Japan and
Russia are already in alliance,) so that within the quite measurable
future we may be confronted by a military community drawing on a
population of 500,000,000 souls, autocratically governed and endowed
with all the machinery of destruction which modern science has given to
the world. A Russo-Chino-Japanese alliance might on behalf of the
interest or dignity of one of the members of such a group challenge this
country in some form or another, and a Western Europe with whom we had
refused to co-operate for a common protection might as a consequence
remain an indifferent spectator of the conflict.

Such a situation would certainly not relieve us from the burdens of
militarism merely because we declined to enter into any arrangement with
the European powers. As a matter of fact, of course, this present war
destroyed the nationalist basis of militarism itself. The militarist may
continue to talk about international agreement between nations being
impossible as a means of insuring a nation's safety, and a nation having
no security but the strength of its own arms, but when it actually comes
to the point even he is obliged to trust to agreement with other nations
and to admit that even in war a nation can no longer depend merely upon
the strength of its arms; it has to depend upon co-operation, which
means an agreement of some kind with other nations as well.

Just as the nations have by forces stronger than their own volition been
brought into industrial and commercial co-operation, so, strangely
enough, have they been brought by those same forces into military
co-operation. While the warrior and militarist have been talking the old
jargon of nationalism and holding international co-operation up to
derision as a