a great
military power, yet they are all pathetically anxious to secure the
good-will of the United States.

Why?

It can hardly be to save the shock to their moral feelings which would
come from the mere disapproval of people on the other side of the world.
If any percentage of what we have read of German methods is true, if
German ethics bear the faintest resemblance to what they are so often
represented to be, Germany must have no feeling in the political sphere
to be hurt by the moral disapproval of the people of the United States.
If German statesmen are so desperately anxious as they evidently are to
secure the approval and good-will of the United States it is because
they realize, however indistinctly, that there lie in the hands of the
United States powers which could be loosed, more portentous than those
held by the masters of many legions.

Just what these powers are and how they might be used to give America
greater security than she could achieve by arms, to place her at the
virtual head of a great world State, and to do for mankind as a whole a
service greater than any yet recorded in written history, must be left
to the third and concluding article of this series.

III.

AMERICA AS LEADER.

In the preceding article I indicated that America might undertake at
this juncture of international affairs an intervention in the politics
of the Old World which is of a kind not heretofore attempted by any
nation, an intervention, that is to say, that should not be military,
but in the first instance mediatory and moral, having in view if needs
be the employment of certain organized social and economic forces which
I will detail presently.

The suggestion that America should take any such lead is resisted first
on the ground that it is a violation of her traditional policy, and
secondly that "economic and social forces" are bound to be ineffective
unless backed by military, so that the plea would involve her in a
militarist policy. With reference to these two points, I pointed out in
the preceding article that America's isolation from a movement for world
agreement would infallibly land her in a very pronounced militarist
policy, the increase of her armaments, the militarization of her
civilization and all that that implies.

There are open to America at this present moment two courses: one which
will lead her to militarism and the indefinite increase of
armaments--that is the course of isolation from th