ded at all the women folk and children would be all
right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German
"savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute
power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has
been injured.

Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based
upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some
hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled
through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the
German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by
German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and
health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of
these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the
educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It
was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were
protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could
not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria,
yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those
of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no
better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom
we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention
which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their
advantage to observe it.

And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely
convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their
property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they
possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely
leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and
property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against
whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.

No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would
pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that
afforded by these moral forces. Sixty years ago Britain had as against
Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of
the latter's policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats
of "consequences" could not prevent British travelers being murdered by
Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces--the recogni