ive necessity of aiding panicstricken
tourists and panicstricken stay-at-homes. Apparently, too, our people
are suffering more in purse and general comfort than the actual
combatant nations.

Clamorous for American sympathy and cash, we have on our shores
embassies from the belligerents, pleading their respective virtues and
sorrows.

Why, after all, should our chiefest concern be with them? Surely we may
be good Samaritans without a total disregard of our own interests and a
blindness to opportunity verging on impotency. There is no immorality in
the proper play of self-interest. It is the conflict of interests which
creates morality. But the spectators, even the maddest baseball "fans,"
do not play the game nor train for it. It is high time we ceased wasting
our energies in emotions and vain babble.

At this writing the first line of defense against the Oriental deluge is
endangered. The Slav individually and in his primitive culture is
altogether charming. He is a son of the soil, picturesque in life and
creative; he is minstrel and poet, seer. But so far he is the carrier of
a low civilization, the prophet, priest, and king of autocracy and
absolutism. Never has there been a time in history when the higher
civilization was not in a savage struggle for existence. It is almost
the first time in three centuries that the highest civilizations were in
alliance with the lowest; not since the pugnacious Western powers of
Europe sued for favor at the Sublime Porte.

In Peril of the Whirlwind.

This ought to be a very sobering spectacle, but it seems to arouse the
delighted enthusiasm of an American majority. For such an aberration
there is but a single and efficient remedy: absorption in our own
affairs, the discriminating study of efficient methods to prevent our
being caught up by a whirlwind, even the outer edges of which may snatch
us into the vortex.

To change the metaphor, we revel in the pleasant propulsion of the
maelstrom's rim, unaware that every instant brings us closer to dangers,
escape from which would demand herculean effort. Irresponsible emotions
are, like those of the novel and the stage, when intensified to excess
utterly incompatible with action. And just such a paralysis seems for
six long weeks to have lamed the highest powers of America.

The proportionate increase in population among the European powers is
overwhelmingly in favor of the Slavs. Their rate of increase by natural
generation