establishment of Germany up to 2,000,000,000 marks and more
per annum, or $500,000,000.

Many Americans were dismayed when our total national expenditure
reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this
expenditure was nicknamed the "Billion-dollar Congress." What would we
say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone!
With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in
an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or
fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully the burden, each year, of half
our total national expenditure, merely on the military and naval
barricade which enables them to toil in peace and security.

Humanity has, indeed, made but a poor zigzag progress from the
gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners
of warriors setting out for one another's throats, has failed
ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central
state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen
of her adult male inhabitants, and spend half a billion dollars a
year, to protect herself from assault and plunder.

If the hairy, skin-clad cave-dwellers, or the man who left us the
Neanderthal skull, could have a look at us now, here in Berlin, in
many ways the centre of the most enlightened people in the world, they
would undoubtedly go mad trying to understand what we mean by the word
''progress.'' And yet we smile indulgently at the poor farmers in
Afghanistan who till their fields with a rifle slung across their
shoulders. What is Germany doing but that! And an enormously heavy
rifle it is, costing just seven times as much as all other national
expenditures together; in short, it costs seven marks of soldier to
protect every one mark of plough. I admit frankly the horror and the
absurdity of all this; but as an argument for disarmament, "it does
not lie," as the lawyers phrase it. It is a criticism, and an
unanswerable one, of our failure as human beings to enthrone reason
and to tame our passions; but it is a veritable call to arms to
protect ourselves, not a reason for not doing so. Let the
international gluttons overeat themselves till they are seriously ill;
but it would be madness to starve ourselves in the meantime, and yet
that is the grotesque logic of certain of our preachers of
disarmament.

At the moment of writing there are 1,000,000 men at each other's
throats in the Balkans, there is a revoluti