racing and friendliness to the stranger, I am not sure that it is
equalled at either Newport or Cowes. Were I writing merely from my
personal experience, I should declare unhesitatingly that it is the
most splendid and best-managed picnic on the water that one can
attend, and lovers of yachts and yachting should not fail to see it.
This Kielerwoche, too, has, and is intended to have, an influence in
teaching the Germans to aid and abet their Emperor and his ministers
in making Germany a great sea power.

When a nation for more than a hundred years has been quite comfortably
safe from any fear of attack because she has been easily first in
commerce, wealth, industry, and in sea power, it comes as a shock,
even to a phlegmatic people, to learn that they are being rapidly
overhauled commercially, financially, industrially, and as a fighting
force on the sea; and all this within a few years.

England with her money subsidies, with her troops, and with her navy
has heretofore provided against Continental aggression by the
diplomatic philosophy of a balance of power. She has arranged her
alliances with Continental powers so that no one of them could become
a menace to herself. She did so against the Spain of Charles V, the
France of Louis XIV, the France of Napoleon, the Russia of the late
Czar, and now against the Germany of William II. The France of the
great Napoleon, in attempting to complete the commercial isolation of
England by compelling Russia to close her ports to her, buried herself
in snow and ice on the way back from Moscow, and delivered herself up
completely a little later at Waterloo. That was the nearest to success
of any attempt to break through the doctrine of the balance of power.

In the year 800 A. D. the Catholic Church, which took over the Roman
supremacy to translate it into a spiritual empire, accepted a German
Emperor, Charlemagne, as her man-at-arms. One hundred and fifty years
later she accepted still another, Otto I. This partnership was called
the Holy Roman Empire. It has been noted, but is still misunderstood,
that the difference between the Catholic Church before and after the
Reformation was very marked. The Catholic Church claimed to be not
only a system of belief but a system of government. Infallibility was
to include secular as well as religious matters, and the church strove
to rule as a secular emperor and as a spiritual tyrant. To-day Roman
Catholicism is a sect, one among many; R