ake observations and to read charts, but men to trim the sails to the
fitful breezes, the blustering winds, the tempests and the changing
currents of life. They must know, too, the methods, the manners, the
habits of other men who sail the seas of life. It is just here that
the German fails; he lacks the confidence of experience, and bursts
into bluster and bravado. He is a believer in vicarious experience,
and is as little likely to be saved by it, in this world at least, as
he is by vicarious sacrifice.

His imagination does not make allowances for either England or
America. He does not see, for example, that the Monroe Doctrine is not
open for discussion for the simple reason that America has announced
it as American policy; just as Prussia took part three times in the
dismemberment of Poland; just as Prussia pounced upon Silesia; just as
Germany took Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Frankfort, and
held the ring while Austria-Hungary bagged Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
by the word of her Emperor, promised to do the same thing for Russia,
when Japan declared war against her. We have decided that we will have
no European sovereignty in South America, and this side war, that is
the end of the matter, call it the Monroe Doctrine or what you will.
It only makes for uneasiness and bad temper to discuss it. It is the
national American policy. It may be right or wrong theoretically, but
international law has nothing to do with it. The German professors who
discuss it from that stand-point, are beating the air and raising a
dust in the world's international drawing-room.

This German mania for translating facts back into philosophy and then
dancing through a discussion of theories is not understood, much less
appreciated, by the rest of the world. We can never get on if we are
to introduce the discussion of the lines of every new battle-ship by
arguments as to the sea-worthiness of the ark. Those of us who control
a quarter of the habitable globe, and the inhabitants thereof, are
much too busy to discuss the legal aspects of the land-grabbing of the
Pharaohs. Geography is not metaphysics, but it is wofully hard for the
professorial mind to grasp this.

"Given a mouse's tail, and he will guess
With metaphysic quickness at the mouse."

In much the same way German statesmen and the German press do not
understand, or do not care to understand, that British statesmen when
they speak in the House of Commons, or when they