cious of all the
American national assets.

Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of
turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now
making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it
again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with
anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war
found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her
colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America
can supply in almost unlimited quantities. From the West and portions of
the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men
who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and
shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those
qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre
of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.

But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere
matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit
permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will
always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European
country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The
standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last
few years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no
mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately
no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the
unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his
own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the
colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the
national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the
people, is likely to fall into error.

The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under
the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American
lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there--is
necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand
is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the
reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.
How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"
spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the
individual, seem to Europe