nry Lawrence, who framed
the ideals of his career on the poet's conception, and so nobly
illustrated it in his self-sacrifice; that something which has made
the soldier to all ages the type of heroism and of self-denial. When
the religion of Christ, of Him who was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
seeks to raise before its followers the image of self-control, and of
resistance to evil, it is the soldier whom it presents. He Himself, if
by office King of Peace, is, first of all, in the essence of His
Being, King of Righteousness, without which true peace cannot be.

Conflict is the condition of all life, material and spiritual; and it
is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual life goes for its
most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations. Whatever else the
twentieth century may bring us, it will not, from anything now current
in the thought of the nineteenth, receive a nobler ideal.

[Illustration: THE GULF OF MEXICO AND THE CARIBBEAN SEA]

THE STRATEGIC FEATURES OF THE GULF OF MEXICO AND THE CARIBBEAN SEA.

_June, 1897._

The importance, absolute and relative, of portions of the earth's
surface, and their consequent interest to mankind, vary from time to
time. The Mediterranean was for many ages the centre round which
gathered all the influences and developments of those earlier
civilizations from which our own, mediately or immediately, derives.
During the chaotic period of struggle that intervened between their
fall and the dawn of our modern conditions, the Inland Sea, through
its hold upon the traditions and culture of antiquity, still retained
a general ascendency, although at length its political predominance
was challenged, and finally overcome, by the younger, more virile, and
more warlike nationalities that had been forming gradually beyond the
Alps, and on the shores of the Atlantic and Northern oceans. It was,
until the close of the Middle Ages, the one route by which the East
and the West maintained commercial relations; for, although the trade
eastward from the Levant was by long and painful land journeys, over
mountain range and desert plain, water communication, in part and up
to that point, was afforded by the Mediterranean, and by it alone.
With the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope this
advantage departed, while at the same instant the discovery of a New
World opened out to the Old new elements of luxury and a new sphere of
ambition. Then the Mediterranean, th