alone. It is that which has given to the so-called Nordic races their dominion over land and sea. In point of numbers they are inferior to the brown and yellow races. In point of physical courage they are likewise inferior, for the Oriental faces both torture and death with a resignation and a fatalism that the white man either had never attained or has long ago lost. In ability to endure hardship, to exist on a minimum of nourishment, and to survive in the midst of an evil environment, the swarming millions of Asia are superior to the European or the American. As for intellectual power, dismissing the uses to which that power is applied, the Eastern mind has attained a discipline and a subtlety of reasoning that the Western mind has never yet achieved. It is the white man's economic accomplishments which have been the magic carpet that transported him everywhere, and the armor that none could penetrate. While this economic supremacy exists, no other race can challenge the white man's civilization. Whenever that supremacy has been weakened, the white man's civilization has been menaced. It is again in peril.

Three great military empires were extinguished in the war, but three great economic empires were wrecked, as well. Russia has been rightly described as an "economic vacuum." Austria-Hungary is practically in ruins; and whether the great German economic machine will ever be permitted to function freely again is still a matter of speculation. We are only beginning to comprehend the terrific impact of the blow that the war dealt to the economic structure of Europe; and from the day the Armistice was signed, conditions have grown steadily worse. It must be apparent to anybody who will examine the situation dispassionately that, unless this economic fabric can be speedily restored, modern civilization may slowly disintegrate, to its utter ruin, as preceding civilizations have disintegrated.

Obviously the place to begin the work of reconstruction, so far as the government is concerned, is with the burden of taxation under which all the great nations are groaning. The one point at which an extensive reduction of taxation can be made, which reduction will have an instantaneous economic effect, is military expenditure.

The United States is spending on future wars alone more than the entire net expenses of the Federal government five years ago. It is spending as much as the aggregate net earnings of all the railroads of the country in their most prosperous year. Nobody has yet shown wherein there is a shadow of an excuse for this exhausting strain on the nation's economic resources, or what peril or policy of government can warrant such expenditure. To say that it is done for the national defense is silly. The national defense is weakened, not strengthened, by this excessive 'drain.

Of all the nonsense that is talked about preparedness, no other nonsense quite touches the depths of imbecility which are reached by the prattle about nations that are "rich but defenseless." Nations that are rich are not defenseless. They contain in themselves all the elements for defense. They may have been defenseless in times when war was the exclusive business of professional soldiers, but all that has been changed. The elements of national defense are now the sum total of all the economic resources of the country plus all the man power. In time of imminent danger, the mobilization of a thousand chemists might be infinitely more important than the mobilization of a million troops.

The conventional argument that armament is a form of national insurance is one that is not highly impressive in the circumstances. Insurance does not run parallel with competitive armament, and it is with competitive armament that the world is dealing. No property-owner feels compelled to take out new policies because a business rival

has increased his insurance. Nor does he ever feel impelled to establish a two-policy or three-policy standard in respect to other property owners, or solemnly to announce as a measure of life or death that, come what may, his insurance must equal that of any of his competitors, whether he occupies a fire-proof building or not.

Moreover, if a manufacturer devoted eighty per cent of his total income, as the United States government is doing, to paying insurance premiums, his creditors would soon intervene, and his case would also receive the careful attention of an expert alienist. He might be solvent, and he might be sane, but neither his solvency nor his sanity would be taken for granted. What an individual could not do without subjecting himself to court proceeding is what every government is doing in the name of national defense.

No nation can be asked to strip itself of all defense -that is beyond the bounds of reason; but the system. of competitive armament has nothing to sustain it except the incompetency of statesmanship. Most wars are made by politicians engaged in capitalizing race-prejudices and international rivalries for their own advantage. Wars that spring from the people themselves are few, indeed; and most of the money that is now spent in preparing for another war among the white races is doubly wasted. If there is such a war during the lifetime of the next generation, on a scale equal to that of the recent war, it makes no difference who triumphs or who is defeated. Victor and vanquished alike will perish in the ruins of the civilization that they have destroyed.

Spending money on competitive armament at this time, under the pretext of providing for national defense, is like drawing blood from a patient who is suffering from pernicious anæmia. The disease may not be fatal in itself, but the remedy is sure to be. Whether Europe can recover from the effects of this inconceivably disas

trous war is still a debatable question. No person even reasonably familiar with the situation in which mankind finds itself would venture to predict the general state of civilization five years hence. The issue is still hanging in the balance.

The old Prussian doctrine of Weltmacht oder Niedergang has taken on aspects that were never dreamed of by Bernhardi or the General Staff. It has extended itself to all Western civilization-the Weltmacht that comes from continued economic development, or the Niedergang that must result from economic exhaustion. Collapse is inevitable if the impaired resources of the world are to be steadily depleted by the competition of armament that has been stimulated beyond the wildest dreams of antebellum imperialism. Unless the statesmanship of the world can be brought to a realization of the imperative necessity of economic rehabilitation and of the immediate need of sacrificing everything that stands in the way of that rehabilitation, then indeed was this war the Götterdämmerung-the twilight of the white man's gods.

CHAPTER XII

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

MR. COBB was not wholly immersed in politics, great

as were the political crises that broke in his time. He was a keen critic in music, in art, in literature; had wide acquaintance among artists and liked occasionally to turn aside from the main current of events to treat of topics whose interest may be more enduring but was less tense at the moment. The articles that follow range from ships and shoes and sealing wax to cabbages and kings.

THE PLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW

[October 15, 1905]

"It's clever, but is it Art?" whispered the Devil in Mr. Kipling's "Conundrums of the Workshop."

New York is asking substantially the same question about Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays. They are clever-even a New York audience can perceive that obtrusive fact— but are they art? The consensus of opinion seems to be that if they are they ought not to be.

New York's interest in Mr. Shaw is recent. Although it has been a decade since Richard Mansfield added "Arms and the Man" to his repertoire, it has been hardly two years since New York began to concern itself seriously with the most picturesque writer of the contemporary English playmakers.