Indeed, it is so obviously impolitic, on the part of the administration and its party friends, to avow a purpose to keep the people in the dark as to our preparedness (or rather as to our virtually admitted unpreparedness) to protect the national interests, safety, and honor, that a practical avowal of such purpose on their part would seem altogether incredible, but for certain rather notorious facts developed by our experience during the last year and three quarters. It has gradually become evident, or, at least, probable that the mind (wherever that mind may be located) which determines, or has, as yet, determined, our foreign policy under President Wilson, really relies upon a timid neutrality and innumerable treaties of general arbitration as sufficient to protect us from foreign aggression; and advisedly wishes to keep us virtually unarmed and helpless to defend ourselves, so that a sense of our weakness may render us sufficiently pusillanimous to pocket all insults, to submit to any form of outrage, to resent no provocation, and to abdicate completely and forever the dignity and the duties of a great nation. In the absence of actual experience, a strong effort of the imagination would be required, at least on the part of the writer, to conceive of anybody’s not finding such an outlook for his country utterly intolerable; but incredulity must yield to decisive proof. Even the votaries of this novel cult of cowardice, however, are evidently compelled to recognize that, as yet, they constitute a very small minority among Americans, and, for this reason, they would keep their fellow countrymen, as far as may be practicable, in the dark as to our national weakness and our national dangers; they delight in gagging soldiers and sailors and, to the extent of their power, everybody else who may speak with any authority, and, if they could, would shut out every ray of light which might aid public opinion to see things as they are. * * * * * There is no room for difference as to the utter absurdity of reliance on treaties, no matter how solemn or with whomsoever made, as substitutes for proper armaments to assure the national safety; Belgium’s fate stares in the face any one who should even dream of this. Her neutrality was established and guaranteed, not by one treaty but by several treaties, not by one power but by all the powers; yet she has been completely ruined because she relied upon these treaties, refused to violate them herself and tried, in good faith, to fulfil the obligations they imposed on her.