President Wilson is, of course, fully and completely responsible for Mr. Bryan. Mr. Bryan appreciates this and loyally endeavors to serve the President and to come to his defense at all times. As soon as President Wilson had announced that there was no need of preparations to defend ourselves, because we loved everybody and everybody loved us and because our mission was to spread the gospel of peace, Mr. Bryan came to his support with hearty enthusiasm and said: “The President knows that if this country needed a million men, and needed them in a day, the call would go out at sunrise and the sun would go down on a million men in arms.” One of the President’s stanchest newspaper adherents lost its patience over this utterance and remarked: “More foolish words than these of the Secretary of State were never spoken by mortal man in reply to a serious argument.” However, Mr. Bryan had a good precedent, although he probably did not know it. Pompey, when threatened by Cæsar, and told that his side was unprepared, responded that he had only to “stamp his foot” and legions would spring from the ground. In the actual event, the “stamping” proved as effectual against Cæsar as Mr. Bryan’s “call” would under like circumstances. I once heard a Bryanite senator put Mr. Bryan’s position a little more strongly than it occurred to Mr. Bryan himself to put it. The senator in question announced that we needed no regular army, because in the event of war “ten million freemen would spring to arms, the equals of any regular soldiers in the world.” I do not question the emotional or oratorical sincerity either of Mr. Bryan or of the senator. Mr. Bryan is accustomed to performing in vacuo; and both he and President Wilson, as regards foreign affairs, apparently believe they are living in a world of two dimensions, and not in the actual workaday world, which has three dimensions. This was equally true of the senator in question. If the senator’s ten million men sprang to arms at this moment, they would have at the outside some four hundred thousand modern rifles to which to spring. Perhaps six hundred thousand more could spring to squirrel pieces and fairly good shotguns. The remaining nine million men would have to “spring” to axes, scythes, hand-saws, gimlets, and similar arms. As for Mr. Bryan’s million men who would at sunset respond under arms to a call made at sunrise, the suggestion is such a mere rhetorical flourish that it is not worthy even of humorous treatment; a high-school boy making such a statement in a theme would be marked zero by any competent master. But it is an exceedingly serious thing, it is not in the least a humorous thing, that the man making such a statement should be the chief adviser of the President in international matters, and should hold the highest office in the President’s gift.