Nor is Mr. Bryan in any way out of sympathy with President Wilson in this matter. The President, unlike Mr. Bryan, uses good English and does not say things that are on their face ridiculous. Unfortunately, his cleverness of style and his entire refusal to face facts apparently make him believe that he really has dismissed and done away with ugly realities whenever he has uttered some pretty phrase about them. This year we are in the presence of a crisis in the history of the world. In the terrible whirlwind of war all the great nations of the world, save the United States and Italy, are facing the supreme test of their history. All of the pleasant and alluring but futile theories of the pacificists, all the theories enunciated in the peace congresses of the past twenty years, have vanished at the first sound of the drumming guns. The work of all the Hague conventions, and all the arbitration treaties, neutrality treaties, and peace treaties of the last twenty years has been swept before the gusts of war like withered leaves before a November storm. In this great crisis the stern and actual facts have shown that the fate of each nation depends not in the least upon any elevated international aspirations to which it has given expression in speech or treaty, but on practical preparation, on intensity of patriotism, on grim endurance, and on the possession of the fighting edge. Yet, in the face of all this, the President of the United States sends in a message dealing with national defense, which is filled with prettily phrased platitudes of the kind applauded at the less important type of peace congress, and with sentences cleverly turned to conceal from the average man the fact that the President has no real advice to give, no real policy to propose. There is just one point as to which he does show real purpose for a tangible end. He dwells eagerly upon the hope that we may obtain “the opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in the world” among the warring nations and adjures us not to jeopardize this chance (for the President to take part in the peace negotiations) by at this time making any preparations for self-defense. In effect, we are asked not to put our own shores in defensible condition lest the President may lose the chance to be at the head of the congress which may compose the differences of Europe. In effect, he asks us not to build up the navy, not to provide for an efficient citizen army, not to get ammunition for our guns and torpedoes for our torpedo-tubes, lest somehow or other this may make the President of the United States an unacceptable mediator between Germany and Great Britain! It is an honorable ambition for the President to desire to be of use in bringing about peace in Europe; but only on condition that the peace thus brought is the peace of righteousness, and only on condition that he does not sacrifice this country’s vital interests for a clatter of that kind of hollow applause