Under these conditions it is mischievous to a degree for a nation to trust to any treaty of the type now existing to protect it in great crises. Take the case of China as a living and present-day example. China has shown herself utterly impotent to defend her neutrality. Again and again she made this evident in the past. Order was not well kept at home and above all she was powerless to defend herself from outside attack. She has not prepared for war. She has kept utterly unprepared for war. Yet she has suffered more from war, in our own time, than any military power in the world during the same period. She has fulfilled exactly the conditions advocated by these well-meaning persons who for the last five months have been saying in speeches, editorials, articles for syndicates, and the like that the United States ought not to keep up battle-ships and ought not to trust to fortifications nor in any way to be ready or prepared to defend herself against hostile attack, but should endeavor to secure peace by being so inoffensive and helpless as not to arouse fear in others. The well-meaning people who write these editorials and make these speeches ought to understand that though it is a bad thing for a nation to arouse fear it is an infinitely worse thing to excite contempt; and every editor or writer or public man who tells us that we ought not to have battle-ships and that we ought to trust entirely to well-intentioned foolish all-inclusive arbitration treaties and abandon fortifications and not keep prepared, is merely doing his best to bring contempt upon the United States and to insure disaster in the future. Nor is China the only case in point. Luxembourg is a case in point. Korea is a case in point. Korea was utterly inoffensive and helpless. It neither took nor was capable of taking the smallest aggressive action against any one. It had no forts, no war-ships, no army worthy of the name. It excited no fear and no anger. But it did excite measureless contempt, and therefore it invited aggression. The point I wish to make is, first, the extreme unwisdom and impropriety of making promises that cannot be kept, and, second, the utter futility of expecting that in any save exceptional cases a strong power will keep a promise which it finds to its disadvantage, unless there is some way of putting force back of the demand that the treaty be observed.