In this American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate, expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, or less exclusively national footing in matters of the common defense. The national administration has been moving at an accelerated rate in the direction not of national isolation and self-reliance resting on a warlike equipment formidable enough to make or break the peace at will--such as the more truculent and irresponsible among the politicians have spoken for--but rather in the direction of moderating or curtailing all national pretensions that are not of undoubted material consequence, and of seeking a common understanding and concerted action with those nationalities whose effectual interests in the matters of peace and war coincide with the American. The administration has grown visibly more pacific in the course of its exacting experience,--more resolutely, one might even say more aggressively pacific; but the point of chief attention in all this strategy of peace has also visibly been shifting somewhat from the maintenance of a running equilibrium between belligerents and a keeping of the peace from day to day, to the ulterior and altogether different question of what is best to be done toward a conclusive peace at the close of hostilities, and the ways and means of its subsequent perpetuation. This latter is, in effect, an altogether different question from that of preserving neutrality and amicable relations in the midst of importunate belligerents, and it may even, conceivably, perhaps not unlikely, come to involve a precautionary breach of the current peace and a taking of sides in the war with an urgent view to a conclusive outcome. It would be going too far to impute to the administration, at the present stage, such an aggressive attitude in its pursuit of a lasting peace as could be called a policy of defensive offense; but it will shock no one's sensibilities to say that such a policy, involving a taking of sides and a renouncing of national isolation, is visibly less remote from the counsels of the administration today than it has been at any earlier period.