The laws that govern human events are as mathematically accurate and as immutable as the laws that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies; the laws that govern human reactions--the reactions between men and men, communities and communities, nations and nations--are as immutable and are governed as exactly by the laws of cause and effect as are chemical reactions. Nothing can happen without a cause, and there can be no cause that does not make something happen. Every event is the child of its parents--cause and effect. Now let us look at the parentage of the cause and effect whose progeny are soon to bring upon us the great red peril of war, and, finding us unprepared, will treat us as Germany has treated Belgium. We are rich--our country from one end to the other possesses a vast wealth of enticements to the invasion of a foreign foe--and we are defenseless. These conditions are the parents of vast impending calamities. Europe, today, is involved in the greatest war in the history of mankind, and--in spite of all the saving grace of our so-called modern civilization, in spite of all the mercifulness of the Christian religion, in spite of all the charitable kindness of the Red Cross--the sum of brutality, savagery, and misery of this war is certainly not much less than it has been at any other time in the history of a striving world, every page of which has been written with blood. We have arrived at a time when we must decide whether or not our safety can be better secured and peace maintained with armaments or without armaments. DEFENSELESS AMERICA CHAPTER I DANGEROUS PREACHMENTS "There will be no war in the future, for it has become impossible now that it is clear that war means suicide." _I. S. Bloch, "The Future of War," 1899._ "What shall we say of the Great War of Europe ever threatening, ever impending, and which never comes? We shall say that it will never come. Humanly speaking, it is impossible." _Dr. David Starr Jordan, "War and Waste," 1913._ They who are loudest in their vociferations about the calamities that the warring nations of Europe have brought upon themselves are those peace-palavering persons who have been telling us all along, during the past twenty-five years, that human nature had improved so much lately, and the spirit of international brotherhood had become so dominant, that the fighting spirit was nearly dead in the souls of men. The peace praters have assured us from time to time that the last great war of the world had been fought; they have told us that no great nations would dare to go to war any more, because war between any of the Great Powers would now mean bankruptcy and national suicide; they have assured us that all international differences would hereafter be settled by jurisprudential procedure, and that law would be substituted for war.