Occasionally, an American citizen, with more manhood than discretion, would resent a nameless indignity, and kill some military blackguard, who would immediately be avenged by the burning of the town and the corralling and shooting of the people with machine-guns. This is not an overdrawn picture--the thing has actually been done in the present war. It is very likely that some of us who look upon this page will be forced to see wife or daughter or sweetheart namelessly maltreated to gratify the brutal lust of an invader, and lose our own life for a blow on the scoundrel's jaw or a stab in his ribs, unless--aye, there's the rub--unless this whole country awakens to its danger and rises up as one man and demands prompt and adequate defensive measures for national protection. As this saving thing is not likely to happen, the entire country east of the Alleghanies will probably be Belgiumized with fire and the sword, depredated, degraded, and desolated by an invading army within a very short time after the European War is over. This is an age of mechanics--an age wherein man-made mechanism more and more replaces hand work. Everywhere in our industries of peace, we have seen labor-saving machinery replace the labor of human hands. Today all the men in the world could not do by hand all of the world's ploughing, sowing, reaping, and carrying of the world's food to market; all the women in the world could not, today, do the world's sewing without the sewing-machine; and all the men in the world and all the women in the world combined could not, today, do a tenth of the world's writing without the typewriter and type-setting and printing machinery. One of the giant dredges that have been ladling out of the Panama Canal the vast landslides, can do the pick and shovel and wheelbarrow work of a thousand men. Everywhere, in everything we do, and in everything done for us, we find human hands now mainly engaged in guiding the work of labor-saving machinery. The people of the United States of America have been able to develop their enormous resources and to keep abreast of the world's industrial progress mainly by the invention of labor-saving machinery under the protection of our patent law. In our competition with other nations for the markets of the world, no one thinks of referring to the prowess of our unskilled citizen soldiers of industry unsupported by machinery, but all reliance is placed upon our multiform labor-saving machinery, and our skilled labor behind that machinery.