When the present war is over, the precipitation of a war with England may not depend on what England will choose to do, but it may depend on what we shall choose to do. We have been a lamb rampant for a long time in a jungle alive with lions, and we have owed our security to the fact that the lions have been watching one another, and have not dared to avert their eyes long enough to devour us. If we did not have a grandiose sense of our importance and power, we should not need a whipping in order to prepare against war, but so long as we believe that we can beat all creation without any preparation, we are going to act just as though it were true, and England, although she may be friendly, may be forced, by our inconsiderate bluff and arrogance, to declare war on us. Much better England than any other country. England now has no territorial aspirations that would make her want to annex some of our land. She would be satisfied with a good big indemnity, which we could well afford to pay for the benefit we should gain from the war. If England will merely come over seas, and whip us, and tax us for the trouble, and thereby lead us to prepare adequately to defend ourselves against less friendly nations, she will do us the greatest possible good. We are living and working not alone for ourselves, but also for those who are our own, and for all others insomuch as their interests and their welfare are in common with our own. Our welfare is part and parcel of the aggregate welfare of all those for whom we are working, and our welfare and their welfare are not only a condition of the present, but are also a condition of the future. The welfare of our children and our children's children, and of those whose interests will be in common with theirs, is part and parcel of our own present welfare. This is the true philosophy by which we who are sane and conscientious are guided. Upon such philosophy are based all economics and all prudence. The false philosophy of the selfish and the sensual, the spendthrift and the debauchee, is the philosophy of such as they whose acts of omission and commission brought on the French Revolution, and who said, "_Après nous le déluge_"; but such should not be our philosophy. Therefore, if now there be a calamity in the making, which we are able to foresee must surely descend upon the heads of our children, even if it does not come soon enough to fall upon our own heads, it is a thing that should awaken our concern and stimulate our inquiry, and lead us to seek ways and means for averting it. It is a fact, which I absolutely know as certainly as anything can be known in human affairs, that we, and all of those who are near and dear to us, are sitting today on a powder magazine with the train lighted, and it is only a question of the slowness, or quickness, of the fuse when the time shall arrive for the explosion.