To all of which, it is said, the Frenchman answered, in substance, as follows: "What you really mean is this,--that if France and England laid down their arms, and allowed Germany to keep her land uninvaded, her fleet intact, that so far from raising ten or twenty billions to restore Belgium and France and recompense England, the Kaiser would simply load one or two millions of his veterans on the three thousand of his ships, and sail away to New York, and assess the twenty or fifty billions on the American people. You must remember," said the French officer, "that England and France do not betray their friends. They do not count their treaties 'scraps of paper.' My country will never consent to hand the United States over to the armies and the battle-ships of Germany." The genuineness of this brief discussion is beyond all doubt. The time has fully come therefore for every American and manufacturer and merchant, every farmer and financier, to realize that we have _got_ to win this war, otherwise there will be no United States. We are unprepared for war or even self-defense. After ten months of war Secretary Baker tells us frankly that thus far we have not one single machine gun completed, that not until April will there be one rifle, for each of a little army of a half-million men, while the other investigations have brought home the fact that it is the French and British army that stand between us and the Kaiser's troops, and that it is England's battle-ships that hold the Kaiser's war fleet behind the Kiel Canal. It is the British bulldog that keeps the German rat in the Kiel hole. On one side of the American silver dollar we have written these words, "In God we trust," and on the other we should write these words, "And in England's battle-ships." EDMUND BURKE'S WORDS