the British Fleet before the German menace. I point to the Mediterranean, bereft of British battleships, and to the gradual narrowing, year by year, of our once far-flung battle-line. We may stand still: Germany always advances, and the direction of her advance, the line along which she is moving, is now most manifest. It is towards that consummation which I have described--a complete supremacy by land and sea. She has built a mighty fleet; but, as if nothing were done so long as anything stands between her and her goal, still she presses on--here establishing a new Heligoland, for every available island in the North Sea has been fortified--there enclosing Holland in a network of new canals, and deepening old riverbeds for the swifter transport of the munitions of war, whether to her army or her fleet. Contrasted with our own apathy or puerile and spasmodic efforts, how impressive is this magnificent and unresting energy! It has the mark of true greatness; it extorts admiration even from those against whom it is directed! But, it is urged by the advocates of universal peace, how monstrous is this expenditure of human strength and human ingenuity, if unused, and how yet more monstrous the waste of human life if actually used in war![4] And how much more sane is the policy of Cobden and of Bright and of their imitators or followers at the present day! Gentlemen, arguments which prove the folly and criminality of war are, at the present stage of history, like the arguments which prove the folly and criminality of ambition and of the love of glory. Even those who argue most eloquently against glory do, by that very eloquence, seek to win glory; and those who argue most forcibly against war do, nevertheless, live, and for long will continue to live, under an invisible power which has made war an inseparable portion of human polity. Much, during the autumn of 1911, was said and written upon arbitration. America's action in the Panama Canal, and the impotence of diplomatists in the Balkan crisis,[5] are again history's ironic comment in the autumn of 1912! Arbitration most certainly is more humane than war; but, at the present stage of the polity of nations, arbitration again and again refuses to extend itself to some of the most vital and essential questions--questions which, to a nation or empire sensitive alike to its honour and to its abiding interests, make war unavoidable.