Our impregnability does not protect us from militarism. It is quite true that this country, like Russia, cannot be permanently invaded; it is quite true that hostile navies need not necessarily be resisted by navies of our own so far as the protection of our coasts is concerned. But there is no such thing as absolute certainty in these matters. While personally I believe that no country in the world will ever challenge the United States, that the chances are a hundred to one against it, it is on just that one chance that the militarist bases his plea for armaments and secures them. But, unfortunately, we are already committed to a good deal more than just mere defense of American territory; problems arising out of the Philippines and the Panama Canal and the Monroe Doctrine have already committed us to a measure of intervention in the political affairs of the outside world. In brief, if the other nations of the world have great armies and navies--and tomorrow those other nations will include a reorganized China as they already include a westernized Japan--if there is all that weight of military material which might be used against us, then in the absence of those other guarantees which I shall suggest, we shall be drawn into piling up a corresponding weight of material as against that of the outside world. And, of course, just as we cannot escape the economic and the military reaction of European development, neither can we escape the moral. If European thought and morality did, by some fatality, really develop in the direction of a Nietzschean idealization of military force, we might well get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ideals, and morals.