Whatever the upshot of the European tragedy, its political and psychological consequences are likely to be great. If it result in new national divisions upon racial lines of more reality, who knows but that the awakened spirits of nationality will germinate fresh military ambitions? Or will the horrors of the war force political reforms and the search for assurance in more democratic institutions against any repetition of those horrors? And is popular government an assurance against useless war while men remain warlike even when not military? Except from the successful countries or from those where disaster has brought such sobering change that men can return to work heartened with new hope, when the war is over there is likely to be a heavy emigration of disgusted people. Possibly even victory will be so dear that men will emigrate from a country half prostrate in its triumph. Many will come as the Puritans came, and as the bulk of our own excellent Germanic element came, and will cast in their lot with a new nation. We shall get a good share, but doubtless some will go to the republics of the far South, and some to the highlands of the tropics and through the canal to the West Coast. If so, this will tend gradually toward increased production and purchasing power, as well as toward a leavening of social, political, and economic conditions of life. If the war were indecisive or left all the combatants more or less prostrated, peaceful immigration might give a big impulse to the gradual growing up of powerful States in the temperate zone of the extreme South. The situation there, and the evolution of our own power, make it perhaps even now fair to consider the question of regarding as optional in any given case the assertion by us of the Monroe Doctrine much below the equator, let us say, beyond which it may possibly be doubtful whether we have nowadays much reason for special interest. But, even so, our relations to South America and our obligations under the Monroe Doctrine, in spite of the blessed fortifications of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, leave us where it is tempting fate to be without a navy of the first magnitude, and a big merchant marine. We have seen what happened to Belgium and Luxemburg. We have seen how even some of the most enlightened nations can still make force their god. Nations learn slowly, and there are perhaps some new big ones coming on, like China. If the war is a fight to a finish, and the Allies triumph, we can imagine Russia, with its teeming millions of people, occupied for a while in the Near East; Japan consolidating her position in the Far East, an increasingly powerful neighbor to us in the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Ocean; France still a great power; and England as a world power of uncomfortably ubiquitous strength, able to challenge the Monroe Doctrine at will.