Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions. They cannot shirk that responsibility. They cannot evade the fact that the menace against which we most need national defense arises from the degeneracy that we are breeding in our midst. If we cannot do both, we had far better spend our national energies and revenues in fighting the evils that are rotting our citizenship, than in building forts and fortifications or maintaining a navy and an army for defense against the remote possibility of attacks by other nations. We hear much of the danger to New York from such an attack. New York is in far greater danger from the criminal, immoral, evil, and degenerating forces that she is nursing in her own bosom than she is from any military force that might be landed on our shores by a foreign invader. The enemies she has most to fear are her own Gunmen and Bomb-throwers; Black-handers and White-Slavers; Apaches, Dope Fiends, Gamblers, and Gangsters; Tenement House Landlords; Out-of-Works, and all the breeders of poverty, crime, insanity, disease, and human misery that are rampant in her midst,--the direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has herself created and for which she alone is responsible. This is no overdrawn picture. It is only the briefest possible outline of the evil conditions which less than a century of the Service of Mammon has bred in that mighty metropolis. Everyone who reads the newspapers which reflect the daily events of New York City will appreciate how impossible it is to portray in words the depth of degradation to which a great mass of humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon--rich as well as poor. The invasion that New York City should most fear, that of Vice and Crime and Degeneracy, has been accomplished. They have captured the outer fortifications and are intrenched within the citadel. The Goths are not _at_ the gates,--they are _within_ the gates. Uncle Sam has transformed the wild Apaches of the Southwest into steady and industrious laborers who have done yeoman work with the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service in Arizona. New York is now breeding, in her modern canyons and cliff dwellings, a more bloodthirsty, cruel, and treacherous race of Apaches than were ever bred amid the mountain fastnesses and forbidding deserts of the Southwest. Do not these domestic enemies constitute a more immediate danger than any foreign enemy? The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow our imaginations, is still in the remote distance--a future possibility, not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast. _The greatest merit of the plan for national defense advocated in this book is that it will safeguard against danger from these domestic enemies, who are already in our midst, at the same time that it will safeguard, in the only adequate way yet proposed, against war or any possibility of a foreign invasion._