The extent to which the great powers will go in order to secure enthusiasm for their military establishments is almost beyond comprehension. Each nation has its great military rendezvous, its grand naval parades, its magnificent display of gorgeous military uniforms, its wave of colors, blare of trumpets, and bursts of martial music. The United States is now sending her navy around the world--for the purpose of training the seamen?--certainly, but also that the youth of our land may be intoxicated by the apparent glory of it all, and thus enlist for service; that the American citizens may be aroused to greater enthusiasm by this magnificent display of the implements of legalized murder, and thus be willing to build more floating arsenals rather than irrigate arid lands, develop internal waterways, build hospitals, schools, and colleges. The trouble with such exhibitions is, that it displays only the bright side of militarism. If in place of the Russian battleships they should display the starving masses of dejected and despised beings who pay for those battleships; if in place of the gay German uniforms they should exhibit the rags of the disheartened peasants who pay for those uniforms; if in place of the grand parade they should produce masses of wounded men and rivers of blood; if in place of the stirring martial music they should produce the writhing agonies and awful groans of dying men; if in place of sham war they should produce actual war,--their exhibitions would make militarism unbearable. Again, we are told that we have suddenly become a world power, and that we must prepare to exercise a new diplomacy under new conditions. We must increase our navy, they say, to enforce this new diplomacy. We must prepare to fight in behalf of the Monroe Doctrine. But why, I ask, cannot this new diplomacy be enforced as American diplomacy has always been enforced? We promulgated the Monroe Doctrine without a navy; we have maintained it for over eighty years without the show of force. If our new diplomacy is right, it is as strong as the world's respect for righteousness; if it is wrong, a hundred battleships cannot enforce it.