Do you know that to maintain our so-called prestige we spend seventy per cent of our national income? Think of it! Seventy per cent to maintain our present status and to prepare for the future! Think of that awful drain; think, if applied in other channels, what good could be done! We are proud of our battleship _Texas_. She is a noble war dog; yet do you realize that if we had applied the money spent on her in our own state we could have had one gigantic paved highway twice the distance from El Paso to Galveston? We could have had two hundred high schools, representing $75,000 each. We could have raised our institutions of higher learning to a level with any of the East or North. Fifteen millions gone for a floating war machine which in twenty years will be a piece of rusted, useless iron; fifteen millions for a sailing dragon who, each time one of her big guns speaks, wastes the equivalent of a four-year college education for some youth--$1700--for a single shot. Our war dogs sail the seas; our soldiers parade our forts; and we look on and raise a joyous hubbub as the nations of the world rush madly on, wasting themselves in the race for military supremacy. Have you ever considered yourself transported to some celestial height, and there, from the regions of the infinite, allowed to view a battle on earth? How foolish it must seem, these pygmies coming forth to make war. See them as they charge and wound and kill! See brother slay brother! See the wounded left to die! Hear the cries of distress, and picture the grief that follows all! Men battling to conquer; men assuming the prerogative of a god--how foolish, yet how serious! And these artificial lines that men call boundaries, how punctiliously they are guarded! "Take but a hundred feet, and we shall war with thee." How foolish this too must seem when viewed from above--that we should carry on war over even a slight infraction on any imaginary, mathematical line. We cherish the thought that the youth of our land are being taught self-restraint. It is ever impressed upon them that there are courts of justice for the settlement of controversies. Law and order have become stock phrases, dinned into their ears at every turn. The man who would settle his difficulty by trying the physical metal of his adversary is of the past. By the new order he is taboo as a savage. Individual self-restraint rings out in our vocabulary as nationally descriptive. The babe at the mother's knee learns first the virtue of it; the child at school is tutored to it soundly; the man in life is lectured with it regularly. Brotherhood! Love! Self-restraint!