In the same breath he acclaimed the President of Chile who led the way to the court of reason as a new prophet of humanity. He would not yield one inch in the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine--no! But it had been demonstrated that such issues could be settled by moral suasion! The next session of the august Parliament of Man, he declared, would ratify the decision of the Pan-American Congress without a dissenting voice. The long pent energies of our nation drove us forward now at lightning speed. During the last year of the great war our commerce had practically come to dominate the world. Anticipating conditions at its close, Congress passed a new high tariff which closed our ports to the flood of cheap goods Europe was ready to dump on our shores. Every wheel in America was turning, every man at work, wages leaped upward with profits mounting to unheard-of figures. The distress in Europe from the glut of an overstocked market sent us millions of laborers and still our industries clamored for more. A hundred million Americans went mad with prosperity. Our wealth had already mounted steadily during the war. We were not only the richest nation on earth, there was no rival in sight. New York ascended her throne as the money center of the world, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice poured into the coffers of her captains of industry. The one thing on which we had failed to make relative progress was the development of our national defenses. We had more ships, more guns, more forts, more aircraft and more submarines than ever before, but our relative position in power of defense had dropped to the lowest record in history. At the beginning of the great war in 1914 our navy stood third on the list in power and efficiency. Only Great Britain and Germany outranked us and Germany’s balance of power was so slight that our advantageous position was deemed sufficient to overcome it. At the end of the great war we had sunk to sixth place among the nations in power and efficiency of defense. Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Japan outranked us so far that we could not consider ourselves in their class. The armies of each of these powers were so tremendous in their aggregate the mind could not grasp the import of such figures. In spite of all the losses, Germany’s mobile forces, ready at a moment’s notice, numbered 5,000,000 trained veterans with muscles of steel and equipment unparalleled in the history of warfare. Russia had 9,000,000 men armed and hardened by war, France had 3,000,000, Great Britain 3,000,000, Austria-Hungary 3,000,000, Japan 4,000,000.