'You may have made your front door secure' says Marshal Foch, arguing for the Rhine frontier, 'but you may as well make sure by having a good high garden wall as well.' 'Make sure,' that is the note--_si vis pacem_.... And he can be sure that 'the average practical man,' who prides himself on 'knowing human nature' and 'distrusting theories' will respond to the appeal. Every club smoking room will decide that 'the simple soldier' knows his business and has judged human forces aright. Yet of course the simple truth is that the 'hard-headed soldier' has chosen the one ground upon which all experience, all the facts, are against him. Then how is he able to 'get away with it'--to ride off leaving at least the impression of being a sternly practical unsentimental man of the world by virtue of having propounded an aphorism which all practical experience condemns? Here is Mr Churchill. He is talking to hard-headed Lancashire manufacturers. He desires to show that he too is no theorist, that he also can be hard-headed and practical. And he--who really does know the mind of the 'hard-headed business man'--is perfectly aware that the best road to those hard heads is to propound an arrant absurdity, to base a proposed line of policy on the assumption of a physical impossibility, to follow a will-o'-the-wisp which in all recorded history has led men into a bog. They applaud Mr Churchill, not because he has put before them a cold calculation of relative risk in the matter of maintaining peace, an indication, where, on the whole, the balance of safety lies; Mr Churchill, of course, knows perfectly well that, while professing to do that, he has been doing nothing of the sort. He has, in reality, been appealing to a sentiment, the emotion which is strongest and steadiest in the 'hard-faced men' who have elbowed their way to the top in a competitive society. He has 'rationalised' that competitive sentiment of domination by putting forward a 'reason' which can be avowed to them and to others. Colonel Roosevelt managed to inject into his reasons for predominance a moral strenuousness which Mr Churchill does not achieve. The following is a passage from one of the last important speeches made by Colonel Roosevelt--twice President of the United States and one of the out-standing figures in the world in his generation:-- 'Friends, be on your guard against the apostles of weakness and folly when peace comes. They will tell you that this is the last great war. They will tell you that they can make paper treaties and agreements and guarantees by which brutal and unscrupulous men will have their souls so softened that weak and timid men won't have anything to fear and that brave and honest men won't have to prepare to defend themselves.