applies to the islands both of the Atlantic and of the Pacific, for

our boundaries have been pushed thousands of miles nearer to the markets of Asia and Australia, and hundreds of miles nearer to the markets of South America and Africa, than they were a year ago. Advantages for the increase of our carrying-trade thus afforded will become ours if we stretch forth our hands to accept them.' And

again: The relatively undeveloped navigation between the United States and the islands of the Pacific and Asia, and the partially developed navigation to South America and Africa, will certainly be lost to us if indifference to present political and commercial rivalry is now left undisturbed, as was indifference to the mechanical revolution wrought in navigation by iron and steel at the end of the first half of the century.' There we have the sum of the whole situation.

5

Political wrestling has resulted in the acquisition of sea-power by the United States, and sea-power is now to make of her a sea-carrier. We need not stop just now to discuss Mr. Gage's proposed methods for the development of the merchant marine. His recommendations have been framed with a judicious regard for vested interests, and they are just what might have been expected from a leader of a party wedded to high Protection. A bounty-fed merchant marine in the foreign trade, a subsidised fleet of cargo and passenger liners, mean not only a most active competition with our own shipowners, but also an enormous stimulus to the creation of a great American shipbuilding industry. And the restriction of the trade between the United States and Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and of the coasting trade of these islands, to the American flag, means a large immediate loss to British vessels, even though they have still open to them the ocean trade between these islands and Great Britain and all other countries save the United States. Herein is trouble being prepared. If, says Mr. Chamberlain, the United States is about. to enter upon a new career as a colonising nation, 'we shall welcome her into the same field with ourselves.' It is doubtful, however, if the welcome will be a cordial one if America shuts us out of her colonial trade while vigorously making way into ours. Patriotism, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, is nationally that which egoism is individually, and along with kindred benefits brings kindred evils. We can meet America in fair competition on the open ocean as we have done in the past, when sometimes the victory fell to her and sometimes to us. But we cannot forget that she once cut us out of our colonial carrying-trade, and that that trade is still open to her ships--when she gets them. The least we can ask is that her (new) colonial trade should be as free to our ships as to

The Shipping Bounty Bill did not get through last Congress, but having been approved by the Committees of both Houses it will come before the new Congress, in which the Republicans will have an absolute majority, as a party measure.

hers. Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?'

In the relations of sea-power to sea-carriage we have had two object-lessons-the development of the maritime enterprise of Germany since the war with France, and the development of the merchant marine of Japan since the war with China. We are now about to have a third in the creation of a merchant navy by America, as a necessary consequence of the war with Spain. In each case war is the creator of a sea-carrier, and these three Powers will be our greatest competitors in the ocean trade of the future. The probable competition of Germany is limited by the same considerations which prevent her from becoming one of the foremost of the sea Powers. The insular position of Japan, on the other hand-a position so analogous to our own-makes for her advance as a great maritime nation. It is probable, indeed, that Japan, with more energy than can find employment in domestic industries, may become the chief oceancarrier of the East. At any rate, with her and with America we shall have to contend in the future as we have never contended with any ocean competitor in the past. It should not, however, make us melancholy, but should spur us to sustained effort, to know that when Great Britain retires from business as the world's sea-carrier, her sea-power will be gone. If Britannia is to continue to rule the waves, it must be with a parallel ruler.

BENJAMIN TAYLOR.

SOME NOTES FROM WASHINGTON

THE United States is entering upon a new and, to our eyes, a formidable departure. A war undertaken impulsively, I might almost say hysterically, has involved us in complications of immeasurable complexity and magnitude. Admiral Dewey's exploit in Manila harbour on that May morning, little more than a year ago, followed by the destruction of Cervera's fleet off Santiago and by the capitulation of the Spanish army to General Shafter, terminated the incident finally. Of the polite formalities which ensued it is unnecessary to speak. The campaign, so far as Spain was concerned, lasted less than six months. We lost not quite four hundred men killed, from beginning to end; there were some 1,500 wounded, and out of the whole force suddenly called into action to meet the emergency-275,000 in round numbers-the mortality from all causes was only a small fraction more than one per cent. During our civil war, 1861-5, we had at least a hundred skirmishes in any one of which more men were killed than in all this trumpery affair with Spain. Those skirmishes are forgotten. History has dismissed them with a paragraph. Their survivors look back upon them as the mere side-shows of a war. Yet it is clearly on the cards that the events of last summer have ushered in an epoch more momentous than any in which our nation has ever yet figured.

Of the war with Spain, I am free to say that I lamented it. I shared the conviction of many of our greatest and most powerful public men, at the head of whom I place the President, not only because of his illustrious position, but because of his impressive personality, his high character, his profound convictions, and his philanthropy. A few months before the war broke out I was in Cuba, and devoted several weeks to careful and dispassionate investigation. I went in the character of a sympathiser with the insurrection. I returned convinced by overwhelming evidence that the insurgents represented only an insignificant faction of the Cuban population; that their armies were nothing more than bands of marauders; that their 'generals' were mere fugitives, and their entire military establishment was an impudent and sorry jest. Even accepting the most extravagant claims of the Juntas, here and in

New York, the insurrection was a wretched humbug. It was their extreme assertion that they had 40,000 men under arms; and, even accepting this as true, and figuring on the basis warranted by statistics in this part of the world, it represented only 200,000 out of a total native population of 1,150,000. There were therefore nearly a million Cubans, to say nothing of the 350,000 Spanish residents, who took no part in the insurrection, who did not sympathise with it, and who feared nothing so much as its success. These conditions, which I discovered in December 1897, are now recognised by everyone as having been in existence then, for we have been enlightened by experience. It was because of his knowledge of these conditions that the President refused to approve the clause in the war resolutions which recognised the so-called Cuban government'; and I am in a position to say that he has had occasion, since, to congratulate himself upon his escape from that sinister and abhorrent trap. The war, while undertaken in a spirit of humanity and civilisation, was nevertheless a blunder. It was brought about by the organised falsehood of disreputable newspapers, the selfish aspirations of unprincipled politicians, the greed of callous speculators, with the credulity, the hysteria, and the feverish altruism of the American people to use as their raw material in the creation of public sentiment. The war came, therefore, and while it ended even more quickly than most of us expected, we are now threshing out its aftermath in pain and prayer. There are grave and solemn problems before us in our newly acquired territories-problems in the solution of which we shall acquire sympathy with, if not affection for, Spain as the legatee of her sufferings and her sorrows. We are perplexed and burdened at home with a visitation of 'heroes.' One of them, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, turned his heroism to account while as yet the melodramatic glamour of it was burnished by popular excitement and credulity. He has been made Governor of New York, and, for the time being, he vexes only his party and his friends. But the rest of the 'heroes'! They are like the locusts that descended upon Egypt for numbers and for hunger. Not Waterloo, not the Crimea, not Gettysburg or Chickamauga produced so many or such voracious heroes as that paltry skirmish at Santiago last July, with its absurdly magnified proportions and its casualties in buckram. We have won a great and glorious victory, no doubt, but, verily, we are paying for it now.

It will not do, however, to suppose that our people are not fighters. The trouble is that thus far we have had only our superficial and, if I may say so, our cheaper emotions called upon. We went into the war on sentiment-the hypocritical craft of Chadband utilising the innocent fervour of Mrs. Jellyby; circumstances have yet to scratch the outer cuticle of our philanthropy and set free the Berserker hidden there. We haven't got to fighting yet. The generation

born since 1865 does not know the meaning of the word. But it can learn, and learn rapidly. Like most men who have seen the Yankees at war-real war-I am heartily ashamed of the wretched outcries and childish complaints which disgraced our history last year. That hideous chorus of execration of the Secretary of War, conducted by hysterical women, meddlesome preachers, fanatical reformers and trumpery politicians, and spread broadcast through the vicious machinery of yellow journalism, will long remain a memory of sorrow and of shame. No army in any age or country was ever half so tenderly cared for. Every veteran of the civil war of thirty-eight years ago knows this to be true. The nation may well blush for the abhorrent episode. Some excuse for the men themselves-inexperienced young fellows fresh from the ploughhandle and dry-goods counter-is to be found in the fact that they saw their commanding officers, especially one so conspicuous as Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, bounding about here and there in wild excitement, complaining of this and that, of the beef, the confusion, the difficulty in embarking troops, of everything in general. They had mischievous examples, indeed, and much is to be said in extenuation of their folly.

But the war came and went. The United States is now launched upon a strange and possibly a stormy sea. The country no longer goes into convulsions of horror and alarm over a few cases of typhoid among the soldiers. The fever of conquest and expansion is getting into our blood. Whether the war was conceived in folly or was born of righteousness is a conundrum which no one now discusses. The intensifying complications in Cuba, the angry recognition of our obstacles in the Philippines, the swiftly spreading conviction that we have a very thinly ambushed foe in Germany-all these forces are at work in the nation's consciousness. The day of our isolation is gone to return no more. We have taken our place in the equation of foreign politics, and for good or for evil we shall retain it. On the wave of this vast and novel sentiment Mr. McKinley will be renominated, and, unless some revolution of circumstance or feeling, now invisible, should intervene, he will be re-elected in November, 1900. Thus far he has presided with dignity and with great ability. He has impressed the country as a man of infinite kindness and of broad and genuine sympathies. He possesses what his predecessor, Mr. Cleveland, never so much as approached-the respect, the confidence, and the affection of the people. The humblest citizen speaks and feels concerning him with a sense of intimacy. He believes the President is his friend, his well-wisher, his protector. In trouble or affliction he finds solace in the thought that Mr. McKinley would pity and comfort him if he knew. I do not think that any President of the United States ever ruled in such an atmosphere of personal esteem and love. It is safe to predict that, whatever bitterness VOL. XLV-No. 268

3 X