battleships, and armored or unarmored cruisers, and light draft vessels, and torpedo boats, and destroyers, we shall want. It will depend upon the naval armaments our rivals and possible enemies have on the field of competition. Until recently, when we were proud, not of possessing large armaments, but of not needing any, it has afforded us much occasion for compassionate amusement to observe the almost hysterical nervousness into which old world governments were thrown when one of them began the building of new warships by which the proportion of power on the seas might be disturbed. Already we begin to feel that nervousness in our bones, and we cannot tell how many and what kind of warships we shall be obliged to have in order to maintain what is so vauntingly called our new position among the powers of the world.

Nor will any amount of new construction set the matter at rest for any certain time. We do not know when we shall have to rebuild the larger part of our fleet; for, as the Czar truthfully says in his manifesto, "the terrible engines of destruction which are to-day regarded as the last word of science, are destined to-morrow to lose all value by some new discovery in the same field." All forecasts as to the expenditures for naval purposes which the new policy will impose upon us in the course of time, are, therefore, futile. But whatever they may be, the people will have to pay the bills.

Moreover, we have to bear a burden of which other nations know comparatively little. During the last fiscal year we paid over $140,000,000 in pensions. More than one hundred years after the revolutionary war, more than eighty years after the war of 1812-for we still have some widows of soldiers in those wars on our pension rolls-fifty years after the Mexican war, and thirty-three years after the civil war the number of pensioners was about one million. And still they come. It is estimated that the recent Spanish war will add $20,000,000 to our annual pension expenditure. It will probably be much more. The pension attorneys and

members of Congress looking for the soldier-vote will take care of that. But if we continue the military occupation of tropical countries there will be a constant stream of new pensioners owing to tropical diseases; and if we have any active military operations in those tropical regions, that stream will be heavy beyond calculation. And it will be without any end in sight. We must therefore look for a considerable increase of the pension charge for an incalculable period-the number of new pensioners overbalancing the number of those who in the natural course of things may be expected to drop out-that dropping out being notoriously very slow. Our annual pension expenditure now exceeds the whole cost of the great German army on the peace footing, its pension roll included. As our pension charge threatens to become, it may approach for a time the annual cost of the whole peace establishments of the empire of Germany and the kingdom of Italy combined.

Taking it all in all, assuming our standing army not to exceed 100,000 men, but a large part of it to be engaged in the tropics, and our navy to be gradually enlarged to the strength which it "must have" in order to enable this republic to play the part of a colonial power, we are sure to have, including our pension roll, an annual expenditure for army and navy purposes not only far exceeding that of any European power, but not falling very much short of twofifths of the expenses for the same purposes of all the six great powers of Europe together-that is not far from $400,000,000 a year. By honest and strenuous effort we have paid off the bulk of the heavy national debt left by the civil war, and we have been very proud of that achievement. We are now in the way of running up a new national debt, of which, if we go on with the new policy, nobody can foretell to what figures it will rise.

It may be said that the American people, owing to their large and ever increasing numbers and to their extraordinary resources will be much more capable than other nations, of bearing such taxation, and therefore feel it less. That is

true.

But it is also true that it will yet be a painful burden upon the labor of the people, and contribute neither to their well-being nor to their contentment unless the burden, as well as the resulting benefit, be equitably distributed. To justify heavy taxes for military purposes beyond absolute necessity we should, therefore, economically speaking, show two things: (1) that the benefit derived from the employment of the money raised by such taxation will exceed the value of the money thus taken out of the pockets of the people; and (2) that such benefit will accrue to the several taxpayers, or classes of taxpayers, in substantially just proportion to their respective contributions for the purpose in view.

Thus it would in our case be necessary to prove: (1) that if we increase our taxation so many hundred millions a year for the purpose of enlarging our standing armaments to the end of establishing and maintaining our rule in the West Indies and the Philippines, the profits from the expansion of our business enterprise accomplished thereby would exceed that amount-a matter about which, to say the least, there is extremely grave doubt; and (2) that such profits from whatever increase of business there may be, will directly or indirectly redound in substantially just proportion to the people who pay the taxes-in other words that, while the taxes to sustain our foreign enterprises are levied upon the great mass of the people, the poor as well as the rich, they will redound really to the general benefit of the people, and not merely, or mainly, to the profit of a comparatively small number of capitalists who are able to take advantage, in a more or less speculative way, of the chances that may offer themselves in those distant regions. About this, too, there is exceeding grave doubt.

These are points which I have no time to elaborate here in detail; but I commend them for serious consideration to good citizens who are disposed to look before they leap; for they involve not only an economic question, but also one of justice.

Let me now pass to the institutional aspect of the case as it concerns this republic in particular. I am far from predicting that the organization and maintenance and use of large armaments will speedily bring forth in this country the same consequences which they did produce in England in Cromwell's time, and in France at the periods of the first and the second French republics. With us the "man on horseback" is not in sight. There is no danger of monarchical usurpation by a victorious general-although it is well worthy of remembrance that even here in the United States of America, at the close of the revolutionary war, at the very threshold of our history as a republic, a large part of the revolutionary army, "turned by six years of war from militia into seasoned veterans," and full of that overbearing esprit de corps characteristic of standing armies, urged George Washington to make himself a dictator, a monarch; that, as one of his biographers expresses it, it was as easy for Washington to have grasped supreme power then, as it would have been for Cæsar to have taken the crown from Antony upon the Lupercal;" and that it was only George Washington's patriotic loyalty and magnificent manhood that stamped out the plot. However, usurpation of so gross a character would now be rendered infinitely more difficult, not only by the republican spirit and habits of the people, but also by our federative organization dividing so large an expanse of country into a multitude of selfgoverning states.

But even in such a country and among such a people it is possible to demoralize the constitutional system and to infuse a dangerous element of arbitrary power into the government without making it a monarchy in form and name. One of the most necessary conservative agencies in a democratic republic is general respect for constitutional principles, and faithful observance of constitutional forms; and nothing is more apt to undermine that respect and to foster disregard of those forms than warlike excitements, which at the same time give to the armed forces an importance and a prestige which they otherwise would not possess.

No candid observer of current events will deny that even to-day the spirit of the new policy awakened by the victories and conquests achieved in the Spanish war, and by the occurrences in the Philippines, has moved even otherwise sober-minded persons to speak of the constitutional limitations of governmental power with a levity which a year ago would have provoked serious alarm and stern rebuke. We are loudly told by the advocates of the new policy that the constitution no longer fits our present conditions and aspirations as a great and active world power, and should not be permitted to stand in our way. Those who say so forget that it is still our constitution; that while it exists, its provisions as interpreted by our highest judicial tribunal are binding upon our actions as well as upon our consciences; that they will be binding and must be observed until they are changed in the manner prescribed by the constitution itself for its amendment; and that if any power not granted by the constitution is exercised by the government or any branch of it, on the ground that the constitution ought to be changed in order to fit new conditions, or on any other ground, usurpation in the line of arbitrary government is already an accomplished fact. And if such usurpations be submitted to by the people, that acquiescence will become an incentive to further usurpations which may end in the complete wreck of constitutional government.

Such usurpations are most apt to be acquiesced in when, in time of war, they appeal to popular feeling in the name of military necessity, or of the honor of the flag, or of national glory. In a democracy acting through universal suffrage, and being the government of public opinion informed and inspired by discussion, every influence is unhealthy that prevents men from calm reasoning. And nothing is more calculated to do that than martial excitements which stir the blood. We are told that war will lift up people to a higher and nobler patriotic devotion, inspire them with a spirit of heroic self-sacrifice, and bring their finest impulses and qualities into action. This it will, in a large measure,