We are not against any nation, but we are against all men in our own nation and all nations who trade with one hand.

If the hundreds of thousands of mothers who are shedding tears to-day for their dead sons at the feet of emperors and of war ministers would cry at the feet of smug business men who are making people afraid of human nature, who daily in everything they do and buy and sell, are making people afraid of men they do not know, their tears would be more to the point.

When a woman has lost three sons in a war and wants to cry at the right place, let her go to her own grocer, or to her banker or her broker possibly or to any man on God's earth who makes a little money for a few days out of breaking down the credit of the human heart forever.

We fight and have wars and armaments because nobody can quite believe that anybody will do what he says.

We may be deceived of course, and it may not be true, but it is always looking true or looking true enough to keep the people crushed with armaments, to make the people—especially the very poor people spend all their lives in defending their lives until what is left of their lives is hardly worth defending.

In the same way that we realize how monstrous it would be for Germany to attack America because some Americans are not what they should be, or for Japan to attack America because some Americans are unfair to the Japanese, we realize that it is monstrous for us to think of Germany as solid Bernhardis or as millions of Lissauers, or as all rejoicing over the Lusitania or as all looking forward to the annexation of Belgium.

Germany has the same problem that we have-of sorting people out. If she will wait a little for us to do it, we will wait a little for her to do it.

If Germany will do as well in crowding back her militarists and fight-itchers in the next twenty years as we will in crowding out our short-ranged, i-sized business men, and if we will do as well in crowding out our i-sized business men as Germany already has in

crowding out i-sized business men in Germany, we will not need to have armies to be afraid of each other with.

All any nation needs to do is to be intelligently and constructively afraid of itself. If each nation will do what it can at home to protect itself from itself, it will be protected from other nations automatically.

The best way for either Germany or America to carry the scheme through of protecting itself by seeing through itself is, not so much by paying a big bill for legislation, as by paying a big bill for publicity and for making people see through themselves and see through one another. If they see through themselves other nations will not have to fight them to get them to.

The real defense of a country from other countries is its fearlessness and courage in seeing through itself. Permanent, cheap, guaranteed national defense consists in the punishment and subjugation at home of men and institutions which expose the country to the just suspicion of the world.

To protect America from war we will see to it that we are the kind of Americans everybody wants to be identified with and to deal with and that nobody wants to fight.

VII

ANOTHER SCENE (THE SALESMEN'S SCENE)

If I were a German or a Frenchman or an Englishman, and if my government had sent me over to America a year ago when the present world-disturbance broke out and had delegated me to see what Americans were like and to study how large an armament my country would probably have to have to express its precise amount of trust or distrust of Americans, one of the first things I would have done would have been to study the ways the American business men were using at that time in the back pages of the magazines to get people to buy what they had.

One of the first things I would have discovered would have been the astonishing campaign some American business men were making the moment the war began, to persuade American people to form the habit of buying American goods. Many of my readers will have forgotten perhaps the tone of these early advertisements which were published in nearly all the magazines in those first months when the business doors of Europe were all slammed in the faces of the world, and we saw at last for the first time that we were a nation that stood alone.

It was to me a tragic and pathetic sight in that great silent moment of the world when we could all look up almost any minute and see eleven nations in Europe committing suicide before our eyes, to see the manufacturers of America come gayly tripping in waving like schoolchildren their little patriotic flags in the magazines, at a time like this, a time when the people over there in the other nations were all so helpless, when they could not so much as make a pill or dye a stocking to defend their business, it was a strange and unhappy sight to me to have as we

did that huge crowd of American business men all shouting to us, to the great American people everywhere (any day, any magazine), all flocking out and shouting to us: “Oh, dear, beautiful American people, lend us your ears! You see they are all dying over there now. They cannot do anything. We have no one to compete with us now! Do buy your goods of us! Do get the habit of buying your goods of us! Put up the motto over your bed where your eyes fall on it first in the morning, 'God bless our home' and 'Made in America.' Dear great American people, let all your beautiful pocketbooks, all your hopes for your country and your prayers, let them all be for America, let them all be for American factories, that, God helping us, American factories may wax fat, and that God may be praised in the groans of the nations."

Of course the advertisements were decorously and studiously worded, and I cannot deny that the advertisements themselves literally reproduced in these pages would have kept up an appearance of propriety and even almost (some of them) a look and tone of nobility in what they were attempting to do, more successfully no doubt than I have in my attempted translation of them.

I cannot say that these advertisements afforded me much really comforting support in my idea that America is to defend herself by the self-revelation of her business men.

VIII

WHINERS AND GETTERS

If Europe absolutely knew and could absolutely prove that it could supply this country with what it wants to eat and to wear better than we can, if Europe wanted to get the attention of Americans once for all and all at once, and fully convince Americans forever, in three years, that they cannot afford to trade at home, Europe could not have schemed out a better arrangement than the one it has now. American producers have been presented by eleven nations with the complete, absolute faithful submissive attention of the American consumer. Not a European manufacturer can peep or get a word in to-day with the American people. The European war is the most stupendous gift of advertising space, the most stupendous free lease of vast territories of attention to American manufacturers that has ever been dreamed of. This whole nation in a time of high cost of living, when it has to study to keep alive at all, is studying to-day morning, noon and night, what American manufacturers are like and how they run their business and how they make their goods.

In the next three years the American people are going to find out, and find out for the rest of their lives, just how much better or just how much worse goods made in America are than other goods.

The American producers look around them and they see the consumers of America on every hand being held up by the war, standing day after day with their hands up and their mouths open and their eyes shut by the war. All the American producers have to do is to put anything they like down into their