sufficient alone for our security. Much more needs to be cast into the
scale that it may incline in favor of our strength. They are mere
defensive factors, and partial at that. Though distant, our shores can
be reached; being defenceless, they can detain but a short time a force
sent against them. With a probability of three months' peace in Europe,
no maritime power would fear to support its demands by a number of
ships with which it would be loath indeed to part for a year.

Yet, were our sea frontier as strong as it now is weak, passive
self-defence, whether in trade or war, would be but a poor policy, so
long as this world continues to be one of struggle and vicissitude. All
around us now is strife; "the struggle of life," "the race of life,"
are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we
stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation;
our own no less than others. What is our protective system but an
organized warfare? In carrying it on, it is true, we have only to use
certain procedures which all states now concede to be a legal exercise
of the national power, even though injurious to themselves. It is
lawful, they say, to do what we will with our own. Are our people,
however, so unaggressive that they are likely not to want their own way
in matters where their interests turn on points of disputed right, or
so little sensitive as to submit quietly to encroachment by others, in
quarters where they long have considered their own influence should
prevail?

Our self-imposed isolation in the matter of markets, and the decline of
our shipping interest in the last thirty years, have coincided
singularly with an actual remoteness of this continent from the life of
the rest of the world. The writer has before him a map of the North and
South Atlantic oceans, showing the direction of the principal trade