regard to the reasons for the change of royal plans.
The arbitration movement is undoubtedly gaining force; and still, at best, it is but binding warriors with threads. No one for a moment believes that any number of arbitration agreements or Hague Tribunals would hold in check a military movement when ruler or people were once aroused. Without doubt such agreements may do much to harmonize international prejudice and may be of great use in preventing friction over small differences—friction which sometimes grows into animosities demanding national bloodshed. Their usefulness is acknowledged by most of the statesmen of Europe, but no nation shows any inclination toward abating one jot of its military programme.
Increasing armament, larger armies, more expensive defences and more thorough preparation is the order of the day everywhere in Europe. In conversation with public men and with many commercial and industrial leaders, I have never heard the opinion ventured that the leading powers of Europe are likely in the near future to disarm, or, indeed, materially to reduce their military expenditures. The German Socialists, it is true, make the reduction of such expenditures one of the principal planks of their platform, but in the same speech in which Herr Bebel arraigns the Government for excessive military expenditures, he castigates it for doing nothing to check the aggressive policy of Russia. There is plenty of grumbling over the taxes which support these vast armaments of Europe, but there is no deep-seated conviction in the minds of any considerable portion of the people of any of the great powers that their own nation should set the example of a reduction of military and naval strength. Few things in Europe can be predicted with more certainty than that the outlay for defence and for aggressive strength will continue.
The bankruptcy of Europe, which such men as the Baron de Constant see, is perfectly easy of demonstration by any amateur statistician, who needs only a series of budgets and a short lead-pencil thoroughly to demonstrate such a conclusion; but so easily reached a conclusion might be wrong. I believe that it would be. It is true that the cost of the military establishment, the vast expenditures in constructing navies, the constantly recurring budget deficits, the terrible weight of taxation, are all real and painfully evident facts. France is the natural place to look for these pessimistic opinions in regard to the future of the great powers, for France has a debt incomparably the greatest in the world, and a debt that seems ever growing. To-day it stands roundly at $6,500,000,000, a debt so great that every voter in France—and there is universal manhood suffrage there—every voter in France has a share of responsibility for the national debt equal to $844. It is small wonder that this vast debt should give rise to apprehension. Only the unparalleled thrift of her own people has enabled France to market the tremendous blocks of rentes which have been the legacies left her by one finance minister after another. During the years of peace the succession of budget deficits have made almost as great increases in the debt of France as had formerly been piled up by the misfortunes of war. So it is easy to see how a Frenchman, with mind imbued with the great military expenditures and growing debt of his own country, should look out over Europe and note the cost of the great armies and see the stream of taxes that runs into the sea that navies may float there—sees everywhere a tendency toward increasing government expenditures and threatening deficits and nowhere means of escape through taxation, because taxation is already perilously high; it is no wonder that such an observer sees in the constant increase of government obligations an ultimate financial collapse and political disintegration of a character which might readily disturb the balance of power in a way no army could check nor treaty stay.
In spite of all that there is to sustain such pessimistic views, I am certain that the men most powerful in shaping the affairs of Europe do not see, at least in anything like the immediate future, any reason to believe that in Western or Central Europe there are to be radical political upheavals, sweeping social changes, or the financial break-down of governments. The exception is the near East, the Balkan firebrand, where there are irreconcilable differences and implacable racial antagonisms, seething under impossibly bad government, and where, sooner or later—where, indeed, both sooner and later