- 7 - threw in her weight behind it. Without her aid Great Britain and France could not have continued economically and financially till 1918, nor could they have ejected Germany from Belgium and Northern France without the assistance of the 2,000,000 American soldiers in Europe in that year. President Wilson attempted to make the world a safe place to live in by trying to induce the whole world to go democratic and low tariff, and to substitute for British sea power and the balance of power the system of the League of Nations. It was a magnificient conception. But the world was not ready for it, and to-day not only has the League gone but the alternative system of preserving liberty over half the world, the control of the seas by Great Britain alone coupled with something approximating to free trade is rapidly disappearing also. On the one hand economic nationalism and still more totalitarian economics are undermining the old free capitalist exchange. On the other hand the strategic balance is going rapidly against Great Britain. The population of Germany is 90,000,000 of Italy is 45,000,000, of Japan is 70,000,000, and all of these countries are now on a war basis. The population of Great Britain is 45,000,000 and of France about the same. Both are only half on a war basis. With Russia for the time being outside the picture, there is now a balance of some 200,000,000 peoples organised on totalitarian lines, against about l00,000,000, including the overseas Dominions, organised on democratic lines, though the latter are still in possession of the strategic keys to sea power. Two possible conclusions can be drawn from this. One is that the United States is once more going to be confronted, as it was indeed in 1917, with the choice of whether, with her population of 130,000,000 and immense |