"I have always said that if at any time any country was foolish enough to attempt invasion the best possible plan would be to make their landing as easy as possible, point out to them the best possible roads, and allow them to go as far as they desired to go inland. Then warn them to look out, and turn a million of our 16,000,000 of militia loose upon them. Getting in would be easy, but how to get out would result in surrender.
"There is no other country in the world so well equipped to repel invasion or make it so hot for an enemy should he land as to make him exceedingly sorry he ever tried it."
The foregoing statements of Mr. Carnegie contain in a nutshell the whole pith and gist of the present anti-armament peace advocacy, backed by the ten-million-dollar Carnegie foundation, representing an income of half a million dollars a year.
Now, if it happens to be a fact that these views of Mr. Carnegie and his coterie of peace advocates are wrong, and if we need to take immediate and radical measures for our national defense, then whenever the Carnegie advocacy prevents a battery of guns being built, the resultant injury to the country is as great as though a battery of our guns were to be destroyed, or as though a battery of guns were made for a possible enemy.
Truly, as Mr. Carnegie states, we are friendly to other nations, and we do not want any of their territory, but I do not agree with him that we have nothing which they might want, for we are both very rich and very defenseless, and the history of nations has shown that always the rich and the defenseless sooner or later become the prey of the poor and the powerful.
One after another of the surrounding nations will likely be drawn into the war before it is over. After the present belligerents have settled their scores with the sword, there will be other scores to be settled between the victors and the neutral nations. Differences between the warring and the neutral powers—differences which, in time of peace, might produce very strained relations or precipitate war—may now be lightly passed over as mere discourtesies. But, after the war, some of the acts of the neutrals that at present seem quite insignificant may be magnified to advantage as casus belli.
It is my opinion that, whichever side wins, the United States will likely have to fight the winner within a short time after the war is over, for neither the Germans nor the Allies, in the heat of passion that now dominates them, will be in a mood to forgive some of the things that we may feel compelled to do in the maintenance of our neutrality. In short, the things that we may be led to do to avoid being embroiled in the present war may serve to embroil us with the victors, unless the war should end in a draw.
Mr. Carnegie thinks it would be quite a difficult undertaking for a foreign nation to land troops enough on our shores successfully to contend with our people. Our expert army and navy officers, who have been educated at government expense, and who are supposed to know about such matters, tell us that it would be impossible for us to mobilize and bring to the front more than 30,000 of our standing Army during the first month; and that it would be impossible to mobilize and get our militia into shape to resist an army of 100,000 of the well-trained and well-armed troops of one of the Great Powers, inside of a year and a half.
Also, our naval and military experts tell us that it would require not only months, but years, to get our Navy into such efficient fighting trim as to be able to resist the navy of any one of the leading Great Powers of the world. They tell us that we are so short of ammunition that we might easily exhaust the present supply in the first four weeks of the war, and possibly in the first few days of the war.