National Protection

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Cause and Measure of Preparedness ARTICLE III. AN ALGEBRAIC FORMULA FOR PREPAREDNEES, - 100,000,000 Citizensf Billions of Dollars]X=Security. (Baltimore American, February 1, 1916) The simplicity of the underlying principles of 'preparedness is almost unbelievable. The United States is fabulously rich; it...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Cause and Measure of Preparedness ARTICLE III. AN ALGEBRAIC FORMULA FOR PREPAREDNEES, - 100,000,000 Citizensf Billions of Dollars]X=Security. (Baltimore American, February 1, 1916) The simplicity of the underlying principles of 'preparedness is almost unbelievable. The United States is fabulously rich; it desires, undisturbed, to enjoy the billion dollars a year it gets from the sale of cotton, and to continue the annual production of half a billion dollars' worth of poultry products. There is no farmer in Maryland, Democrat or Republican, who leaves even his chicken coop unguarded. The number of his padlocks and the bore of his shot gun are based upon the number of chickens he possesses and the number and activity of those of his neighbors who have a congenital fondness for poultry. His problem of preparedness is simple. Our National problem of preparedness is equally so. We enjoy the blessings of liberty because we possess domestic tranquility, and above all, we require security, ?security at home and abroad. The President reiterated our policy Saturday in Cleveland. America, he said, has not only to assert her rights to her own life, within her own borders, but she has to assert the right of equal and just treatment of her citizens wherever they go. And she has something more than that to insist upon, because she has made up her mind long ago that she is going to stand, so far as this whole Western Hemisphere is concerned, for the right of peoples to choose their own policies without foreign influence or interference. So she has a gigantic task which she cannot shirk.'' What must be the measure of our preparedness for this gigantic task? Our population is 100,000,000; our wealth, incomprehensible billions; what should be the measure of our prep..