"The purpose of such an alliance? It is not too much to construe it into
the first step toward a world-war--a war of reprisal and conquest beside
which the other great wars of the world would seem trivial. For the fact
has at last come home to the nations of the world that ultimately the
English-speaking peoples will dominate it--dominate it, because they are
the practical peoples. They have given to the world all its great
practical inventions--the railroad, the steamship, electricity, the
telegraph and cable--all of them; they are the great civilizing forces,
rounding the world up to new moral understanding, for what England has
done in Africa and India we have done in a smaller way in the
Philippines and Cuba and Porto Rico; they are the great commercial
peoples, slowly but surely winning the market-places of the earth;
wherever the English or the American flag is planted there the English
tongue is being spoken, and there the peoples are being taught the
sanity of right living and square dealing.

"It requires no great effort of the imagination, Mr. Grimm, to foresee
that day when the traditional power of Paris, and Berlin, and St.
Petersburg, and Madrid will be honey-combed by the steady encroachment
of our methods. This alliance would indicate that already that day has
been foreseen; that there is now a resentment which is about to find
expression in one great, desperate struggle for world supremacy. A few
hundred years ago Italy--or Rome--was stripped of her power; only
recently the United States dispelled the illusion that Spain was
anything but a shell; and France--! One can't help but wonder if the
power she boasts is not principally on paper. But if their forces are
combined? Do you see? It would be an enormous power to reckon with, with
a hundred bases of supplies right at our doors."

He rose suddenly and walked over to the window, where he stood for a