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The world-struggle, we all feel, has shifted to another battlefield, and the future in every realm of human activity rests on the mastery of ideas. In that intellectual conflict, the primary school rooms are the trenches on the first line of defence; the college and university lecture halls stand out as the strategic heights from which the heavy artillery of ideas smashes the way to victory.

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope.

Unless all signs fail, however, or I fail to interpret them, the old America, the America obedient to the traditions of the founders of the republic, is passing away, and a new America, an America standing armed, alert and exigent in the arena of the world-struggle, is taking its place.

But mind you, I've the best reasons for making it. We are entering the last phase of a world-struggle for financial supremacy. This country is to be the real centre of modern power. Out in that harbour lie at anchor ships that fly the flags of every nation, but they are all carrying our goods to the ends of the earth.

Swift as it was unseen, it ran from mind to mind, infecting all with a horror of fear and loathing. "He's swearing at him!" cried the White Hat, aghast. "B shame!" shouted another. "Tryin' to rattle the lad!" And a howl of indignation went up to the unheeding heavens. To Silver it was no longer a race: it was the world-struggle, old as time Right against Wrong, Light against Dark.

With the single exception of the Louisiana transaction, Jefferson's diplomatic administration is a story of European intrigue and imposition upon an impotent and helpless neutral. American commercial rights were lost sight of in the world-struggle between Napoleon and his enemies.

Hence, "we must face in ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are strong with the strength that comes from struggle with poverty and hardship, and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets in the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and for racial readjustment."

We are not justified in holding that the inevitable is morally ordained, much less that, because the higher races happen to be on the winning side in the world-struggle, might can ever constitute right.

Literally hundreds of German war books echo that cry, and, above all else, it is the hope of attaining this aim which has aroused the bitterest war fury in the entire German nation man, woman and child. Reduced to first principles, this difference of geographical position and the varying advantages arising therefrom are the prime causes if not the cause of the present world-struggle.

It made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" in the end may not prove to be the Chinese! Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that now threaten us.