"Not only are the physical difficulties which would hamper an invasion practically insuperable, but the reception enemies would get, if any of them landed, would be wholly without parallel in the world's history.
"If our liberties really were threatened, every man, and very nearly every woman, in our vast population would rise to their defense as never any people yet has risen to any national defense. Americans, young and old, en masse, would sweep to the protection of what they know, and what the world knows, would be the cause of right and human liberty.
"I, myself, should wish to be invited to advance and meet invading forces if they came. I would approach them without any weapons on my person. I would not shoot at them. I would make a speech to them.
"'Gentlemen,' I would say, 'here's the chance of your life to win life's chief prize. Now you are peasant soldiers. You have the opportunity to become citizen kings. We are all kings here. Here the least of you can take a rank much higher than that of any General in your army. He can become a sovereign in a republic.'
"I think they would hurrah for me, not harm me, after they had heard my speech.
"Striving for peace, we shall become so powerful that if war comes we shall be invincible. Peace, not war, makes riches; the rich nation is the powerful nation.
"Perhaps I was as much a peace man in my youth as I am now, but when I was asked, during the civil war, to organize a corps of telegraph operators and railroad conductors and engineers and take them to Washington, I considered it the greatest of all privileges to obey the order.
"I was the last man to get on the last train leaving Burkes Station, after Bull Run, and, now, if the country ever should be invaded, I would be, I hope, one of the first to rush to meet the enemy--but I think my haste would be to convert, not to kill, him.
"The man who has done well in business, however, learns to abhor all waste, and I must admit that it does pain me to see hundreds of millions of our dollars spent on battleships which will but rust away, and thousands of our able men vegetating on them or in an army.
"The men who urge this vast waste of our money and men mean well, no doubt, but they do not know the nation of which they have the good fortune to be citizens--they do not realize how very potent a force we have become in the wide world, nor the fact that one of the great reasons why we have become a force lies in the circumstance that our national development has not been hampered by the vast expense of militarism."