The increasingly strenuous nature of international competition and the constantly higher standards of international economic, technical, and political efficiency prescribe a constantly improving domestic political and economic organization.  The geographical isolation which affords the United States its military security against foreign attack should not blind Americans to the merely comparative nature of their isolation.  The growth of modern sea power and the vast sweep of modern national political interests have at once diminished their security, and multiplied the possible sources of contact between American and European interests.  No matter how peaceably the United States is inclined, and no matter how advantageously it is situated, the American nation is none the less constantly threatened by political warfare, and constantly engaged in industrial warfare.  The American people can no more afford than can a European people to neglect any necessary kind or source of efficiency.  Sooner than ever before in the history of the world do a nation’s sins and deficiencies find it out.  Under modern conditions a country which takes its responsibilities lightly, and will not submit to the discipline necessary to political efficiency, does not gradually decline, as Spain did in the seventeenth century.  It usually goes down with a crash, as France did in 1870, or as Russia has just done.  The effect of diminishing economic efficiency is not as suddenly and dramatically exhibited; but it is no less inevitable and no less severe.  And the service which the very intensity of modern international competition renders to a living nation arises precisely from the searching character of the tests to which it subjects the several national organizations.  Austria-Hungary has been forced to assume a secondary position in Europe, because the want of national cohesion and vitality deprived her political advance of all momentum.  Russia has suddenly discovered that a corrupt bureaucracy is incapable of a national organization as efficient as modern military and political competition requires.  It was desirable in the interest of the Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Russians, that these weaknesses should be exposed; and if the Christian states of the West ever become so organized that their weaknesses are concealed until their consequences become irremediable, Western civilization itself will be on the road to decline.  The Atlantic Ocean will, in the long run, fail to offer the United States any security from the application of the same searching standards.  Its democratic institutions must be justified, not merely by the prosperity which they bestow upon its own citizens, but by its ability to meet the standards of efficiency imposed by other nations.  Its standing as a nation is determined precisely by its ability to conquer and to hold a dignified and important place in the society of nations.