IN a certain colored regiment there was a chaplain who was habitually
called by the negroes, with their usual gift at lucky misnomers, “Mr.
Chapman.” He was very fond of risky adventures, and one of the negroes
once said: “Woffor Mas’ Chapman made preacher fo’? He’s de fightin’est
mos’ Yankee I ebber see in all my days!” It is impossible not to read
this in reading what is written by these friends of peace, who are
constantly using the olive branch for a war club and hammering away
at those who think differently. The excellent Mr. Angell, in the last
number of “Our Dark Friends,” announces in one column that the object
of his paper is “the humane education of the millions,” and in another
column that it is to be wished “that England had not only Venezuela,
but every other Spanish-speaking colony on the face of the earth.” In
this manner, more prosaically, do Mr. Edward Atkinson and Mr. Edward D.
Mead hold it up as the highest desideratum for every part of Spanish
and Portuguese America to pass into English hands. Grant the force of
all their arguments, can this be regarded as the gospel of serenity and
brotherly love? It rather recalls Heine’s glowing description of one of
his early teachers, one Schramm, who had written a book on Universal
Peace, and in whose classes the boys pommelled each other with especial
vigor.
If jingoism there be on earth, where are its headquarters, its normal
school, its university extension system? Where, pray, but in the
example of England? No one who has watched the course of things at
Washington can help seeing the influence of that vast object-lesson.
Seeley’s book, “The Expansion of England,” is of itself enough to
demoralize a whole generation of Congressmen. It is the trophies of
Great Britain which will not allow Lodge and Roosevelt to sleep.
Logically, they have the right of it. If it be a great and beneficent
thing for England to annex, by hook or crook, every desirable harbor
or island on the globe; to secure Gibraltar by a trick, India by a
lucky disobedience of orders, Egypt by a temporary occupation of which
the other end never arrives,—why not follow the example? This impulse
lay behind the whole Hawaiian negotiation; it asserts itself in all
the Venezuela interference, in all the Cuban imbroglio. Moreover, it
is absolutely consistent and defensible, if England is, as we are
constantly assured, the great, beneficent, and civilizing power on the
earth. If so, let us also be beneficent; let us proceed to civilize;
let us, too, say, especially to all Spanish-speaking peoples, “Sois mon
frère, ou je te tue!”
If there ever was a Church Militant, surely England is the Nation
Militant. While we debate a gunboat, she equips a fleet; while we
introduce a bill for an earth-work, and refer it to a committee, she
forwards ten additional guns to Puget Sound. “Her march is o’er the
mountain wave,” as Campbell long since boasted; and yet, whenever
the youngest statesman asks why we should not be allowed to take a
faltering step after her, he is treated as if he had violated the
traditions of the human race and had indeed brought death into the
world and all our woe. Let us at heart be consistent. To me, I confess,
the old tradition of “an unarmed nation”—about which that good soldier,
Gen. F. A. Walker, once made so fine an address—still seems the better
thing. But the unarmed nation is the condemnation of England; if
defencelessness is right, then England is all wrong, and we should say
so. We can by no possible combination be English and pacific at the
same time.
Above all, it seems to me an absolute abandonment of the whole
principle of republican institutions to say that they are for one
nation alone, and for only those who speak one language. If deserving
means anything, it means that sooner or later all will grow up to
it. Nobody doubts that the Romans governed well and were the best
road-builders on this planet; but all now admit that it helped human
progress when they took themselves out of England and left those
warring tribes to work themselves out of their dark condition into
such self-government as they now possess. There was a time on this
continent when Mexico was such a scene of chaos that the very word
“to Mexicanize” carried a meaning of disorder. Yet what State of the
Union has shown more definite and encouraging progress than has been
accomplished in Mexico within the last ten years? What Mexico is,
every Spanish-American or Portuguese-American state may yet be, only
give it time and a fair chance. If we believe that the principle of
self-government is unavailable for those who speak Spanish, we might as
well have allowed Maximilian to set up his little empire undisturbed.
No one ever doubted that Louis Napoleon knew how to build good roads
and to shoot straight; and perhaps he might have taught the same arts
to his representative. Whatever injury we may before have done to
Mexico, we repaid it liberally when we said to Europe, “Hands off,”
and secured to that Spanish-American state its splendid career of
self-development out of chaos. What Mexico has done the states of South
America may yet imitate.