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[Illustration: _THE PRESIDENT IN THE SADDLE_
_Mr. Roosevelt’s afternoon ride from the White House to Chevy Chase,
across country and over Virginia fences_]
THE WORKS OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
IN FOURTEEN VOLUMES,
_Illustrated_
THE STRENUOUS LIFE
[Illustration]
EXECUTIVE EDITION
PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
PRESIDENT THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
WITH THE CENTURY CO., MESSRS. CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS, AND G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK
P. F. COLLIER & SON, PUBLISHERS
12
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT 1900
BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1900
BY THE CHURCHMAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1899
BY THE S. S. MCCLURE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1899, 1900, 1901
BY THE CENTURY COMPANY
* * * * *
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
... My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,—
* * * * *
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
—TENNYSON’S “ULYSSES.”
Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,
Dass ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss;
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muss.
Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,
Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
Solch’ ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
—GOETHE’S “FAUST.”
EXECUTIVE MANSION, ALBANY, N. Y.
_September, 1900._
CONTENTS
THE STRENUOUS LIFE 3
EXPANSION AND PEACE 23
LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE AMONG REFORMERS 37
FELLOW-FEELING AS A POLITICAL FACTOR 58
CIVIC HELPFULNESS 80
CHARACTER AND SUCCESS 98
THE EIGHTH AND NINTH COMMANDMENTS IN POLITICS 107
THE BEST AND THE GOOD 113
PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE 119
THE AMERICAN BOY 128
MILITARY PREPAREDNESS AND UNPREPAREDNESS 138
ADMIRAL DEWEY 156
GRANT 171
THE TWO AMERICAS 189
MANHOOD AND STATEHOOD 201
BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES 215
NATIONAL DUTIES 228
THE LABOR QUESTION 245
CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP 262
THE STRENUOUS LIFE
SPEECH BEFORE THE HAMILTON CLUB, CHICAGO, APRIL 10, 1899
In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of
the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who
pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the
American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,
but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of
labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes,
not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not
shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of
these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely
from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things,
is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that
what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his
sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among
you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first
consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they
strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of
Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making
America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine.
You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are
rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they
may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used
leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the
necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to
carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in
art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most
need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects
most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace.
We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never
wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those
virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In
this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the
present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.
A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he
or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom
thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work,
though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether
in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure,
he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of
freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation,
but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment,
he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he
surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to
do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very
satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits
those who follow it for serious work in the world.
In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men
and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when
the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk
difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how
to wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a
man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to
keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the
helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy
children. In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks
of “the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the
present day.” When such words can be truthfully written of a nation,
that nation is rotten to the heart’s core. When men fear work or fear
righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of
doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they
are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves
strong and brave and high-minded.
As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat. If, in 1861, the men who loved the Union had
believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have
saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds
of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and
treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of
many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared
the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our
armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering
simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we
would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to
stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in
the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln,
and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children
of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the
children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant
conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels
of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of
sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife
endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and
the mighty American Republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among
nations.
We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our
fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to
perform them! We can not, if we would, play the part of China, and
be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders,
taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling
commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of
toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for
the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question,
what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has
trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in
the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly
and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we
must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We can not
avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is
whether we shall meet them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being
brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could
decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or
enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once
in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now.
We can not avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba,
Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall
meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether
we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and
shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely
amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve.
If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that
we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution
simply renders it certain that we can not possibly solve it aright.
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the
over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues,
the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of
feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their
brains”—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake
its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate
to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work,
by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from
which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish
flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only
national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that
cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps
them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of
gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all
of national life, instead of realizing that, though an indispensable
element, it is, after all, but one of the many elements that go to
make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its
foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes
from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing
effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation
ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All
honor must be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to
the great captains of industry who have built our factories and our
railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand;
for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind. But our
debt is yet greater to the men whose highest type is to be found in
a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their
lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; they
toiled to win a competence for themselves and those dependent upon
them; but they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier
duties—duties to the nation and duties to the race.
We can not sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely
an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens
beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations
grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into
closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle
for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without
our own borders. We must build the Isthmian Canal, and we must grasp
the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding
the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.
So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international
honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila
and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of
duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage
anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than
idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their
fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course
of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched
islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in
and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to
carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited
nations are eager to undertake.
The work must be done; we can not escape our responsibility; and
if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the
work—glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great
tasks set modern civilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to
the importance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into
underestimating the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let
us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with
proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the
highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to
grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability
those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the
nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon
our strength and our resources.
Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one
act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are
merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. Let me illustrate
what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone
to war, we should have found the navy as absolutely unprepared as the
army. At that time our ships could not have encountered with success
the fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained
soldiers, no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black-powder
weapons, against well-drilled regulars armed with the highest type of
modern repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the attention of the
nation became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a
series of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a succession
of able and patriotic Secretaries, of both political parties, the
navy was gradually built up, until its material became equal to its
splendid personnel, with the result that in the summer of 1898 it
leaped to its proper place as one of the most brilliant and formidable
fighting navies in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to the
men controlling the navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor
to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the
ships in action, to the daring lieutenants who braved death in the
smaller craft, and to the heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that
the ships were so commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well engined,
as to ensure the best results. But let us also keep ever in mind that
all of this would not have availed if it had not been for the wisdom
of the men who during the preceding fifteen years had built up the
navy. Keep in mind the Secretaries of the Navy during those years;
keep in mind the Senators and Congressmen who by their votes gave the
money necessary to build and to armor the ships, to construct the great
guns, and to train the crews; remember also those who actually did
build the ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals and
captains who handled battleship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat on the high
seas, alone and in squadrons, developing the seamanship, the gunnery,
and the power of acting together, which their successors utilized so
gloriously at Manila and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the
converse, too. Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to those
who built up the navy, and, for the sake of the future of the country,
keep in mind those who opposed its building up. Read the “Congressional
Record.” Find out the Senators and Congressmen who opposed the grants
for building the new ships; who opposed the purchase of armor, without
which the ships were worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance
for the Navy Department, and strove to cut down the number of men
necessary to man our fleets. The men who did these things were one
and all working to bring disaster on the country. They have no share
in the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago. They have no cause
to feel proud of the valor of our sea-captains, of the renown of our
flag. Their motives may or may not have been good, but their acts were
heavily fraught with evil. They did ill for the national honor, and we
won in spite of their sinister opposition.
Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army has never
been built up as it should be built up. I shall not discuss with an
audience like this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy
millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liberties from the
existence of an army of one hundred thousand men, three-fourths of
whom will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast
fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man of good sense and stout
heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings
as the proposition implies, then we are unworthy of freedom in any
event. To no body of men in the United States is the country so much
indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular
army and navy. There is no body from which the country has less to
fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be
more anxious to upbuild.
Our army needs complete reorganization,—not merely enlarging,—and the
reorganization can only come as the result of legislation. A proper
general staff should be established, and the positions of ordnance,
commissary, and quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from
the line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to exercise
in large bodies. Never again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish
War, major-generals in command of divisions who had never before
commanded three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible to
relate, Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of the
lessons of the war. There were large bodies of men in both branches
who opposed the declaration of war, who opposed the ratification of
peace, who opposed the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed
the purchase of armor at a reasonable price for the battleships and
cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building of any new
fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the years to come, any disaster
should befall our arms, afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come
to the United States, remember that the blame will lie upon the men
whose names appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of
these great questions. On them will lie the burden of any loss of our
soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the
people of this country will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in
no unmistakable way, what these men have done. The blame will not rest
upon the untrained commander of untried troops, upon the civil officers
of a department the organization of which has been left utterly
inadequate, or upon the admiral with an insufficient number of ships;
but upon the public men who have so lamentably failed in forethought as
to refuse to remedy these evils long in advance, and upon the nation
that stands behind those public men.
So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility for the
blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood
of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so
long delayed the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by
their worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage people to
plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster for them—a war, too, in
which our own brave men who follow the flag most pay with their blood
for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in
peace.
The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation
must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if
she is not to stand merely as the China of the Western Hemisphere. Our
proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain
is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course
we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must
see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense
in our home administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive
for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation
and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative
where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative
where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our
own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part
in the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to his own
home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State;
for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing
to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within
its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in
the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits
its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the
destiny of mankind.
In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by most
difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in
the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some
stronger and more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too
foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the
solution. Personally, I am far too firm a believer in the greatness of
my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for one moment that
we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alternative.
The problems are different for the different islands. Porto Rico is
not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well,
primarily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment,
entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an
independent State or an integral portion of the mightiest of Republics.
But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must remain in the
island to ensure them, and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and
courage must be shown by our military and civil representatives in
keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage,
in protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to
the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The Philippines offer a
yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and native
Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are
utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit.
Others may in time become fit, but at present can only take part in
self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent.
We have driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be
replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for
good. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task
of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear
to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense
and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a
pretence of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who
cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to
excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.
Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to
leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to
decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines
condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these
United States.
England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to England,
for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at the
larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater
benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has
advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the
Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest
and finest part of national life, we will greatly benefit the people of
the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in
the great work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in
mind that we must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage,
of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped out. The
first and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy
of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish
anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in
dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the
foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be
remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable
merely by the fact that they are despicable.
When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is
acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then
we must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute
honesty and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the
islands be turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have
begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We
must send out there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness,
and not because of their partisan service, and these men must not
only administer impartial justice to the natives and serve their own
government with honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and
firmness, remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are
to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness
comes lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices.
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for
the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand
idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace,
if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of
their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder
and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of
strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold
righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and
brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all,
let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the
nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is
only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall
ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
EXPANSION AND PEACE
PUBLISHED IN THE “INDEPENDENT,” DECEMBER 21, 1899
It was the gentlest of our poets who wrote:
“Be bolde! Be bolde! and everywhere, Be bolde”;
Be not too bold! Yet better the excess
Than the defect; better the more than less.
Longfellow’s love of peace was profound; but he was a man, and a wise
man, and he knew that cowardice does not promote peace, and that even
the great evil of war may be a less evil than cringing to iniquity.
Captain Mahan, than whom there is not in the country a man whom we can
more appropriately designate by the fine and high phrase, “a Christian
gentleman,” and who is incapable of advocating wrong-doing of any kind,
national or individual, gives utterance to the feeling of the great
majority of manly and thoughtful men when he denounces the great danger
of indiscriminate advocacy of peace at any price, because “it may
lead men to tamper with iniquity, to compromise with unrighteousness,
soothing their conscience with the belief that war is so entirely
wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong. Witness Armenia
and witness Crete. War has been avoided; but what of the national
consciences that beheld such iniquity and withheld the hand?”
Peace is a great good; and doubly harmful, therefore, is the attitude
of those who advocate it in terms that would make it synonymous with
selfish and cowardly shrinking from warring against the existence of
evil. The wisest and most far-seeing champions of peace will ever
remember that, in the first place, to be good it must be righteous, for
unrighteous and cowardly peace may be worse than any war; and, in the
second place, that it can often be obtained only at the cost of war.
Let me take two illustrations:
The great blot upon European international morality in the closing
decade of this century has been not a war, but the infamous peace kept
by the joint action of the great powers, while Turkey inflicted the
last horrors of butchery, torture, and outrage upon the men, women,
and children of despairing Armenia. War was avoided; peace was kept;
but what a peace! Infinitely greater human misery was inflicted during
this peace than in the late wars of Germany with France, of Russia with
Turkey; and this misery fell, not on armed men, but upon defenceless
women and children, upon the gray-beard and the stripling no less than
upon the head of the family; and it came, not in the mere form of
death or imprisonment, but of tortures upon men, and, above all, upon
women, too horrible to relate—tortures of which it is too terrible
even to think. Moreover, no good resulted from the bloodshed and
misery. Often this is the case in a war, but often it is not the case.
The result of the last Turko-Russian war was an immense and permanent
increase of happiness for Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
These provinces became independent or passed under the dominion of
Austria, and the advantage that accrued to them because of this
expansion of the domain of civilization at the expense of barbarism
has been simply incalculable. This expansion produced peace, and put a
stop to the ceaseless, grinding, bloody tyranny that had desolated the
Balkans for so many centuries. There are many excellent people who have
praised Tolstoi’s fantastic religious doctrines, his fantastic advocacy
of peace. The same quality that makes the debauchee and the devotee
alternate in certain decadent families, the hysterical development
which leads to violent emotional reaction in a morbid nature from vice
to virtue, also leads to the creation of Tolstoi’s “Kreutzer Sonata”
on the one hand, and of his unhealthy peace-mysticism on the other. A
sane and healthy mind would be as incapable of the moral degradation of
the novel as of the decadent morality of the philosophy. If Tolstoi’s
countrymen had acted according to his moral theories they would now
be extinct, and savages would have taken their place. Unjust war is
a terrible sin. It does not nowadays in the aggregate cause anything
like the misery that is caused in the aggregate by unjust dealing
toward one’s neighbors in the commercial and social world; and to
condemn all war is just as logical as to condemn all business and
all social relations, as to condemn love and marriage because of the
frightful misery caused by brutal and unregulated passion. If Russia
had acted upon Tolstoi’s philosophy, all its people would long ago
have disappeared from the face of the earth, and the country would now
be occupied by wandering tribes of Tartar barbarians. The Armenian
massacres are simply illustrations on a small scale of what would
take place on the very largest scale if Tolstoi’s principles became
universal among civilized people. It is not necessary to point out
that the teaching which would produce such a condition of things is
fundamentally immoral.
Again, peace may come only through war. There are men in our country
who seemingly forget that at the outbreak of the Civil War the great
cry raised by the opponents of the war was the cry for peace. One of
the most amusing and most biting satires written by the friends of
union and liberty during the Civil War was called the “New Gospel of
Peace,” in derision of this attitude. The men in our own country who,
in the name of peace, have been encouraging Aguinaldo and his people
to shoot down our soldiers in the Philippines might profit not a
little if they would look back to the days of the bloody draft riots,
which were deliberately incited in the name of peace and free speech,
when the mob killed men and women in the streets and burned orphan
children in the asylums as a protest against the war. Four years of
bloody struggle with an armed foe, who was helped at every turn by the
self-styled advocates of peace, were needed in order to restore the
Union; but the result has been that the peace of this continent has
been effectually assured. Had the short-sighted advocates of peace for
the moment had their way, and secession become an actual fact, nothing
could have prevented a repetition in North America of the devastating
anarchic warfare that obtained for three quarters of a century in
South America after the yoke of Spain was thrown off. We escaped
generations of anarchy and bloodshed, because our fathers who upheld
Lincoln and followed Grant were men in every sense of the term, with
too much common sense to be misled by those who preached that war was
always wrong, and with a fund of stern virtue deep in their souls which
enabled them to do deeds from which men of over-soft natures would have
shrunk appalled.
Wars between civilized communities are very dreadful, and as nations
grow more and more civilized we have every reason, not merely to
hope, but to believe that they will grow rarer and rarer. Even with
civilized peoples, as was shown by our own experience in 1861, it
may be necessary at last to draw the sword rather than to submit to
wrong-doing. But a very marked feature in the world-history of the
present century has been the growing infrequency of wars between
great civilized nations. The Peace Conference at The Hague is but one
of the signs of this growth. I am among those who believe that much
was accomplished at that conference, and I am proud of the leading
position taken in the conference by our delegates. Incidentally I may
mention that the testimony is unanimous that they were able to take
this leading position chiefly because we had just emerged victorious
from our most righteous war with Spain. Scant attention is paid to the
weakling or the coward who babbles of peace; but due heed is given to
the strong man with the sword girt on thigh who preaches peace, not
from ignoble motives, not from fear or distrust of his own powers, but
from a deep sense of moral obligation.
The growth of peacefulness between nations, however, has been confined
strictly to those that are civilized. It can only come when both
parties to a possible quarrel feel the same spirit. With a barbarous
nation peace is the exceptional condition. On the border between
civilization and barbarism war is generally normal because it must be
under the conditions of barbarism. Whether the barbarian be the Red
Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the border
of British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the Siberian Cossack,
the result is the same. In the long run civilized man finds he can keep
the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian
will yield only to force, save in instances so exceptional that they
may be disregarded. Back of the force must come fair dealing, if the
peace is to be permanent. But without force fair dealing usually
amounts to nothing. In our history we have had more trouble from the
Indian tribes whom we pampered and petted than from those we wronged;
and this has been true in Siberia, Hindustan, and Africa.
Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other words,
every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law,
order, and righteousness. This has been the case in every instance of
expansion during the present century, whether the expanding power were
France or England, Russia or America. In every instance the expansion
has been of benefit, not so much to the power nominally benefited,
as to the whole world. In every instance the result proved that the
expanding power was doing a duty to civilization far greater and more
important than could have been done by any stationary power. Take the
case of France and Algiers. During the early decades of the present
century piracy of the most dreadful description was rife on the
Mediterranean, and thousands of civilized men were yearly dragged into
slavery by the Moorish pirates. A degrading peace was purchased by the
civilized powers by the payment of tribute. Our own country was one
among the tributary nations which thus paid blood-money to the Moslem
bandits of the sea. We fought occasional battles with them; and so, on
a larger scale, did the English. But peace did not follow, because the
country was not occupied. Our last payment was made in 1830, and the
reason it was the last was because in that year the French conquest of
Algiers began. Foolish sentimentalists, like those who wrote little
poems in favor of the Mahdists against the English, and who now write
little essays in favor of Aguinaldo against the Americans, celebrated
the Algerian freebooters as heroes who were striving for liberty
against the invading French. But the French continued to do their
work; France expanded over Algiers, and the result was that piracy on
the Mediterranean came to an end, and Algiers has thriven as never
before in its history. On an even larger scale the same thing is true
of England and the Soudan. The expansion of England throughout the
Nile valley has been an incalculable gain for civilization. Any one
who reads the writings of the Austrian priests and laymen who were
prisoners in the Soudan under the Mahdi will realize that when England
crushed him and conquered the Soudan she conferred a priceless boon
upon humanity and made the civilized world her debtor. Again, the same
thing is true of the Russian advance in Asia. As in the Soudan the
English conquest is followed by peace, and the endless massacres of the
Mahdi are stopped forever, so the Russian conquest of the khanates of
central Asia meant the cessation of the barbarous warfare under which
Asian civilization had steadily withered away since the days of Genghis
Khan, and the substitution in its place of the reign of peace and
order. All civilization has been the gainer by the Russian advance, as
it was the gainer by the advance of France in North Africa; as it has
been the gainer by the advance of England in both Asia and Africa, both
Canada and Australia. Above all, there has been the greatest possible
gain in peace. The rule of law and of order has succeeded to the rule
of barbarous and bloody violence. Until the great civilized nations
stepped in there was no chance for anything but such bloody violence.
So it has been in the history of our own country. Of course our whole
national history has been one of expansion. Under Washington and Adams
we expanded westward to the Mississippi; under Jefferson we expanded
across the continent to the mouth of the Columbia; under Monroe we
expanded into Florida; and then into Texas and California; and finally,
largely through the instrumentality of Seward, into Alaska; while under
every administration the process of expansion in the great plains
and the Rockies has continued with growing rapidity. While we had a
frontier the chief feature of frontier life was the endless war between
the settlers and the red men. Sometimes the immediate occasion for the
war was to be found in the conduct of the whites and sometimes in that
of the reds, but the ultimate cause was simply that we were in contact
with a country held by savages or half-savages.
Where we abut on Canada there is no danger of war, nor is there any
danger where we abut on the well-settled regions of Mexico. But
elsewhere war had to continue until we expanded over the country. Then
it was succeeded at once by a peace which has remained unbroken to
the present day. In North America, as elsewhere throughout the entire
world, the expansion of a civilized nation has invariably meant the
growth of the area in which peace is normal throughout the world.
The same will be true of the Philippines. If the men who have counseled
national degradation, national dishonor, by urging us to leave the
Philippines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control of those
islands, could have their way, we should merely turn them over to
rapine and bloodshed until some stronger, manlier power stepped in
to do the task we had shown ourselves fearful of performing. But, as
it is, this country will keep the islands and will establish therein
a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the
world’s surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness.
Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace.
With civilized powers there is but little danger of our getting into
war. In the Pacific, for instance, the great progressive, colonizing
nations are England and Germany. With England we have recently begun to
feel ties of kindness as well as of kinship, and with her our relations
are better than ever before; and so they ought to be with Germany.
Recently affairs in Samoa have been straightened out, although there we
suffered from the worst of all types of government, one in which three
powers had a joint responsibility (the type, by the way, which some
of the anti-imperialists actually advocated our introducing in the
Philippines, under the pretence of rendering them neutral). This was
accomplished very largely because the three nations set good-humoredly
to work to come to an agreement which would do justice to all. In the
preliminary negotiations the agents of America and Germany were Mr.
Tripp and Baron Sternburg. No difficulty can ever arise between Germany
and the United States which will not be settled with satisfaction to
both, if the negotiations are conducted by such representatives of
the two powers as these two men. What is necessary is to approach the
subject, not with a desire to get ahead of one another, but to do even
and exact justice, and to put into operation a scheme which will work,
while scrupulously conserving the honor and interest of all concerned.
Nations that expand and nations that do not expand may both ultimately
go down, but the one leaves heirs and a glorious memory, and the other
leaves neither. The Roman expanded, and he has left a memory which has
profoundly influenced the history of mankind, and he has further left
as the heirs of his body, and, above all, of his tongue and culture,
the so-called Latin peoples of Europe and America. Similarly to-day
it is the great expanding peoples who bequeath to the future ages the
great memories and material results of their achievements, and the
nations which shall have sprung from their loins, England standing as
the archetype and best exemplar of all such mighty nations. But the
peoples that do not expand leave, and can leave, nothing behind them.
It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace
to the world. The Arab wrecked the civilization of the Mediterranean
coasts, the Turk wrecked the civilization of southeastern Europe, and
the Tartar desolated from China to Russia and to Persia, setting back
the progress of the world for centuries, solely because the civilized
nations opposed to them had lost the great fighting qualities, and,
in becoming overpeaceful, had lost the power of keeping peace with
a strong hand. Their passing away marked the beginning of a period
of chaotic barbarian warfare. Those whose memories are not so short
as to have forgotten the defeat of the Greeks by the Turks, of the
Italians by the Abyssinians, and the feeble campaigns waged by Spain
against feeble Morocco, must realize that at the present moment the
Mediterranean coasts would be overrun either by the Turks or by
the Soudan Mahdists if these warlike barbarians had only to fear
those southern European powers which have lost the fighting edge.
Such a barbarian conquest would mean endless war; and the fact that
nowadays the reverse takes place, and that the barbarians recede
or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their
retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty
civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by
their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where
the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.
LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE AMONG REFORMERS
PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” JUNE, 1900
One of Miss Mary E. Wilkins’s delightful heroines remarks, in speaking
of certain would-be leaders of social reform in her village: “I don’t
know that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side.
Sometimes it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that separates
people.” This is true, and the philosophy it teaches applies quite as
much to those who would reform the politics of a large city, or, for
that matter, of the whole country, as to those who would reform the
society of a hamlet.
There is always danger of being misunderstood when one writes about
such a subject as this, because there are on each side unhealthy
extremists who like to take half of any statement and twist it into an
argument in favor of themselves or against their opponents. No single
sentence or two is sufficient to explain a man’s full meaning, any more
than in a sentence or two it would be possible to treat the question of
the necessity for, and the limitations of, proper party loyalty, with
the thoroughness and justice shown, for instance, by Mr. Lecky in his
recent queerly named volume, “The Map of Life.”