I
In a speech at Huntsville, Alabama, President McKinley said:
“We are not a military people. We are not dedicated to arms. We love
peace, and the United States never goes to war except for peace, and
only where it can have it in no other way. We have never gone to war
for conquest, for exploitation or for territory, but always for liberty
and humanity, and in our recent war with Spain the people of the whole
United States as one man marched with the flag for the honor of the
nation, to relieve the oppressed people in Cuba.”
The American people are a singularly “cantankerous” people. True we are
not “military,” but that was not what the president meant to affirm;
he meant that we are not “warlike,” which is a very different thing.
The Germans are military, the North American Indians are warlike. To be
warlike is to be fond of war; to be military is to cultivate the arts
and sciences of war, to make the arts of peace subservient to them, to
maintain a powerful standing army, with armaments of high efficiency.
A people may be both warlike and military, or it may be either and not
the other. The distinction was evidently not in the president’s mind,
for he said that we love peace, that we go to war only to assure it,
and so forth. What are the facts?
There have been four generations of politically independent Americans.
Each of the four fought a war of magnitude, not counting the small
affairs and the “continuous performance” against the Indians. There
were the war of 1812 against Great Britain, the war against Mexico, the
war among ourselves, the war against Spain. We may say that all these
were fought to assure peace, and that is true—peace on our terms. No
war is undertaken for any other purpose. It was for that that Alexander
invaded Asia and Hannibal Italy. It was for that that the Turks laid
siege to Vienna. It was for that that Napoleon overran Europe.