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Page 20
Meanwhile no moral obligation forbids developing our navy upon lines
and proportions adequate to the work it may be called upon to do.
Here, again, the crippling force is a public impression, which limits
our potential strength to the necessities of an imperfectly realized
situation. A navy "for defence only" is a popular catchword. When, if
ever, people recognize that we have three seaboards, that the
communication by water of one of them with the other two will depend
in a not remote future upon a strategic position hundreds of miles
distant from our nearest port,--the mouth of the Mississippi,--they
will see also that the word "defence," already too narrowly
understood, has its application at points far away from our own coast.
That the organization of military strength involves provocation to war
is a fallacy, which the experience of each succeeding year now
refutes. The immense armaments of Europe are onerous; but
nevertheless, by the mutual respect and caution they enforce, they
present a cheap alternative, certainly in misery, probably in money,
to the frequent devastating wars which preceded the era of general
military preparation. Our own impunity has resulted, not from our
weakness, but from the unimportance to our rivals of the points in
dispute, compared with their more immediate interests at home. With
the changes consequent upon the canal, this indifference will
diminish. We also shall be entangled in the affairs of the great
family of nations, and shall have to accept the attendant burdens.
Fortunately, as regards other states, we are an island power, and can
find our best precedents in the history of the people to whom the sea
has been a nursing mother.
POSSIBILITIES OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN REUNION.
_July, 1894._
[The following article was requested by the Editor of the "North
American Review," as one of a number, by several persons, dealing
with the question of a formal political connection, proposed by
Mr. Andrew Carnegie, between the United States and the British
Empire, for the advancement of the general interests of the
English-speaking peoples. The projects advocated by previous
writers embraced: 1, a federate union; 2, a merely naval union or
alliance; or, 3, a defensive alliance of a kind frequent in
political history.]
The words "kinship" and "alliance" express two radically distinct
ideas, and rest, for both the privileges and the obligations involved
in them, upon foundations essentially different. The former represents
a natural relation, the latter one purely conventional,--even though
it may result from the feelings, the mutual interests, and the sense
of incumbent duty attendant upon the other. In its very etymology,
accordingly, is found implied that sense of constraint, of an
artificial bond, that may prove a source, not only of strength, but of
irksomeness as well. Its analogue in our social conditions is the
marriage tie,--the strongest, doubtless, of all bonds when it realizes
in the particular case the supreme affection of which our human nature
is capable; but likewise, as daily experience shows, the most fretting
when, through original mistake or unworthy motive, love fails, and
obligation alone remains.
Personally, I am happy to believe that the gradual but, as I think,
unmistakable growth of mutual kindly feelings between Great Britain
and the United States during these latter years--and of which the
recent articles of Sir George Clarke and Mr. Arthur Silva White in the
"North American Review" are pleasant indications--is a sure evidence
that a common tongue and common descent are making themselves felt,
and are breaking down the barriers of estrangement which have
separated too long men of the same blood. There is seen here the
working of kinship,--a wholly normal result of a common origin, the
natural affection of children of the same descent, who have quarrelled
and have been alienated with the proverbial bitterness of civil
strife, but who all along have realized--or at the least have been
dimly conscious--that such a state of things is wrong and harmful. As
a matter of sentiment only, this reviving affection well might fix the
serious attention of those who watch the growth of world questions,
recognizing how far imagination and sympathy rule the world; but when,
besides the powerful sentimental impulse, it is remembered that
beneath considerable differences of political form there lie a common
inherited political tradition and habit of thought, that the moral
forces which govern and shape political development are the same in
either people, the possibility of a gradual approach to concerted
action becomes increasingly striking. Of all the elements of the
civilization that has spread over Europe and America, none is so
potential for good as that singular combination of two essential but
opposing factors--of individual freedom with subjection to law--which
finds its most vigorous working in Great Britain and the United
States, its only exponents in which an approach to a due balance has
been effected. Like other peoples, we also sway between the two,
inclining now to one side, now to the other; but the departure from
the normal in either direction is never very great.
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