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Page 34
In like manner, the United States, in estimating her need of military
preparation of whatever kind, is justified in considering, not merely
the utmost force which might be brought against her by a possible
enemy, under the political circumstances most favorable to the latter,
but the limitations imposed upon an opponent's action by well-known
conditions of a permanent nature. Our only rivals in potential
military strength are the great powers of Europe. These, however,
while they have interests in the western hemisphere,--to which a
certain solidarity is imparted by their instinctive and avowed
opposition to a policy to which the United States, by an inward
compulsion apparently irresistible, becomes more and more
committed,--have elsewhere yet wider and more onerous demands upon
their attention. Since 1884 Great Britain, France, and Germany have
each acquired colonial possessions, varying in extent from one million
to two and a half million square miles,--chiefly in Africa. This
means, as is generally understood, not merely the acquisition of so
much new territory, but the perpetuation of national rivalries and
suspicions, maintaining in full vigor, in this age, the traditions of
past animosities. It means uncertainties about boundaries--that most
fruitful source of disputes when running through unexplored
wildernesses--jealousy of influence over native occupants of the soil,
fear of encroachment, unperceived till too late, and so a constant, if
silent, strife to insure national preponderance in these newly opened
regions. The colonial expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries is being resumed under our eyes, bringing with it the same
train of ambitions and feelings that were exhibited then, though these
are qualified by the more orderly methods of modern days and by a
well-defined mutual apprehension,--the result of a universal
preparedness for war, the distinctive feature of our own time which
most guarantees peace.
All this reacts evidently upon Europe, the common mother-country of
these various foreign enterprises, in whose seas and lands must be
fought out any struggle springing from these remote causes, and upon
whose inhabitants chiefly must fall both the expense and the bloodshed
thence arising. To these distant burdens of disquietude--in the
assuming of which, though to an extent self-imposed, the present
writer recognizes the prevision of civilization, instinctive rather
than conscious, against the perils of the future--is to be added the
proximate and unavoidable anxiety dependent upon the conditions of
Turkey and its provinces, the logical outcome of centuries of Turkish
misrule. Deplorable as have been, and to some extent still are,
political conditions on the American continents, the New World, in the
matter of political distribution of territory and fixity of tenure, is
permanence itself, as compared with the stormy prospect confronting
the Old in its questions which will not down.
In these controversies, which range themselves under the broad heads
of colonial expansion and the Eastern question, all the larger powers
of Europe, the powers that maintain considerable armies or navies, or
both, are directly and deeply interested--except Spain. The latter
manifests no solicitude concerning the settlement of affairs in the
east of Europe, nor is she engaged in increasing her still
considerable colonial dominion. This preoccupation of the great
powers, being not factitious, but necessary,--a thing that cannot be
dismissed by an effort of the national will, because its existence
depends upon the nature of things,--is a legitimate element in the
military calculations of the United States. It cannot enter into her
diplomatic considerations, for it is her pride not to seek, from the
embarrassments of other states, advantages or concessions which she
cannot base upon the substantial justice of her demands. But, while
this is true, the United States has had in the past abundant
experience of disputes, in which, though she believed herself right,
even to the point of having a just _casus belli_, the other party has
not seemed to share the same conviction. These difficulties, chiefly,
though not solely, territorial in character, have been the natural
bequest of the colonial condition through which this hemisphere passed
on its way to its present political status. Her own view of right,
even when conceded in the end, has not approved itself at first to the
other party to the dispute. Fortunately these differences have been
mainly with Great Britain, the great and beneficent colonizer, a state
between which and ourselves a sympathy, deeper than both parties have
been ready always to admit, has continued to exist, because founded
upon common fundamental ideas of law and justice. Of this the happy
termination of the Venezuelan question is the most recent but not the
only instance.
It is sometimes said that Great Britain is the most unpopular state in
Europe. If this be so,--and many of her own people seem to accept the
fact of her political isolation, though with more or less of
regret,--is there nothing significant to us in that our attitude
towards her in the Venezuelan matter has not commanded the sympathy of
Europe, but rather the reverse? Our claim to enter, as of right, into
a dispute not originally our own, and concerning us only as one of the
American group of nations, has been rejected in no doubtful tones by
organs of public opinion which have no fondness for Great Britain.
Whether any foreign government has taken the same attitude is not
known,--probably there has been no official protest against the
apparent admission of a principle which binds nobody but the parties
to it. Do we ourselves realize that, happy as the issue of our
intervention has been, it may entail upon us greater responsibilities,
more serious action, than we have assumed before? that it amounts in
fact--if one may use a military metaphor--to occupying an advanced
position, the logical result very likely of other steps in the past,
but which nevertheless implies necessarily such organization of
strength as will enable us to hold it?
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