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Page 4
It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate, in estimating our needs of
military preparation, to take into account the remoteness of the chief
naval and military nations from our shores, and the consequent
difficulty of maintaining operations at such a distance. It is equally
proper, in framing our policy, to consider the jealousies of the
European family of states, and their consequent unwillingness to incur
the enmity of a people so strong as ourselves; their dread of our
revenge in the future, as well as their inability to detach more than a
certain part of their forces to our shores without losing much of their
own weight in the councils of Europe. In truth, a careful determination
of the force that Great Britain or France could probably spare for
operations against our coasts, if the latter were suitably defended,
without weakening their European position or unduly exposing their
colonies and commerce, is the starting-point from which to calculate
the strength of our own navy. If the latter be superior to the force
that thus can be sent against it, and the coast be so defended as to
leave the navy free to strike where it will, we can maintain our
rights; not merely the rights which international law concedes, and
which the moral sense of nations now supports, but also those equally
real rights which, though not conferred by law, depend upon a clear
preponderance of interest, upon obviously necessary policy, upon
self-preservation, either total or partial. Were we so situated now in
respect of military strength, we could secure our perfectly just claim
as to the seal fisheries; not by seizing foreign ships on the open sea,
but by the evident fact that, our cities being protected from maritime
attack, our position and superior population lay open the Canadian
Pacific, as well as the frontier of the Dominion, to do with as we
please. Diplomats do not flourish such disagreeable truths in each
other's faces; they look for a _modus vivendi_, and find it.
While, therefore, the advantages of our own position in the western
hemisphere, and the disadvantages under which the operations of a
European state would labor, are undeniable and just elements in the
calculations of the statesman, it is folly to look upon them as
sufficient alone for our security. Much more needs to be cast into the
scale that it may incline in favor of our strength. They are mere
defensive factors, and partial at that. Though distant, our shores can
be reached; being defenceless, they can detain but a short time a force
sent against them. With a probability of three months' peace in Europe,
no maritime power would fear to support its demands by a number of
ships with which it would be loath indeed to part for a year.
Yet, were our sea frontier as strong as it now is weak, passive
self-defence, whether in trade or war, would be but a poor policy, so
long as this world continues to be one of struggle and vicissitude. All
around us now is strife; "the struggle of life," "the race of life,"
are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we
stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation;
our own no less than others. What is our protective system but an
organized warfare? In carrying it on, it is true, we have only to use
certain procedures which all states now concede to be a legal exercise
of the national power, even though injurious to themselves. It is
lawful, they say, to do what we will with our own. Are our people,
however, so unaggressive that they are likely not to want their own way
in matters where their interests turn on points of disputed right, or
so little sensitive as to submit quietly to encroachment by others, in
quarters where they long have considered their own influence should
prevail?
Our self-imposed isolation in the matter of markets, and the decline of
our shipping interest in the last thirty years, have coincided
singularly with an actual remoteness of this continent from the life of
the rest of the world. The writer has before him a map of the North and
South Atlantic oceans, showing the direction of the principal trade
routes and the proportion of tonnage passing over each; and it is
curious to note what deserted regions, comparatively, are the Gulf of
Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the adjoining countries and islands. A
broad band stretches from our northern Atlantic coast to the English
Channel; another as broad from the British Islands to the East, through
the Mediterranean and Red Sea, overflowing the borders of the latter in
order to express the volume of trade. Around either cape--Good Hope and
Horn--pass strips of about one-fourth this width, joining near the
equator, midway between Africa and South America. From the West Indies
issues a thread, indicating the present commerce of Great Britain with
a region which once, in the Napoleonic wars, embraced one-fourth of the
whole trade of the Empire. The significance is unmistakable: Europe has
now little mercantile interest in the Caribbean Sea.
When the Isthmus is pierced, this isolation will pass away, and with it
the indifference of foreign nations. From wheresoever they come and
whithersoever they afterward go, all ships that use the canal will pass
through the Caribbean. Whatever the effect produced upon the prosperity
of the adjacent continent and islands by the thousand wants attendant
upon maritime activity, around such a focus of trade will centre large
commercial and political interests. To protect and develop its own,
each nation will seek points of support and means of influence in a
quarter where the United States always has been jealously sensitive to
the intrusion of European powers. The precise value of the Monroe
doctrine is understood very loosely by most Americans, but the effect
of the familiar phrase has been to develop a national sensitiveness,
which is a more frequent cause of war than material interests; and over
disputes caused by such feelings there will preside none of the calming
influence due to the moral authority of international law, with its
recognized principles, for the points in dispute will be of policy, of
interest, not of conceded right. Already France and Great Britain are
giving to ports held by them a degree of artificial strength uncalled
for by their present importance. They look to the near future. Among
the islands and on the mainland there are many positions of great
importance, held now by weak or unstable states. Is the United States
willing to see them sold to a powerful rival? But what right will she
invoke against the transfer? She can allege but one,--that of her
reasonable policy supported by her might.
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