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Page 50
The Isthmus, with all that depends upon it,--its canal and its
approaches on either hand,--will link the eastern side of the American
continent to the western as no network of land communications ever
can. In it the United States has asserted a special interest. In the
present she can maintain her claim, and in the future perform her
duty, only by the creation of that sea power upon which predominance
in the Caribbean must ever depend. In short, as the internal
jealousies of Europe, and the purely democratic institution of the
_lev�e en masse_--the general enforcement of military training--have
prepared the way for great national armies, whose mission seems yet
obscure, so the gradual broadening and tightening hold upon the
sentiment of American democracy of that conviction loosely
characterized as the Monroe doctrine finds its logical and inevitable
outcome in a great sea power, the correlative, in connection with that
of Great Britain, of those armies which continue to flourish under the
most popular institutions, despite the wails of economists and the
lamentations of those who wish peace without paying the one price
which alone has ever insured peace,--readiness for war.
Thus it was, while readiness for war lasted, that the Teuton was held
back until he became civilized, humanized, after the standard of that
age; till the root of the matter was in him, sure to bear fruit in due
season. He was held back by organized armed force--by armies. Will it
be said that that was in a past barbaric age? Barbarism, however, is
not in more or less material prosperity, or even political
development, but in the inner man, in the spiritual ideal; and the
material, which comes first and has in itself no salt of life to save
from corruption, must be controlled by other material forces, until
the spiritual can find room and time to germinate. We need not fear
but that that which appeals to the senses in our civilization will be
appropriated, even though it be necessary to destroy us, if disarmed,
in order to obtain it. Our own civilization less its spiritual element
is barbarism; and barbarism will be the civilization of those who
assimilate its material progress without imbibing the indwelling
spirit.
Let us worship peace, indeed, as the goal at which humanity must hope
to arrive; but let us not fancy that peace is to be had as a boy
wrenches an unripe fruit from a tree. Nor will peace be reached by
ignoring the conditions that confront us, or by exaggerating the
charms of quiet, of prosperity, of ease, and by contrasting these
exclusively with the alarms and horrors of war. Merely utilitarian
arguments have never convinced nor converted mankind, and they never
will; for mankind knows that there is something better. Its homage
will never be commanded by peace, presented as the tutelary deity of
the stock-market.
Nothing is more ominous for the future of our race than that tendency,
vociferous at present, which refuses to recognize in the profession of
arms, in war, that something which inspired Wordsworth's "Happy
Warrior," which soothed the dying hours of Henry Lawrence, who framed
the ideals of his career on the poet's conception, and so nobly
illustrated it in his self-sacrifice; that something which has made
the soldier to all ages the type of heroism and of self-denial. When
the religion of Christ, of Him who was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
seeks to raise before its followers the image of self-control, and of
resistance to evil, it is the soldier whom it presents. He Himself, if
by office King of Peace, is, first of all, in the essence of His
Being, King of Righteousness, without which true peace cannot be.
Conflict is the condition of all life, material and spiritual; and it
is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual life goes for its
most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations. Whatever else the
twentieth century may bring us, it will not, from anything now current
in the thought of the nineteenth, receive a nobler ideal.
[Illustration: THE GULF OF MEXICO AND THE CARIBBEAN SEA]
THE STRATEGIC FEATURES OF THE GULF OF MEXICO AND THE CARIBBEAN SEA.
_June, 1897._
The importance, absolute and relative, of portions of the earth's
surface, and their consequent interest to mankind, vary from time to
time. The Mediterranean was for many ages the centre round which
gathered all the influences and developments of those earlier
civilizations from which our own, mediately or immediately, derives.
During the chaotic period of struggle that intervened between their
fall and the dawn of our modern conditions, the Inland Sea, through
its hold upon the traditions and culture of antiquity, still retained
a general ascendency, although at length its political predominance
was challenged, and finally overcome, by the younger, more virile, and
more warlike nationalities that had been forming gradually beyond the
Alps, and on the shores of the Atlantic and Northern oceans. It was,
until the close of the Middle Ages, the one route by which the East
and the West maintained commercial relations; for, although the trade
eastward from the Levant was by long and painful land journeys, over
mountain range and desert plain, water communication, in part and up
to that point, was afforded by the Mediterranean, and by it alone.
With the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope this
advantage departed, while at the same instant the discovery of a New
World opened out to the Old new elements of luxury and a new sphere of
ambition. Then the Mediterranean, thrown upon its own productive
resources alone, swayed in the East by the hopeless barbarism of the
Turk, in the West by the decadent despotism of Spain, and, between the
two, divided among a number of petty states, incapable of united and
consequently of potent action, sank into a factor of relatively small
consequence to the onward progress of the world. During the wars of
the French Revolution, when the life of Great Britain, and
consequently the issue of the strife, depended upon the vigor of
British commerce, British merchant shipping was nearly driven from
that sea; and but two per cent of a trade that was increasing mightily
all the time was thence derived. How the Suez Canal and the growth of
the Eastern Question, in its modern form, have changed all that, it is
needless to say. Yet, through all the period of relative
insignificance, the relations of the Mediterranean to the East and to
the West, in the broad sense of those expressions, preserved to it a
political importance to the world at large which rendered it
continuously a scene of great political ambitions and military
enterprise. Since Great Britain first actively intervened in those
waters, two centuries ago, she at no time has surrendered willingly
her pretensions to be a leading Mediterranean Power, although her
possessions there are of purely military, or rather naval, value.
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