America should have a coherent policy of action toward foreign powers, and this should primarily be based on the determination never to give offense when it can be avoided, always to treat other nations justly and courteously, and, as long as present conditions exist, to be prepared to defend our own rights ourselves. No other nation will defend them for us. No paper guarantee or treaty will be worth the paper on which it is written if it becomes to the interest of some other power to violate it, unless we have strength, and courage and ability to use that strength, back of the treaty. Every public man, every writer who speaks with wanton offensiveness of a foreign power or of a foreign people, whether he attacks England or France or Germany, whether he assails the Russians or the Japanese, is doing an injury to the whole American body politic. We have plenty of shortcomings at home to correct before we start out to criticise the shortcomings of others. Now and then it becomes imperatively necessary in the interests of humanity, or in our own vital interest, to act in a manner which will cause offense to some other power. This is a lamentable necessity; but when the necessity arises we must meet it and act as we are honorably bound to act, no matter what offense is given. We must always weigh well our duties in such a case, and consider the rights of others as well as our own rights, in the interest of the world at large. If after such consideration it is evident that we are bound to act along a certain line of policy, then it is mere weakness to refrain from doing so because offense is thereby given. But we must never act wantonly or brutally, or without regard to the essentials of genuine morality—a morality considering our interests as well as the interests of others, and considering the interests of future generations as well as of the present generation. We must so conduct ourselves that every big nation and every little nation that behaves itself shall never have to think of us with fear, and shall have confidence not only in our justice but in our courtesy. Submission to wrong-doing on our part would be mere weakness and would invite and insure disaster. We must not submit to wrong done to our honor or to our vital national interests. But we must be scrupulously careful always to speak with courtesy and self-restraint to others, always to act decently to others, and to give no nation any justification for believing that it has anything to fear from us as long as it behaves with decency and uprightness.
Above all, let us avoid the policy of peace with insult, the policy of unpreparedness to defend our rights, with inability to restrain our representatives from doing wrong to or publicly speaking ill of others. The worst policy for the United States is to combine the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.
We in this country have of course come lamentably short of our ideals. Nevertheless, in some ways our ideals have been high, and at times we have measurably realized them. From the beginning we have recognized what is taught in the words of Washington, and again in the great crisis of our national life in the words of Lincoln, that in the past free peoples have generally split and sunk on that great rock of difficulty caused by the fact that a government which recognizes the liberties of the people is not usually strong enough to preserve the liberties of the people against outside aggression. Washington and Lincoln believed that ours was a strong people and therefore fit for a strong government. They believed that it was only weak peoples that had to fear strong governments, and that to us it was given to combine freedom and efficiency. They belonged among that line of statesmen and public servants whose existence has been the negation of the theory that goodness is always associated with weakness, and that strength always finds its expression in violent wrong-doing. Edward the Confessor represented exactly the type which treats weakness and virtue as interchangeable terms. His reign was the prime cause of the conquest of England. Godoy, the Spanish statesman, a century ago, by the treaties he entered into and carried out, actually earned the title of “Prince of Peace” instead of merely lecturing about it; and the result of his peacefulness was the loss by Spain of the vast regions which, she then held in our country west of the Mississippi, and finally the overthrow of the Spanish national government, the setting up in Madrid of a foreign king by a foreign conqueror, and a long-drawn and incredibly destructive war. To statesmen of this kind Washington and Lincoln stand in as sharp contrast as they stand on the other side to the great absolutist chiefs such as Cæsar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Cromwell. What was true of the personality of Washington and Lincoln was true of the policy they sought to impress upon our nation. They were just as hostile to the theory that virtue was to be confounded with weakness as to the theory that strength justified wrong-doing. No abundance of the milder virtues will save a nation that has lost the virile qualities; and, on the other hand, no admiration of strength must make us deviate from the laws of righteousness. The kind of “peace” advocated by the ultrapacificists of 1776 would have meant that we never would have had a country; the kind of “peace” advocated by the ultrapacificists in the early ’60’s would have meant the absolute destruction of the country. It would have been criminal weakness for Washington not to have fought for the independence of this country, and for Lincoln not to have fought for the preservation of the Union; just as in an infinitely smaller degree it would have been criminal weakness for us if we had permitted wrong-doing in Cuba to go on forever unchecked, or if we had failed to insist on the building of the Panama Canal in exactly the fashion that we did insist; and, above all, if we had failed to build up our navy as during the last twenty years it has been built up. No alliance, no treaty, and no easy good-will of other nations will save us if we are not true to ourselves; and, on the other hand, if we wantonly give offense to others, if we excite hatred and fear, then some day we will pay a heavy penalty.
The most important lesson, therefore, for us to learn from Belgium’s fate is that, as things in the world now are, we must in any great crisis trust for our national safety to our ability and willingness to defend ourselves by our own trained strength and courage. We must not wrong others; and for our own safety we must trust, not to worthless bits of paper unbacked by power, and to treaties that are fundamentally foolish, but to our own manliness and clear-sighted willingness to face facts.
There is, however, another lesson which this huge conflict may at least possibly teach. There is at least a chance that from this calamity a movement may come which will at once supplement and in the future perhaps altogether supplant the need of the kind of action so plainly indicated by the demands of the present. It is at least possible that the conflict will result in a growth of democracy in Europe, in at least a partial substitution of the rule of the people for the rule of those who esteem it their God-given right to govern the people. This, in its turn, would render it probably a little more unlikely that there would be a repetition of such disastrous warfare. I do not think that at present it would prevent the possibility of warfare. I think that in the great countries engaged, the peoples as a whole have been behind their sovereigns on both sides of this contest. Certainly the action of the Socialists in Germany, France, and Belgium, and, so far as we know, of the popular leaders in Russia, would tend to bear out the truth of this statement. But the growth of the power of the people, while it would not prevent war, would at least render it more possible than at present to make appeals which might result in some cases in coming to an accommodation based upon justice; for justice is what popular rule must be permanently based upon and must permanently seek to obtain or it will not itself be permanent.
Moreover, the horror that right-thinking citizens feel over the awful tragedies of this war can hardly fail to make sensible men take an interest in genuine peace movements and try to shape them so that they shall be more practical than at present. I most earnestly believe in every rational movement for peace. My objection is only to movements that do not in very fact tell in favor of peace or else that sacrifice righteousness to peace. Of course this includes objection to all treaties that make believe to do what, as a matter of fact, they fail to do. Under existing conditions universal and all-inclusive arbitration treaties have been utterly worthless, because where there is no power to compel nations to arbitrate, and where it is perfectly certain that some nations will pay no respect to such agreements unless they can be forced to do so, it is mere folly for others to trust to promises impossible of performance; and it is an act of positive bad faith to make these promises when it is certain that the nation making them would violate them. But this does not in the least mean that we must abandon hope of taking action which will lessen the chance of war and make it more possible to circumscribe the limits of war’s devastation.
For this result we must largely trust to sheer growth