luttered that strange flag,
the stars and stripes, that meant at once the noblest thing in life,
and the least noble, that is to say, Liberty on the one hand, and on
the other the base jealousy the individual self-seeker feels towards the
common purpose of the State.
For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing
that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers
with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even
more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land
was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North
America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked
their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of
war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited,
picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw
history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with
all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They were inclined to
regret it as something ennobling, to sigh that it could no longer come
into their own private experience. They read with interest, if not with
avidity, of their new guns, of their immense and still more immense
ironclads, of their incredible and still more incredible explosives, but
just what these tremendous engines of destruction might mean for their
personal lives never entered their heads. They did not, so far as one
can judge from their contemporary literature, think that they meant
anything to their personal lives at all. They thought America was safe
amidst all this piling up of explosives. They cheered the flag by habit
and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an
international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to
say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say,
threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist
people. They were spirited to Asia, spirited to Germany, so spirited to
Great Britain that the international attitude of the mother country to
her great daughter was constantly compared in contemporary caricature to
that between a hen-pecked husband and a vicious young wife. And for the
rest, they all went about their business and pleasure as if war had died
out with the megatherium....
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon
armaments and the perfection of explosive
|