robbery and white
slavery are profitable. It is almost useless to attempt to argue with
these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an
obsession and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the outset, for
they lay all the emphasis on peace and none at all on righteousness.
They are not all of them physically timid men; but they are usually men
of soft life; and they rarely possess a high sense of honor or a keen
patriotism. They rarely try to prevent their fellow countrymen from
insulting or wronging the people of other nations; but they always
ardently advocate that we, in our turn, shall tamely submit to wrong
and insult from other nations. As Americans their folly is peculiarly
scandalous, because if the principles they now uphold are right, it
means that it would have been better that Americans should never have
achieved their independence, and better that, in 1861, they should have
peacefully submitted to seeing their country split into half a dozen
jangling confederacies and slavery made perpetual. If unwilling to learn
from their own history, let those who think that it is an "illusion" to
believe that a war ever benefits a nation look at the difference between
China and Japan. China has neither a fleet nor an efficient army. It is
a huge civilized empire, one of the most populous on the globe; and it
has been the helpless prey of outsiders because it does not possess the
power to fight. Japan stands on a footing of equality with European
and American nations because it does possess this power. China now sees
Japan, Russia, Germany, England and France in possession of fragments of
her empire, and has twice within the lifetime of the present generation
seen her capital in the hands of allied invaders, because she in very
fact realizes the ideals of the persons who wish the United States
to disarm, and then trust that our helplessness will secure us a
contemptuous immunity from attack by outside nations.

The chief trouble comes from the entire inability of these worthy
people to understand that they are demanding things that are mutually
incompatible when they demand peace at any price, and also justice and
righteousness. I remember one representative of their number, who used
to write little sonnets on behalf of the Mahdi and the Sudanese, these
sonnets setting forth the need that the Sudan should be both independent
and peaceful. As a matter of fact, the Sudan valued independence only
becau