the innocent and
the guiltless.
There is only one practical way to do this, and that is to have nations
under restraint, just as nations have states and cities under
restraint. Then international courts of justice may perform the same
work national courts now perform in respect to differences between
states.
Man has come up from the individual, or dual, unit through family and
tribal relation, the walled city, the policed state, into the armed
nation. He is now steadily stepping forth into the world as ruler of
himself, the creator of his own government, the heir and sovereign of
the world. He can step into the kingdom of manhood suffrage or
government only so far as the rights of his fellow men are recognized.
Evil holds its own destruction, and nations that live by the sword
perish by the sword.
For the United States to rush into the maelstrom of war, with
organization of armies and the building of armaments, is to invite its
own destruction.
For just one hundred years the North American continent has held the
practical example of the impotency of the war-spirit where there is no
war machinery.
By the Bush memorandum of agreement one hundred years ago it was
provided that there should be no guns, forts, or naval ships on the
greatest national boundary line of the world--4000 miles across the
American continent between the United States and Canada. Nowhere else
in the world have armed men attempted invasion, and yet provoked no
war, no reprisal. What might have been the relations between the
United States and Canada when the "Fenians" armed in New England and
attempted a raid across the border, if there had been armies and
fortifications on that border?
How securely now dwells in Canada $100,000,000 of the Bank of England
reserve gold! When German representatives in the United States talk of
Germany's right to invade Canada and get that gold. Uncle Sam only
smiles and frowns. And the smile and the frown are potential. That
boundary has been consecrated to peace; and what would be thought of
the proposal, did Germany command the seas, that Uncle Sam accept some
money or promises to pay and permit the German armies to go through,
according to the proposal to Belgium?
In an age which has abolished human slavery, broken the walls of China,
which is bringing the yellow races into the labor and white light of
civilization, which has made Germany a nation, and spanned a continent
with the human voi
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