pendence from the
tyranny of Spain. Then began the disintegration of her empire, and the
deliverance of peoples from her oppression, but this was completed
only last year, and then again by the sword--of the United States.

In the centuries which have since intervened, what has not "justice,
with valor armed," when confronted by evil in high places, found
itself compelled to effect by resort to the sword? To it was due the
birth of our own nation, not least among the benefits of which was the
stern experience that has made Great Britain no longer the mistress,
but the mother, of her dependencies. The control, to good from evil,
of the devastating fire of the French Revolution and of Napoleon was
due to the sword. The long line of illustrious names and deeds, of
those who bore it not in vain, has in our times culminated--if indeed
the end is even yet nearly reached--in the new birth of the United
States by the extirpation of human slavery, and in the downfall, but
yesterday, of a colonial empire identified with tyranny. What the
sword, and it supremely, tempered only by the stern demands of justice
and of conscience, and the loving voice of charity, has done for India
and for Egypt, is a tale at once too long and too well known for
repetition here. Peace, indeed, is not adequate to all progress; there
are resistances that can be overcome only by explosion. What means
less violent than war would in a half-year have solved the Caribbean
problem, shattered national ideas deep rooted in the prepossessions of
a century, and planted the United States in Asia, face to face with
the great world problem of the immediate future? What but war rent the
veil which prevented the English-speaking communities from seeing eye
to eye, and revealed to each the face of a brother? Little wonder that
a war which, with comparatively little bloodshed, brought such
consequences, was followed by the call for a Peace Conference!

Power, force, is a faculty of national life; one of the talents
committed to nations by God. Like every other endowment of a complex
organization, it must be held under control of the enlightened
intellect and of the upright heart; but no more than any other can it
be carelessly or lightly abjured, without incurring the responsibility
of one who buries in the earth that which was intrusted to him for
use. And this obligation to maintain right, by force if need be, while
common to all states, rests peculiarly upon the gre