was in truth (as more than one American historian has
pointed out) a party strife and not a war of peoples. The precipitating
cause of the Civil War was not the desire to abolish slavery, but the
bitterness aroused by the political considerations of the advantage
given to one party or the other by the establishment or
non-establishment of slavery in a new territory. The motive which
impelled the United States to make war on Spain was not, as most
Europeans believe, any desire for an extension of territory, any more
than it was, as some Americans would say, a yearning to avenge the
blowing up of the _Maine_; it was the necessity of putting an end to the
disturbed state of affairs in Cuba, which was a constant source of
annoyance, as well as of trouble and expense, to the United States
Government. If a neighbour makes a disturbance before your house and
brings his family quarrels to your doorstep, you must after a time ask
him to stop; and when, after a sufficient number of askings, he fails to
comply with your request, it is justifiable to use force to make him.
That was America's justification--the real ground on which she went to
war with Spain. But the thing which actually inflamed the mind of the
American people was the belief that the Spanish treatment of Cuba was
brutal and barbarous. It was an indignation no less fine than that which
set England in a blaze in the days of the Bulgarian atrocities. The war
may been a war of expediency on the part of the Government; it was a
Crusade in the eyes of the people. Thus it may be easy to show that at
each crisis in its history there was something besides the nobility of a
Cause or the grandeur of a Principle which impelled the American nation
on the course which it took, but it has always been love of the Cause or
devotion to the Principle which has swayed the masses of the people.

And this people now has it in its power to do an infinitely finer thing
than ever it did when it established Liberty of Conscience, or founded a
republic on broader foundations than had been laid before, or abolished
slavery within its borders, or when it won Cuba's independence of what
it believed to be an inhuman tyranny. I believe that it has it in its
power to do no less a thing than to abolish war for ever--to give to
the peoples of the earth the blessing of Perpetual Peace. The question
for it to ask itself is whether it can, with any shadow of
justification, refuse to take this step and