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.
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