Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

vant of the People." This is not a government by presidents; it is a government by the people, a government by public opinion; and to the making of that government wise and righteous it is the duty of every citizen to contribute. Men say with a self-suppression which would be pathetic were it not so pusillanimous, that their "government" has "facts" which they have not and therefore must not be meddled with. The President has no knowledge of important facts which every citizen may not have. As the chief servant of the people, he has no right to important knowledge which he does not share with them; and in the present crisis he has frankly told us that he has not any. In the great town meeting of democracy the responsibility comes home to every man alike, to the selectman and the other; and no man can atone for what he confesses to be sin and shame by any maudlin talk about "supporting the government."

Consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds; and its sway is stronger over nations than over individual men. It is a fearful proverb, that corporations have no souls, though every member of the corporation be a deacon. Men are more willing to do wrong, and less willing to repent, in their corporate capacity than by themselves. Men have to learn that the ethics of the citizen, the ethics of the state, is simply the ethics of the gentleman-to confess mistake or wrong, and to undo it, the moment that he finds it out. Gladstone knows but one law for Hawarden and for Downing Street. Noblesse oblige that is the doctrine and the test alike of the gentlemanly nation and the gentlemanly man; and the "white man's burden," if his whiteness is whiteness. of soul and not simply of skin, is to be quicker to undo a wrong to an inferior than to an equal.

History is kind to us in making this year, so big with fate to the country,

the centennial of the death of the father of the country. We stand at the point just a century after Washington. Let us not keep the feast in desecration of his memory; let us keep it by the manly ceasing from wrongdoing and the humble, proud return to his approving smile; let us keep it by listening with new anxiety and reverence to his word. Could the voice of Washington reach us to-day, it would not speak to us with the accent of any selfish, smug parochialism, but with the accent of the citizen of the world. No man in his great day saw so far west as he; to-day his vision would sweep round the globe. He was the great expander of the republic; he would be the great expander of the republic's true influence among men. He would tell the republic that it was no longer boy, but man, and that it must now quit itself like a man. would remind us that while he was yet with us he foresaw the time "when, our institutions being firmly consolidated and working with complete success, we might safely and perhaps beneficially take part in the consultations held by foreign states for the advantage of the nations;" and he would tell us that a hundred "entanglements" are expedient and imperative for us to-day which were not to be considered a century ago. But he would tell us also that there are truths which do not change with the centuries and with which the nation that measures its power on a continental scale may no more trifle with impunity than the new manchild.

He

"There exists in the economy and course of nature," he would say, "an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."

The year is that when, in the hos

pitable land from which the Pilgrims sailed, to lay the corner stone of this nation, the representatives of all civilized nations are gathered about the sacredest round-table round-table of history, called by a higher and a holier call than any which ever came to Galahad or Arthur. It is the year which strikes the first stroke of the hour of Universal Peace, the year for which prophets have yearned and of which poets have sung, when the nations of the world first echo the strain of the Christmas angels of God. Is democracy to choose this year of years to put on the old armor which even sickened despotism seeks to cast away? Is this Great Republic, whereto waiting, praying Europe has looked for leadership, to choose this year to turn her face from the future back toward the blood-rusted past and make it the Year One of her era of armies and navies, conquest and subjugation, partitions of Poland and opium wars? Tragical was the irony by which the hour of the Peace Congress found her hands alone bloodstained, and which made the song of her poet an "Ichabod."

The faces of Whittier and Whitman and Lowell and Emerson are turned

dare

to the wall to-day, to remind us solemnly how "false is the war no poet sings" and that no line of theirs can be made to keep step with the situation. But to-morrow-who doubt it her step shall be set once again to song; to-morrow-who dare doubt it-the nightmare shall end and she will come to herself. Things present and things past shall not persuade us that the heart of the people is not sound and that the nation shall not rise triumphant over every passion and temptation of the hour, disciplined by the hour's heart-searchings to better fitness for the imperial task to which God has called her in the family of nations. Imperial shall she rise? Yes, imperial; but an "imperial Salem, crowned with light." She shall go out into all the world, with new dreams, larger ambitions and bolder venture, conquering and to conquer. But she shall not go with lust or greed or cruelty or oppression in her heart. She shall go the herald still of liberty, proclaiming liberty to all the earth. She shall found an empire that shall be a universal commonwealth, an empire based not upon the fears, but upon the aspirations and the hopes of men.

[graphic][merged small]

HON, STANFORD NEWEL.

F. W. HOLLS.

HON. SETH LOW. CAPT. WILLIAM CROZIER,

HON. ANDREW D. WHITE. CAPT. ALFRED T. MAHAN. THE AMERICAN DELEGATION TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE.

THE

NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

NEW SERIES.

AUGUST, 1899.

VOL. XX. No. 6.

I

THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE.

By Benjamin F. Trueblood.

N 1869, in the preface to the French edition of Bluntschli's "International Law Codified," Mr. E. Laboulaye wrote these significant sentences: "Steam and electricity have so mixed peoples up, so run together all civil and commercial interests, that men have clearly seen all the horror and folly of war, all the wisdom and beauty of peace. By repeating, with every possible variation, that labor and exchange are the law of the world, that therein only are found the happiness of peoples and the greatness of states, economists have everywhere propagated ideas promotive of peace. Publicists have followed them in this fruitful path. The political ideal has changed, and so changed that we are not far from having done with the old, destructive admiration which our

rism, to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings of labor and of peace,such is to-day the great ambition of peoples. It must be made that of kings and ministers of state."

There may be doubt as to whether Laboulaye's estimate of the ambition of peoples was not much too high for his day, or even for ours. But the same thought has, in one way or another, been repeated by a multitude of pens since he wrote. If he were living now he would certainly feel that, with the progress that is being made toward the constitution of the different peoples into a world-society, kings and ministers have ripened, beyond his expectation, into peacemakers. The International Peace Conference just held at The Hague furnishes abundant proof of this.

[graphic]

THE CZAR OF RUSSIA.

fathers had for those scourges of humanity called conquerors. Napoleon is decreasing; Washington is increasing. To abolish war, or at least to limit it and cut off some of its barba

It was an emperor who issued the great peace manifesto calling for the conference. "The oldest queen in the world and the youngest queen in the world," as a preacher at The

« AnteriorContinuar »