The Conquest of America | Page 3

Mr. Bryan put his trust in love if he felt
himself the victim of injustice or dishonesty?
Once in a century some Tolstoy tries to practise literally the law of love
and non-resistance with results that are distressing to his family and
friends, and that are of doubtful value to the community. We may be
sure the nations of the world will never practise this beautiful law of
love until average citizens of the world practise it, and that time has not
come.
Of course, Mr. Bryan's peace plan recognises the inevitability of
quarrels or disagreements among nations, but proposes to have these
settled by arbitration or by the decisions of an international tribunal,
which tribunal may be given adequate police power in the form of an
international army and navy.
It goes without saying that such a plan of world federation and world
arbitration involves universal disarmament, all armies and all navies
must be reduced to a merely nominal strength, to a force sufficient for
police protection, but does any one believe that this plan can really be

carried out? Is there the slightest chance that Russia or Germany will
disarm? Is there the slightest chance that England will send her fleet to
the scrap heap and leave her empire defenceless in order to join this
world federation? Is there the slightest chance that Japan, with her
dreams of Asiatic sovereignty, will disarm?
And if the thing were conceivable, what a grim federation this would be
of jealousies, grievances, treacheries, hatreds, conflicting patriotisms
and ambitions--Russia wanting Constantinople, France Alsace-Lorraine,
Germany Calais, Spain Gibraltar, Denmark her ravished provinces,
Poland her national integrity and so on. Who would keep order among
the international delegates? Who would decide when the international
judges disagreed? Who would force the international policemen to act
against their convictions? Could any world tribunal induce the United
States to limit her forces for the prevention of a yellow immigration
from Asia?
General Homer Lea in "The Valour of Ignorance" says:
Only when arbitration is able to unravel the tangled skein of crime and
hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and
nations, as nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate
of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these
constitute the basis of individual impulse, so long will they control the
acts of nations.
Dr. Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard University and
trustee of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, makes this admission in
_The Army and Navy Journal:_
I regret to say that international or national disarmament is not taken
seriously by the leaders and thinking men of the more important
peoples, and I fear that for one reason or another neither the classes nor
the masses have much admiration for the idea or would be willing to do
their share to bring it about.
Here is the crux of the question, the earth has so much surface and
to-day this is divided up in a certain way by international frontiers.

Yesterday it was divided up in a different way. To-morrow it will again
be divided up in a new way, unless some world federation steps in and
says: "Stop! There are to be no more wars. The present frontiers of the
existing fifty-three nations are to be considered as righteously and
permanently established. After this no act of violence shall change
them."
Think what that would mean! It would mean that nations like Russia,
Great Britain and the United States, which happened to possess vast
dominions when this world federation peace plan was adopted would
continue to possess vast dominions, while other nations like Italy,
Greece, Turkey, Holland, Sweden, France, Spain (all great empires
once), Germany and Japan, whose present share of the earth's surface
might be only one-tenth or one-fiftieth or one-five-hundredth as great
as Russia's share or Great Britain's share, would be expected to remain
content with that small portion.
Impossible! These less fortunate, but not less aspiring nations would
never agree to such a policy of national stagnation, to such a stifling of
their legitimate longings for a "greater place in the sun." They would
point to the pages of history and show how small nations have become
great and how empires have fallen. What was the mighty United States
of America but yesterday? A handful of feeble colonies far weaker than
the Balkan States to-day.
"Why should this particular moment be chosen," they would protest,
"to render immovable international frontiers that have always been
shifting? Why should the maps of the world be now finally crystallised
so as to give England millions of square miles in every quarter of the
globe, Canada, Australia, India, Egypt, while we possess so little? Did
God make England so much better than he made us? Why should the
Russian