The Conquest of America | Page 4

Empire sweep across two continents while our territory is
crowded into a corner of one? Is Russia so supremely deserving? And
why should the United States possess as much of the earth's surface as
Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria-Hungary, Denmark,
Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Roumania, Spain, Norway, Sweden and
Japan all together and, besides that, claim authority to say, through the

Monroe Doctrine, what shall happen or shall not happen in South
America, Mexico, the West Indies and the Pacific? How did the United
States get this authority and this vast territory? How did Russia get her
vast territory? How did England get her vast territory?"
The late Professor J. A. Cramb, an Englishman himself, gives us one
answer in his powerful and illuminating book, "Germany and England,"
and shows us how England, in the view of many, got her possessions:
England! The successful burglar, who, an immense fortune amassed,
has retired from business, and having broken every law, human and
divine, violated every instinct of honour and fidelity on every sea and
on every continent, desires now the protection of the police!... So long
as England, the great robber-state, retains her booty, the spoils of a
world, what right has she to expect peace from the nations?
In reply to Mr. Bryan's peace exhortations, some of the smaller but
more efficient world powers, certainly Germany and Japan, would
recall similar cynical teachings of history and would smilingly answer:
"We approve of your beautiful international peace plan, of your
admirable world police plan, but before putting it into execution, we
prefer to wait a few hundred years and see if we also, in the ups and
downs of nations, cannot win for ourselves, by conquest or cunning or
other means not provided for in the law of love, a great empire
covering a vast portion of the earth's surface."
The force and justice of this argument will be appreciated, to use a
homely comparison, by those who have studied the psychology of
poker games and observed the unvarying willingness of heavy winners
to end the struggle after a certain time, while the losers insist upon
playing longer.
It will be the same in this international struggle for world supremacy,
the only nations willing to stop fighting will be the ones that are far
ahead of the game, like Great Britain, Russia and the United States.
We may be sure that wars will continue on the earth. War may be a
biological necessity in the development of the human race--God's

housecleaning, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox calls it. War may be a great
soul stimulant meant to purge mankind of evils greater than itself, evils
of baseness and world degeneration. We know there are blighted forests
that must be swept clean by fire. Let us not scoff at such a theory until
we understand the immeasurable mysteries of life and death. We know
that, through the ages, two terrific and devastating racial impulses have
made themselves felt among men and have never been restrained, sex
attraction and war. Perhaps they were not meant to be restrained.
Listen to John Ruskin, apostle of art and spirituality:
All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war. No great art
ever rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers. There is no great art
possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. When I tell you
that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the
foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It was very
strange for me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be
quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues
of civil life flourished together I found to be utterly untenable. We talk
of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilisation;
but I found that these are not the words that the Muse of History
coupled together; that on her lips the words were peace and sensuality,
peace and selfishness, peace and death. I found in brief that all great
nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that
they were nourished in war and wasted in peace; taught by war and
deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word,
that they were born in war and expired in peace.
We know Bernhardi's remorseless views taken from Treitschke and
adopted by the whole German nation:
"War is a fiery crucible, a terrible training school through which the
world has grown better."
In his impressive work, "The Game of Empires," Edward S. Van Zile
quotes Major General von Disfurth, a distinguished retired officer of
the German army, who chants so fierce a glorification of war for