for either party to take any action infringing the honor, independence, and integrity of the other, we are willing to arbitrate all questions.

Hypocrisy never pays, in the long run. Even if the indifference of the majority of the Nation should permit a specific agreement to be made to arbitrate such vital questions, that same majority would promptly (and quite properly) repudiate the agreement the moment that it became necessary to enforce it. No self-respecting nation, no nation worth calling a nation, would ever in actual practice consent to surrender its rights in such matters. Take this very case of the agreement between Great Britain and ourselves. Thank Heaven! it is now impossible—and I use the word literally-that there shall ever be war between the English-speaking peoples. The events of the last ninety-six years have shown this to be the fact, and year by year the feeling between them has grown better and the determination to settle every dispute by amicable and honorable agreement based on mutual respect and consideration has become more fixed. But this is because of the attitude adopted by both during the ninety-six years. Go back a little over a century and conditions are wholly different. If Great Britain now started to exercise the right of search as she exercised it a hundred years ago, with its incidents of killing peaceful fishermen within the limits of New York Harbor, of kidnapping sailors by violence on the high seas, of ruining merchants through no fault of their own, of firing on American men-ofwar and killing men aboard them—why! if any such incident occurred at present, this country would fight at the drop of the hat, and any man who proposed to arbitrate such a matter would be tossed contemptuously out of the popular path. The reason we can now afford to have a general arbitration treaty is that such incidents are no longer possible. As long as they were possible, an arbitration treaty would have been impossible, because they were matters which no self-respecting nation would arbitrate. This is a fact which can be tacitly ignored only as long as it is tacitly accepted. Any language which specifically attempted to deny its existence would be thoroughly unfortu

nate, because it would mean either that this Nation was taking an ignoble position because it had an ignoble spirit, or else that it was hypocrial, pretending to enter into an obligation which in actual practice, if the strain came, it would not for one moment carry out.

As regards Great Britain, the matter is academic, simply because there is no possibility in actual fact of the occasion arising which would make it necessary to try to carry out the unwise obligation. But we should be very cautious of entering into a treaty with any nation, however closely knit to us, the form of which it would be impossible to follow in making treaties with other great civilized and friendly nations. For instance, at this very time Mexico has been engaged for some months in civil war, one of the incidents of which has been the repeated military invasion of our territory. Again and again armed bodies of Mexican troops have fired across the boundary and killed or wounded American citizens. In this case we have chosen to submit to such invasions, as is our right and privilege if we so desire. But it would be absolutely intolerable to bind ourselves to arbitrate the questions raised by such invasions. If, for instance, instead of its being Mexican troops firing into our inland towns and killing our citizens, it happened to be an English or a German or a Japanese fleet which, not once but again and again, fired into our coast towns, killing and wounding citizens, this Nation would immediately demand, not arbitration, but either atonement or war. In the same way, if a dispute arose between us and another nation as to whether we should receive enormous masses of immigrants whom we did not desire from that nation, no one who knows anything of the temper of the American people would dream that they would for one moment consent to arbitrate the matter. In such a case we should say that our honor, our independence, our integrity, and our very National existence were involved, and that we could not submit such a question to arbitration.

Outlook. 99: 66-70. September 9, 1911.

Peace of Righteousness. Theodore Roosevelt.

I

It is one of our prime duties as a Nation to seek peace. It is an even higher duty to seek righteousness. It is also our duty not to indulge in shams, not to make believe we are getting peace by some patent contrivance which sensible men ought to know cannot work in practice, and which if we sought to make it work might cause irretrievable harm. I sincerely believe in the principle of arbitration; I believe in applying that principle so far as practicable; but I believe that the effort to apply it where it is not practicable cannot do good and may do serious harm. Confused thinking and a willingness to substitute words for thought, even though inspired by an entirely amiable sentimentality, do not tend toward sound action. think that the great majority of those persons who advocate any and every treaty which is called a treaty for peace or for arbitration would be less often drawn into a position that tends to humiliate their country if they would take the trouble to formulate clearly and definitely just what it is that they desire. Of course there are persons wholly indifferent to the National honor and interest, who, in consequence, cannot be reached by an appeal to National honor and interest; and there are other persons whose ingrained personal timidity is such that they are more afraid of war than of any dishonor, personal or national. Such persons cannot be influenced by argument. But I do not believe that they make a very numerous class, and I have no question whatever that most of the men who, as I think mistakenly, advocate all peace and arbitration treaties, have the same standards of honor, national and individual, and the same intelligence, as their fellow-countrymen who disagree with them. I believe that the trouble comes from the fact that they do not clearly formulate what it is they wish. This, therefore, is the first thing to do. We, the American people, believe, and ought to believe, in righteousness first, and in peace as the handmaid of righteous

ness.

We abhor brutality and wrong doing, whether exhibited

by nations or by individuals. We hold that the same law of righteousness should obtain between nation and nation as between man and man. I, for one, would rather cut off my hand than see the United States adopt the attitude either of cringing before great and powerful nations who wish to wrong us, or of bullying small and weak nations who have done us no wrong. The American people desire to do justice and to act with frank generosity toward all the other nations of mankind; but I err greatly in my judgment of my countrymen if they are willing to submit to wrong and injustice. Again and again in the past they have shown, and rightly shown, that when the choice lay between righteousness and peace they chose righteousness, just exactly as they also chose righteousness when the choice lay between righteousness and war. In 1776 Washington and his associates scorned the advice of the peace party and went to war for the freedom of our people. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln and his associates scorned the advice and importunity of the peace people, heedless whether these peace people gave the advice they did give because of timidity or because of a twisted sentimentality. They plunged this country into the most terrible struggle the world had seen since the close of the Napoleonic wars; and thereby they perpetuated the Union and abolished slavery and rendered inestimable services to mankind. In 1898 this country disregarded the cries of the peace people and of those who responded to the throb of the money nerve, and warred with Spain. During the immediately preceding years of international peace, over a million lives of men, women, and children had been sacrificed in Cuba, because here at home the peace people had their way and America did not interfere. Then America did interfere, and, at the cost of considerably less than three thousand lives, all told, permanently stopped the dreadful system of destruction which was gradually reducing Cuba to the level of Hayti. If we had not interfered, probably at least a couple of million more lives would have been lost while good persons prattled of peace and arbitration. By the loss of each thousand lives we averted a million deaths; and the lives lost were all of men, and the deaths averted would have been largely those of women and

children. As in 1776 and 1861, so in 1898 we put righteousness above peace; and therefore we obtained both, while if we had shirked our duty we should ultimately have lost both. Cuba and Porto Rico and Panama have enjoyed peace and prosperity, the Panama Canal is being dug, and the Philippines are progressing as never before, because in 1898 we refused to listen to the timid and short-sighted apostles of ease and of slothful avoidance of duty, and dared to play the part of the just man armed.

General arbitration treaties under the best circumstances can only be promises; they appeal especially to sentimentalists, who are never safe advisers, and their importance is usually exaggerated to a ludicrous degree; the really important thing is the practical application of the principle to specific instances. The successful application of the principle of arbitration to the controversy between ourselves and Great Britain, settled at The Hague in the summer of 1910, was of high consequence; and Mr. Root, our special representative, rendered a real and great · service to the country by what he then advised before the Hague court, at the cost of many weary, arduous months. This disinterested, unpaid, and most laborious and important service, the peace advocates, and our people generally, never properly understood or appreciated, and they never felt properly grateful to the man who rendered it. Such work, which represents the reduction of theory to practice, is more important than the negotiation of any general arbitration treaty, which must always and of necessity represent merely the public announcement of a theory which it is hoped can be reduced to practice.

It is our duty, so far as is now possible, so far as human nature in the present-day world will permit, to try to provide peaceful substitutes for war as a method for the settlement of international disputes. But progress in this direction is merely hindered by the folly that believes in putting peace above righteousness; while it is of course even worse to pretend so to believe. The greatest service this Nation can render to righteousness is to behave with scrupulous justice to other nations, and yet to keep ready to hold its own if necessary. Our chief