THE SCHOOL OF JINGOES
IN a certain colored regiment there was a chaplain who was habitually called by the negroes, with their usual gift at lucky misnomers, “Mr. Chapman.” He was very fond of risky adventures, and one of the negroes once said: “Woffor Mas’ Chapman made preacher fo’? He’s de fightin’est mos’ Yankee I ebber see in all my days!” It is impossible not to read this in reading what is written by these friends of peace, who are constantly using the olive branch for a war club and hammering away at those who think differently. The excellent Mr. Angell, in the last number of “Our Dark Friends,” announces in one column that the object of his paper is “the humane education of the millions,” and in another column that it is to be wished “that England had not only Venezuela, but every other Spanish-speaking colony on the face of the earth.” In this manner, more prosaically, do Mr. Edward Atkinson and Mr. Edward D. Mead hold it up as the highest desideratum for every part of Spanishand Portuguese America to pass into English hands. Grant the force of all their arguments, can this be regarded as the gospel of serenity and brotherly love? It rather recalls Heine’s glowing description of one of his early teachers, one Schramm, who had written a book on Universal Peace, and in whose classes the boys pommelled each other with especial vigor.
If jingoism there be on earth, where are its headquarters, its normal school, its university extension system? Where, pray, but in the example of England? No one who has watched the course of things at Washington can help seeing the influence of that vast object-lesson. Seeley’s book, “The Expansion of England,” is of itself enough to demoralize a whole generation of Congressmen. It is the trophies of Great Britain which will not allow Lodge and Roosevelt to sleep. Logically, they have the right of it. If it be a great and beneficent thing for England to annex, by hook or crook, every desirable harbor or island on the globe; to secure Gibraltar by a trick, India by a lucky disobedience of orders, Egypt by a temporary occupation of which the other end never arrives,—why not follow the example? This impulse lay behind the whole Hawaiian negotiation; it assertsitself in all the Venezuela interference, in all the Cuban imbroglio. Moreover, it is absolutely consistent and defensible, if England is, as we are constantly assured, the great, beneficent, and civilizing power on the earth. If so, let us also be beneficent; let us proceed to civilize; let us, too, say, especially to all Spanish-speaking peoples, “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue!”
If there ever was a Church Militant, surely England is the Nation Militant. While we debate a gunboat, she equips a fleet; while we introduce a bill for an earth-work, and refer it to a committee, she forwards ten additional guns to Puget Sound. “Her march is o’er the mountain wave,” as Campbell long since boasted; and yet, whenever the youngest statesman asks why we should not be allowed to take a faltering step after her, he is treated as if he had violated the traditions of the human race and had indeed brought death into the world and all our woe. Let us at heart be consistent. To me, I confess, the old tradition of “an unarmed nation”—about which that good soldier, Gen. F. A. Walker, once made so fine an address—still seems the better thing. But the unarmed nation is the condemnation ofEngland; if defencelessness is right, then England is all wrong, and we should say so. We can by no possible combination be English and pacific at the same time.
Above all, it seems to me an absolute abandonment of the whole principle of republican institutions to say that they are for one nation alone, and for only those who speak one language. If deserving means anything, it means that sooner or later all will grow up to it. Nobody doubts that the Romans governed well and were the best road-builders on this planet; but all now admit that it helped human progress when they took themselves out of England and left those warring tribes to work themselves out of their dark condition into such self-government as they now possess. There was a time on this continent when Mexico was such a scene of chaos that the very word “to Mexicanize” carried a meaning of disorder. Yet what State of the Union has shown more definite and encouraging progress than has been accomplished in Mexico within the last ten years? What Mexico is, every Spanish-American or Portuguese-American state may yet be, only give it time and a fair chance. If we believe that the principleof self-government is unavailable for those who speak Spanish, we might as well have allowed Maximilian to set up his little empire undisturbed. No one ever doubted that Louis Napoleon knew how to build good roads and to shoot straight; and perhaps he might have taught the same arts to his representative. Whatever injury we may before have done to Mexico, we repaid it liberally when we said to Europe, “Hands off,” and secured to that Spanish-American state its splendid career of self-development out of chaos. What Mexico has done the states of South America may yet imitate.