EXPANSION AND PEACE 



PUBLISHED IN THE "INDEPENDENT," DECEMBER 21, 1899 



I T was the gentlest of our poets who wrote : 



* "Be bolde! Be bolde! and everywhere, Be bolde"; 

 Be not too bold ! Yet better the excess . 

 Than the defect; better the more thankless. 



Longfellow's love of peace was profound; but he 

 was a man, and a wise man, and he knew that cow 

 ardice does not promote peace, and that even the 

 great evil of war may be a less evil than cringing to 

 iniquity. 



Captain Mahan, than whom there is not in the 

 country a man whom we can more appropriately des 

 ignate by the fine and high phrase, "a Christian gen 

 tleman," and who is incapable of advocating wrong 

 doing of any kind, national or individual, gives ut 

 terance to the feeling of the great majority of manly 

 and thoughtful men when he denounces the great 

 danger of indiscriminate advocacy of peace at any 

 price, because "it may lead men to tamper with in 

 iquity, to compromise with unrighteousness, sooth 

 ing their conscience with the belief that war is so 

 entirely wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil 

 is wrong. Witness Armenia and witness Crete. 



(23) 



