African and European Addresses

Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others. The supreme difficulty in connection with developing the peace work of The Hague arises from the lack of any executive power, of any police power, to enforce the decrees of the court. In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force; on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect. In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind.

The Colonial Policy of the United States

An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, on the Evening of May 5, 1910

When I first heard that I was to speak again this evening, my heart failed me. But directly after hearing Mr. Bratlie7 I feel that it is a pleasure to say one or two things; and before saying them, let me express my profound acknowledgment for your words. You have been not only more than just but more than generous. Because I have been so kindly treated, I am going to trespass on your kindness still further, and say a word or two about my own actions while I was President. I do not speak of them, my friends, save to illustrate the thesis that I especially uphold, that the man who has the power to act is to be judged not by his words but by his acts—by his words in so far as they agree with his acts. All that I say about peace I wish to have judged and measured by what I actually did as President.

I was particularly pleased by what you said about our course, the course of the American people, in connection with the Philippines and Cuba. I believe that we have the Cuban Minister here with us to-night? [A voice: "Yes."] Well, then, we have a friend who can check off what I am going to say. At the close of the war of '98 we found our army in possession of Cuba, and man after man among the European diplomats of the old school said to me: "Oh, you will never go out of Cuba. You said you would, of course, but that is quite understood; nations don't expect promises like that to be kept." As soon as I became President, I said, "Now you will see that the promise will be kept." We appointed a day when we would leave Cuba. On that day Cuba began its existence as an independent republic. Later there came a disaster, there came a revolution, and we were obliged to land troops again, while I was President, and then the same gentlemen with whom I had conversed before said: "Now you are relieved from your promise; your promise has been kept, and now you will stay in Cuba." I answered: "No, we shall not. We will keep the promise not only in the letter but in the spirit. We will stay in Cuba to help it on its feet, and then we will leave the island in better shape to maintain its permanent independent existence." And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want—that is, a continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.

We acted along the same general lines in the case of San Domingo. We intervened only so far as to prevent the need of taking possession of the island. None of you will know of this, so I will just tell you briefly what it was that we did. The Republic of San Domingo, in the West Indies, had suffered from a good many revolutions. In one particular period when I had to deal with the island, while I was President, it was a little difficult to know what to do, because there were two separate governments in the island, and a revolution going on against each. A number of dictators, under the title of President, had seized power at different times, had borrowed money at exorbitant rates of interest from Europeans and Americans, and had pledged the custom-houses of the different towns to different countries; and the chief object of each revolutionary was to get hold of the custom-houses. Things got to such a pass that it became evident that certain European Powers would land and take possession of parts of the island. We then began negotiations with the Government of the island. We sent down ships to keep within limits various preposterous little manifestations of the revolutionary habit, and, after some negotiations, we concluded an agreement. It was agreed that we should put a man in as head of the custom-houses, that the collection of customs should be entirely under the management of that man, and that no one should be allowed to interfere with the custom-houses. Revolutions could go on outside them without interference from us; but the custom-houses were not to be touched. We agreed to turn over to the San Domingo Government forty-five per cent. of the revenue, keeping fifty-five per cent. as a fund to be applied to a settlement with the creditors. The creditors also acquiesced in what we had done, and we started the new arrangement. I found considerable difficulty in getting the United States Senate to ratify the treaty, but I went ahead anyhow and executed it until it was ratified. Finally it was ratified, for the opposition was a purely factious opposition, representing the smallest kind of politics with a leaven of even baser motive. Under the treaty we have turned over to the San Domingo Government forty-five per cent. of the revenues collected, and yet we have turned over nearly double as much as they ever got when they collected it all themselves. In addition, we have collected sufficient to make it certain that the creditors will receive every cent to which they are entitled. It is self-evident, therefore, that in this affair we gave a proof of our good faith. We might have taken possession of San Domingo. Instead of thus taking possession, we put into the custom-houses one head man and half a dozen assistants, to see that the revenues were honestly collected, and at the same time served notice that they should not be forcibly taken away; and the result has been an extraordinary growth of the tranquillity and prosperity of the islands, while at the same time the creditors are equally satisfied, and all danger of outside interference has ceased.

That incident illustrates two things: First, if a nation acts in good faith, it can often bring about peace without abridging the liberties of another nation. Second, our experience emphasizes the fact (which every Peace Association should remember) that the hysterical sentimentalist for peace is a mighty poor person to follow. I was actually assailed, right and left, by the more extreme members of the peace propaganda in the United States for what I did in San Domingo; most of the other professional peace advocates took no interest in the matter, or were tepidly hostile; however, I went straight ahead and did the job. The ultra-peace people attacked me on the ground that I had "declared war" against San Domingo, the "war" taking the shape of the one man put in charge of the custom-houses! This will seem to you incredible, but I am giving you an absolutely accurate account of what occurred. I disregarded those foolish people, as I shall always disregard sentimentalists of that type when they are guilty of folly. At the present we have comparative peace and prosperity in the island, in consequence of my action, and of my disregard of these self-styled advocates of peace.

The same reasoning applies in connection with what we did at the Isthmus of Panama, and what we are doing in the Philippines. Our colonial problems in the Philippines are not the same as the colonial problems of other Powers. We have in the Philippines a people mainly Asiatic in blood, but with a streak of European blood and with the traditions of European culture, so that their ideals are largely the ideals of Europe. At the moment when we entered the islands the people were hopelessly unable to stand alone. If we had abandoned the islands, we should have left them a prey to anarchy for some months, and then they would have been seized by some other Power ready to perform the task that we had not been able to perform. Now I hold that it is not worth while being a big nation if you cannot do a big task; I care not whether that task is digging the Panama Canal or handling the Philippines. In the Philippines I feel that the day will ultimately come when the Philippine people must settle for themselves whether they wish to be entirely independent, or in some shape to keep up a connection with us. The day has not yet come; it may not come for a generation or two. One of the greatest friends that liberty has ever had, the great British statesman Burke, said on one occasion that there must always be government, and that if there is not government from within, then it must be supplied from without. A child has to be governed from without, because it has not yet grown to a point when it can govern itself from within; and a people that shows itself totally unable to govern itself from within must expect to submit to more or less of government from without, because it cannot continue to exist on other terms—indeed, it cannot be permitted permanently to exist as a source of danger to other nations. Our aim in the Philippines is to train the people so that they may govern themselves from within. Until they have reached this point they cannot have self-government. I will never advocate self-government for a people so long as their self-government means crime, violence, and extortion, corruption within, lawlessness among themselves and towards others. If that is what self-government means to any people then they ought to be governed by others until they can do better.

What I have related represents a measure of practical achievement in the way of helping forward the cause of peace and justice, and of giving to different peoples freedom of action according to the capacities of each. It is not possible, as the world is now constituted, to treat every nation as one private individual can treat all other private individuals, because as yet there is no way of enforcing obedience to law among nations as there is among private individuals. If in the streets of this city a man walks about with the intent to kill somebody, if he manages his house so that it becomes a source of infection to the neighborhood, the community, with its law officers, deals with him forthwith. That is just what happened at Panama, and, as nobody else was able to deal with the matter, I dealt with it myself, on behalf of the United States Government, and now the Canal is being dug, and the people of Panama have their independence and a prosperity hitherto unknown in that country.

In the end, I firmly believe that some method will be devised by which the people of the world, as a whole, will be able to insure peace, as it cannot now be insured. How soon that end will come I do not know; it may be far distant; and until it does come I think that, while we should give all the support that we can to any possible feasible scheme for quickly bringing about such a state of affairs, yet we should meanwhile do the more practicable, though less sensational, things. Let us advance step by step; let us, for example, endeavor to increase the number of arbitration treaties and enlarge the methods for obtaining peaceful settlements. Above all, let us strive to awaken the public international conscience, so that it shall be expected, and expected efficiently, of the public men responsible for the management of any nation's affairs that those affairs shall be conducted with all proper regard for the interests and well-being of other Powers, great or small.

The World Movement

An Address Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910

I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making, to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German Empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in Western Europe was round the Karling House, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose Empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in Middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling Empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen North, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early Emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of Middle and Western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children's children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this University covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent; while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed, while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society, and these I shall discuss elsewhere.8 But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own; while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.

The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present—and which is but a span's length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.

Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred during the æons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was very slow indeed, and, moreover, in each case it was strongly localized; while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a "world movement" at all; for by far the greater part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.

With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically these three peoples—although, judged even by the history of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.

The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.

The Græco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world's surface. For the first time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a "world movement" in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the world's surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.