Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/133

Rh one day or another, the red bloom of war. Let us see which is right, and then act accordingly.

The first argument, and not the least powerful, adduced in favour of a peaceful future to be provided by democracy, is derivable from the United States. What the leading democracy in the world thinks of war to-day, surely the democracies of Europe will think to-morrow. Mr. Bryce, in his classic work, The American Commonwealth, states that "no country is at bottom more pervaded by a hatred of war." The Americans, he repeats, "have no lust of conquest—have no earth-hunger." From such a pronouncement it must be difficult to appeal.

Nevertheless, if we look a little more closely at the United States, any such argument drawn from that instance must appear of doubtful import. For, against the view just cited, must be set that which Burke, followed by others up to our own time, entertained of the Americans. He considered them to possess all the characteristics of an ambitious race. "Fierce" was the epithet which he thought most applicable to them: "we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people," and he noticed in them all the marks of "the haughtiness of domination." And surely, the people who, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, could not even settle the question of domestic slavery without a terrible civil war, can hardly be held up safely as a model of peaceful democracy.

Besides, if they are a nation who feel "no lust of conquest" and no "earth-hunger," how is it