Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/392

368 among the other powers of the world by the number of its battleships. In the world abroad those struggling for free government no longer look to this Republic for encouragement by sympathy, example and teaching; the question asked, not without misgiving, is rather, how far the lust of conquest and the impulse of adventurous ambition will carry this great American Republic in its new career. Should not true American patriotism grieve to witness the degradation?

Not many years ago the American people enjoyed a proud and inestimable privilege which enabled us to look down upon the greatest nations of the world with condescending sympathy. It was that while those nations were groaning under the burden of vast and costly armaments, believed by them to be indispensable for their safety, the American people was the only one happily exempt from such a necessity—the only one that could, and did, employ its resources of men and means with a sense of full security for the physical, mental and moral betterment of its country and the inhabitants thereof, instead of sinking them in the building up and maintenance of enormous and unproductive war establishments. We were, indeed, the envy of the whole world.

The best minds of other nations exerted—and still exert—themselves to discover ways to bring about gradually a general disarmament, but are met by the objection that while disarmament would indeed be a blessing devoutly to be wished, England must have the biggest war-fleet in the world to prevent the calamity of being blockaded and starved in her insular position; that France must maintain the largest possible armament on account of the possible hostility of her neighbor, Germany, and that Germany must have the same because of her being hedged in by powerful and possibly hostile neighbors. But for these and other similarly plausible