Although our relations with Russia have always been friendly, past friendship does not justify present injustice. The retention of her foothold in Manchuria, which she was to have held only until the country was pacified, and her obvious and avowed designs upon Corea, evidently aim at the acquisition of their territory, and point to similar ultimate designs upon China and Japan.
Such being the case, we may well sympathize with Japan in her struggle with Russia. We owe nothing to Russia because some of her ships came to New York in 1863; but we are indebted to England for having peremptorily declined the proposition of France to recognize the Southern Confederacy.
Moreover, England is our natural ally, as we are allied to her by an affinity of race, language, religion and free institutions. As for “the Yellow Peril,” of which so much has been said, especially by the Russian Ambassador, as something to be feared by the Western nations, it is purely imaginary and chimerical. There is no more danger of China and Japan, if successful in war at home, invading and overrunning the rest of the world at any time in the future, near or remote, than there is of the man in the moon coming down and invading us with an army of moonshiners.
August 11th, 1905.
Editor New York Times, New York City.
Dear Sir: My attention has been called to an editorial in your issue of August 10th, entitled “That Gladstone Letter Again,” the letter in question being the one received by me personally from Mr. Gladstone. The editorial by its wording seems to bring in question the authenticity and veracity of the statements contained therein.
The letter came to me voluntarily from Mr. Gladstone, as the result of an article written by me, and it should remove any doubt as to the position of the British Cabinet in connection with our Civil War. The utterances of some of the individual members of the Cabinet did doubtless favor the South during a part of our Civil War, but when Emperor Napoleon’s proposition for intervention came up in the British Cabinet, the action taken was exactly as Mr. Gladstone states in his letter to me, and is borne out by Mr. Gladstone’s speech in the House of Commons made soon afterwards, and it was largely due to his speech that Mr. Roebuck’s motion on Napoleon’s proposition was defeated.
There is an unwritten law in England that the deliberations of the British Cabinet shall never be revealed by any member except by consent of the Crown. Mr. Gladstone was known to be a great stickler for conventions, and his letter to me in which he expressly says I am at liberty to publish it could not have been written except by consent of Queen Victoria.
Very truly yours,
HENRY CLEWS.