“I am sure I can echo that wish,” returned Max. “It seems a dreadful thing for two Christian nations to go to war with each other.”
“Very true,” said Albert; “it would certainly look strangely inconsistent to the heathen peoples we are both trying to convert.”
“It couldn’t fail to do so,” assented Max. “War is a dreadful thing; reading descriptions of the awful scenes of bloodshed and carnage on board of vessels, and in land battles, too, I’ve sometimes thought Satan must take great and fiendish delight in it.”
“Yes,” said Lulu, again joining in the talk; “I’ve heard papa make a remark like that, but he said at the same time that there were worse things than war, when it was waged to secure liberty, not only for ourselves, but for others; that war could never be right on both sides, but it often was on one. On the side of America in her two wars with England, for instance.”
“My father surprised me by saying the same thing when I questioned him on the subject after that talk we had about it before,” said Albert. “He added that, of course, England being his native land, he loved her better than any other, and always should, but for all that he couldn’t shut his eyes to the fact that she had not always been in the right.
“The colonies were oppressed, and had a right to be free if they desired separation from the mother country; and that after they had been acknowledged free and independent states, they were no more under English rule than any other foreign nation, and as, according to international law, the public and private vessels of every nation are subject, on the high seas, to the jurisdiction of the State they belong to, and to no other, and no nation has the right of visitation and search of the vessels of another nation, Americans were justly indignant over the insistence upon, and the carrying out, of the so-called right of search by British men-of-war; especially, as native-born Americans had no security against being impressed as Englishmen, and indeed very often were. It must have been awfully hard on them, I’m sure.”
“Yes,” returned Max, “and your father must be an honorable and just man to acknowledge it.”
“Just my opinion,” Albert said, with a frank, good-humored smile; “but if it’s noble to acknowledge one’s own individual faults, why not to own that your country may have sometimes been in the wrong?”
“Certainly,” said Max, “and I’ve heard papa say he thought we were the aggressors in the war with Mexico, and that our government had done grievous wrong to the poor Indians.”
“It’s very true that a good many Americans were impressed,” remarked Lulu; “thousands of them; even while we were fighting France and so helping England, she kept on impressing our sailors and seizing our ships whenever she could find the smallest excuse for doing so; they didn’t respect even the ships belonging to our government when they—the British, I mean—were enough stronger to put resistance out of the question on the part of the Americans.