Late Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University; ex-President National Institute of Arts and Letters and of the American Historical Association; was secretary of George Bancroft, the historian, in Berlin, 1873-5; author of works on French History.
The American public has been carefully trained to avoid entanglement with foreign affairs. This European war was so unexpected, so entirely unforeseen, that we were at first bewildered, and then exasperated, by our unreadiness to meet our own emergencies.
In our effort to fix responsibility we then became partisan to the verge of moral participation and had to be called to our senses by the wise proclamation and warning of our Chief Magistrate.
Western Europe is a nearer neighbor than either Central or Eastern, and what stern censors permit us to know is nicely calculated to arouse our prejudice on one side or the other. Believing that, owing to cable cutting and neutrality restrictions of wireless, as yet the plain truth is not available, we ask for a suspension of judgment on both sides in order that our Government may enjoy the undivided support of all American citizens in its desire to secure a minimum of disturbance to the normal course of our commercial, industrial, and agricultural life by convulsions that are not of our making.
Fairness to ourselves means justice in the formation and expression of opinion about not one or two but all the participants in a struggle for European ascendency, with which we have nothing to do except as overwhelming victory for either side might bring on a struggle for world ascendency, with which, unhappily, we might have much to do. To contemplate such a terrible event should sober us; the best preparation for it is absolute neutrality in thought, speech, and conduct.
Our own history since independence is an unbroken record of expansion and imperialism. Our contiguous territories have been acquired by compulsion, whether of war, of purchase, of occupation, or of exchange. We have taken advantage of others' dire necessity in the case of Great Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico.
To rectify our frontier we compelled the Gladsden Purchase within the writer's lifetime. As to our non-contiguous possessions, we hold them by the right of conquest or revolution, salving our consciences with such cash indemnity as we ourselves have chosen to pay, and even now we are considering what we choose to pay, not what a disinterested court might consider adequate, for the good-will of the United States of Colombia, a good-will desired solely and entirely for an additional safeguard to the Panama Canal and a prop to the policy or doctrine substituted by the present Administration for the moribund Monroe Doctrine.
In no single instance of virtual annexation or protectorate have we consulted by popular vote either the desires of those inhabiting the respective territories annexed or The Hague Tribunal. In every case we have had one single plea and one only—self-interest.
The entire American continent south of our frontier we have closed to all European settlement, thereby maintaining for more than a century in a magnificent territory an imperfect civilization which makes a sorry use of natural resources which could vastly improve the condition of all mankind if properly used.
This is the light in which European nations see us; our identity in this policy from the dawn of our national existence onward they consider a proof of our national character. It differs in no respect from their own policies except in one.