Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/98

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Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook

for a generation or two) the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day—not yet, for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any white race you can name—but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see, incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet—permitting, namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came, however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its medical needs for 140 years!)

Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies—reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst—the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was because