of the principles laid down by George Washington in his Farewell Address, under the observance of which our country has grown so prosperous and powerful, and the substitution therefor of a policy of conquest and adventure—a policy bound to tarnish our National honor at the first step, to frighten our American neighbors and to make enemies of them, to entangle us unnecessarily in the broils of foreign ambitions, to hazard our peace, to load down our people with incalculable burdens, to demoralize, deprave and undermine our democratic government and thus to unfit the great American Republic for its true mission in the world.
TO BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
I have read your open letter, published in the New York Herald of September 13th, with the liveliest interest. To be personally addressed by the renowned poet of Norway is to me an unexpected honor. You say that if you were “a German, more especially a German journalist, and a politician in America,” you would advocate an “alliance” between America and England and the adoption by the United States of a colonial policy with great armaments. If you were situated as I am you might, perhaps, think differently. I am proud of my German origin, but that origin has nothing to do with my views of American policies. I have been for more than forty years a citizen of this Republic. The citizenship of only a small minority of Americans is as old as mine. I am, therefore, more accustomed than you possibly can be, when forming opinions upon such problems as are now confronting us, to regard the maintenance of those free institutions which Abraham Lincoln defined as the “government of the
