Carl Schurz

“ Spain, as the weaker party, will be much more open to the imputation of timidity if she yields on any dubious point. Her proverbial pride may render it therefore especially painful to her to abandon any position she once has held. The impulse to vindicate what she conceives to be her national honor by fighting at any cost to the last extremity for what she had once claimed as her right, or against what she had once denounced as a wrong or an indignity, may therefore be especially potent with her, even though she might herself feel that she could not justly maintain her contentions. ”

“ If a person of great physical strength, he would be feared by some, esteemed by nobody and heartily detested as a public nuisance by the whole decent part of the community. A nation playing such a rôle would deserve and meet with the same judgment in the family of civilized nations, and at the same time it would cultivate within itself those forces of evil which are always developed by a perversion of the sense of honor, and the consequent loss of true moral dignity and of genuine self-respect. ”

“ There is one duty which strong men and strong nations that are imbued with a strong sense of honor will never forget. It is that the strong should scrupulously abstain from abusing their strength when dealing with the weak. Strong men and strong nations, conscious of their moral dignity, will be slow to take offense. ”

“ Although Spain might annoy us much with her fleet at the beginning of hostilities, in case of war, there is no doubt of our ability to defeat her thoroughly in a contest, the final result of which depends upon material staying-power and the tenacity of the popular spirit. Nobody questions this. Our manifest superiority is so great that there would be little glory in our triumph. Neither are we in the situation of a people whose reputation as to courage, bravery or patriotism is still to be established. ”

“ What true honor consists in, what constitutes an offense to one's honor and how the offended honor can or should be vindicated or restored, are questions which in different places and at different times have received different answers, according to the different conventional conceptions of honor or the different states of civilization there and then prevailing. ”

“ A true sense of national honor will move the American people to keep this well in mind at the present moment. It is not intended to inquire here what our grievance against Spain may be. Let us assume it to be very grave. What will then be the situation? This republic is very strong. Spain is, in comparison, very weak. We have a population of nearly 75,000,000. Spain has 18,000,000. We are immensely rich in ready means and still undeveloped resources. Spain is poor, with a heavy debt and impaired credit. ”

“ NATIONAL HONOR
BY CARL SCHURZ
The honor of a person, in the general sense of the term, is his moral dignity. To offend or wound a person's honor means to deny or impeach his moral dignity so as to lower it in the estimation of others, and perhaps also in his own self-respect. To forfeit one's honor means to do something, or to permit something to be done, which is incompatible with one's moral dignity. ”

“ All this is so well-known and so universally acknowledged that no forbearance on our part can ever by any possibility be misinterpreted as a lack of power or of pluck—or that, in fact, it can appear as anything else than the considerate self-control of conscious strength. ”

“ They will, of course, not permit themselves to be injured, or insulted, or trifled with, or balked by anybody at will, or to any length; but they will be especially solicitous to exhaust all peaceable means for the enforcement of their just demands, or for the amicable composition of differences, before their superiority of brute strength is brought into play. They can afford and they should use the greater forbearance as it cannot be charged either to weakness or timidity. ”