Western powers

“ Everything possible will be done to set major Western Powers against each other. Anti-British talk will be plugged among Americans, anti-American talk among British. Continentals, including Germans, will be taught to abhor both Anglo-Saxon powers. ”

“ This contest, between the mightiest of Western powers and a people that began to study Western science only within the recollection of many persons still in vigorous life, is, on one side at least, a struggle for national existence. ”

“ Is it not true that if these principles had been universally adopted, half the bitterness which has been due to the rivalry of the European Powers for colonial possessions would have been obviated? To-day these principles are being advocated by many earnest men as representing the only mode by which the supremacy of western civilisation throughout the world can be reconciled with the avoidance of bitter rivalry and war between the civilised states ”

“ Eighthly, the moral unrest deriving from these conditions has divided among themselves the various Entente Powers: United States of America, Great Britain, Italy and France, not only in their aims and policy, but in their sentiments. The United States is anxious to get rid, as far as possible, of European complications and responsibilities; France follows methods with which Great Britain and Italy are not wholly in sympathy, and it cannot be said that the three Great Powers of Western Europe are in perfect harmony. ”

“ Even more pacific than the British Empire were France and its allies, the Latin powers, heavily armed states indeed, but reluctant warriors, and in many ways socially and politically leading western civilisation. ”

“ This proposition deeply touched the heart of the western pioneer. He had probably crossed the Blue Ridge or the Cumberland Mountains when a boy, and was now in his prime. Rugged, hardy and powerful of frame, he was full to over-flowing with the love of adventure, and animated by a brave soul that scorned the very idea of fear. All had heard of the perpetually green hills and plains of Western Oregon, and how that the warm breath of the vast Pacific tempered the air to the genial degree and drove winter far back towards the north. ”

“ The fairly good of the old must be thrown out to make room for the fairly good of the new, but neither the limitations of our enjoyment nor the wealth of our creative talent will justify treating with prodigality such gifts as Sounds by the Western Sea. In reference to that little pamphlet there was in the Oregon public, ordinarily so sure and warmly quick, a curious embargo of the appreciative senses—eyes closed to the gleam shining through the small type and poor format, ears unresponsive to its cadences, imagination unquickened by the sweep and compass of its connotations. ”

“ The masters of Europe might quarrel among themselves. 2. Non-Europeans might set up rival wealth power centers and challenge Europe's world hegemony. 3. Colonials and other dependants might demand independence, and equal status in the family of nations. 4. Rootless middle classes and the wretched of the earth might join forces and pull down western civilization's house of cards. Western civilization, like its predecessors, was accepting and following one central principle: expand, grab and keep. ”

“ The Western boys rigged themselves in the cast-off bonnets and gowns, and the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps looked like a masquerading party as they filed across the pontoon.
For some unexplained reason, the Thirty Eighth was detained to support a battery, until the whole army had crossed the river, and the pontoon was taken up, when the battery moved on, and the regiment followed. Everything now in the rear was rebel; and the unfortunate soldier who fell out had a fair chance of seeing Galveston via Shreveport. The enemy followed, and had constant skirmishes with the cavalry ”

“ But the North-western farmer boys have looked on this rich soil; the North-western and the North-eastern lumbermen have felled the tall trees near the river-bank; the mechanics of Massachusetts and New York have seen the field for improved implements in husbandry and in domestic life; and ere many years this distant Southern country will put on a new life, and be the seat of an educated, industrious people.
The boat reached Alexandria at midnight, and, the next morning the regiment disembarked, and went into camp three miles beyond the city. ”

“ Banks’s army was then at Grand Ecore, and busily at work throwing up breastworks,—the pine forests furnishing abundant logs for the purpose,—while the river was crowded with gun-boats and transports. Of course the recent battles were the general topics discussed, and there appeared to be as many opinions regarding the details as there were soldiers present. The Western officers and men laid the blame of the repulse on the Eastern generals; the infantry charged it on the cavalry, the artillery on the infantry support; the navy on the army. ”

“ The third brigade of the second division was selected to garrison Alexandria, while the main body of the army moved up the country toward Shreveport; and the Thirty Eighth removed to one of the vacated camps, falling heir to the stock of boards collected by the Western men, who were adepts in building shanties. ”

“ The centre of Europe must be composed of states unequal in power, and each possessing its own peculiar system of policy. These states, from their situation and political relations, will seek support in the protection of the preponderating powers; and they will be interested in the maintenance of peace, because they must always be 24the victims of war. ”

“ There are, in my opinion, but two ways in which the overwhelming perplexities can be averted which a rupture with foreign powers, added to our troubles at home, would inevitably bring upon us. The one consists in great and decisive military success speedily accomplished, and the other in such measures and manifestations on the part of the government as will place the war against the rebellious Slave States upon a higher moral basis, and therefore give us the control of public opinion in Europe. ”

“ Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser." ”

“ It was only after five hundred years of such conflicts that the outlines of western civilization took definite political form:--a group of battle-hardened contestants, centered in Europe, heavily armed and equipped, intent on protecting and enlarging their home territory and extending their authority over dependencies and colonies in various parts of the planet. ”

“ History shows that the civilization to which we belong is subject to a general law which makes it advance with halts, in the manner of armies, in the direction of the Occident, making the sceptre pass successively into the hands of nations more worthy to hold it, more strong and more able to employ it for the general good.
So it seems that the supreme authority is about to escape from Western and Central Europe, to pass to the New World. ”

“ East and West have contributed to her greatness, and it is a matter of surprise to many of us that a country so long isolated and for so many years bound by feudalism should, within a comparatively short space of time, master our Western system of warfare, as well as many of our ethical and social ideas, and become a great world-power. ”

“ The presence of a new force makes itself felt,—a disturbing force, perhaps a dangerous force, but in any case a force fraught with fateful possibilities,—the force of national assertion, fostered by a growing desire among Eastern peoples for the liberty, the equality, the democratisation of the West, and rendered formidable by the acquisition of the applied sciences of Europe. ”

“ How far shall the modern world recognize nations which are not nations, but combinations of a dominant caste and a suppressed horde of serfs? Will it not be possible to rebuild a world with compact nations, empires of self-governing elements, and colonies of backward peoples under benevolent international control? ”

“ The second alliance of South and West had been effected, and “the people” had come to power a second time, only the West was now the dominant element. How would the West and “the people” use their power? ”

“ We know what might happen to us of the United States if the new philosophies of force were to encompass the other continents and invade our own. We, no more than other nations, can afford to be surrounded by the enemies of our faith and our humanity. Fortunate it is, therefore, that in this Western Hemisphere we have, under a common ideal of democratic government, a rich diversity of resources and of peoples functioning together in mutual respect and peace. ”

“ The spirit of conquest, of propagandism, and of system, has hitherto been the moving cause and master of the foreign policy of states. The ambition of princes or peoples has sought its gratification in territorial aggrandizement. Religious or political faith has endeavored to expand by imposing itself. Great heads of government have attempted to regulate the destinies of nations according to profound combinations, the offspring rather of their own thought than the natural result of facts. ”

“ I first give you, gentlemen, what I think the right principles of foreign policy.
The first thing is to foster the strength of the empire by just legislation and economy at home, thereby producing two of the great elements of national power—namely, wealth, which is a physical element, and union and contentment, which are moral elements,—and to reserve the strength of the empire, to reserve the expenditure of that strength, for great and worthy occasions abroad. Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. ”

“ It has become a tradition in the Near East to interpret every action of the European Powers as an attempt at political domination. America is the only power considered strong enough to provide the Orient with the capital and expert knowledge for its industrial development, without aiming at more than a legitimate profit. ”

“ And let no man at the East quiet himself, and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. Our alliance of blood, and political institutions, and common interests, is such, that we can not stand aloof in the hour of her calamity, should it ever come. ”

“ There is a sort of solemn joy in feeling that America, France, and Britain, the three nations which have contributed more than all the rest of the world put together to the establishment of liberty and justice on the earth, are now comrades in arms, fighting a supreme battle for these great causes. May this comradeship never be broken. May it bring about such a decision of the present conflict as will open a new era in the history of the world—a world now unified, as never before, by the final victory of Western civilisation which it is the purpose of this book to describe. ”

“ And we, who possess the world’s greatest fund of capital, that supreme weapon of modern conquest, we propose to place it at the disposal of foreign interests hostile to our fundamental and permanent foreign policies! ”

“ If Europe is no better, and the people of England have been so much worse, who has benefited by the new system of foreign policy? What has been the fate of those who were enthroned at the Revolution, and whose supremacy has been for so long a period undisputed among us? ”

“ The sharper definition of national boundaries, the extension of European civilization and control to the backward countries of the world, and the growth of a few vast political systems which begin to overshadow the earth, all tend to reduce the occasions for war, to simplify the problem of maintaining international peace. ”

“ Turkey under that of Germany, Persia under that of Russia and Britain. No region of the earth remained exempt from the indirect influence of the European system. The civilisation of the West had completed the domination of the globe; and the interests of the great world-states were so intertwined and intermingled in every corner of the earth that the balance of power among them had become as precarious as was the European balance in the eighteenth century. ”

“ Among the Allies, the two chief Imperial Powers, measured by the extent of territory they control, are Britain and France, and each of these is more completely prepared to-day than ever it has been before to consider its imperial possessions as a trust for their inhabitants and for mankind, and its position in the more fertile and less settled regions of the world as that of a mandatory and trustee. These admissions involve a plain prospect and promise of the ultimate release and liberation of all the peoples in these great and variegated Empires to complete world-citizenship. ”

“ That is, they are just such heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations. ”

“ At the beginning of this twentieth century the nations upon which depends the world's peace or war, happiness or misfortune, are the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Japan, and in the near future China. ”

“ The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. ”