Nation-building

“ They teach us that the foundations of this country are deep-rooted and that the process of nation-building, as recounted in these volumes, has proceeded upon right lines and with an unbounded fidelity to principle and purpose. ”

“ What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens. Citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character. ”

“ It points to the industry that underlies wealth, and to the wealth that makes military success possible. It lays stress upon the national or social conditions that render the great statute or legislative act necessary, and upon the pressure of food or population and the spurring of religious conviction that urge men to brave the sea and undertake colonization. It calls attention to the deep significance of peasants’ rebellions, religious revivals, and industrial revolutions in preparing the way for the rise of democracy and the transformation of the social life of a nation. ”

“ They had to invent and originate policies, to bring to light the resources of the land, sleeping unknown in the virgin soil; to open and make accessible to the husbandman the wild acres yet untouched; to protect the frontier settler against the inroads of the savage; to call into full activity the agricultural, commercial and industrial energies of the people; to develop and extend the prosperity of the Nation so as to make even the discontented cease to doubt that the National Union was, and should be maintained as, a blessing to all. ”

“ We will sacrifice our lives and our labors to protect the Union. This is our Nation, this is our Land, the land that we own. Our nation, our land will prosper with productivity and equality as pictured To unite in keeping to the duties of our valuable land. ”

“ And yet you can easily sec the radical necessity, in this respect, in two ways. For, first it is only men who can make a country. You may have rich, productive fields, vast mines of silver, of gold, and of diamonds; a genial clime; noble rivers, capacious harbors, nay, even large masses of inhabitants; and yet you may fail as a nation. That requires citizens with large, expanded minds, a fine culture, with natural or acquired manners, and a constant delicate honor; giving strength and solidity at home, and fair fame, respect, and character abroad. ”

“ Offsprings of the same continent, your institutions point out the path for the development of ours, your mental and moral advance fires the vigor of our spirit, your tireless activity excites us to action; in a word, your progress uplifts our noblest ambitions. We are both marching on to the victories of civilization, although your lot, in the course of history, shall have been that of forerunners.
One of your scholars has said that the American nation has rendered five eminent services to the world's civilization. ”

“ Have they come primarily to get or to give? Will the actions of each nation be governed purely by self-interest, to gain security, to insure colonial possessions, to learn new secrets of power for national aggrandizement? ”

“ Our manifest national policy has been foreshadowed by the conditions that have been created. Averse to wars of conquest, and free from disturbing visions of imperial power and grandeur, the nation has become great beyond the dreams of its founders. A new era is upon it—a condition and not a theory confronts it. Its traditions must be partially shattered and its policy revised and shaped with reference to the exigencies of the times. ”

“ 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." ”

“ But we have not yet achieved the level of political will and national capacity that enable a nation to transform its dream of modernization into reality. The true measure of national capacity is neither the size of a country's army, nor the way power is centralized in one man or group of men. ”

“ The high civilisation of the people, and their earnestness in the pursuit of peaceful industries, have enabled them to maintain their national existence through more dynastic changes than, perhaps, any other country or nation has experienced. ”

“ Just in proportion as such ideas are numerous, clear and true in the national mind, do their power augment and their domain extend; just so much more quickly and firmly do they express themselves, in acts, forms and institutions, and thus enable the nation to enrich, beautify and strengthen its own existence. ”

“ The genius of our institutions, the needs of our people in their home life, and the attention which is demanded for the settlement and development of the resources of our vast territory dictate the scrupulous avoidance of any departure from that foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of our Republic. ”

“ Seventh, and finally, among the collective goals of civilization, each has developed an ideology that justified empire building by conquest, exploitation, chattel slavery, peonage, wagery, the supremacy of the empire nucleus, the subordination of the periphery to the nucleus and other aspects of ascendancy and mastery including "divine" rights in politics and "natural" rights in economics.
Civilizations expect the individuals and groups of which they are composed to preserve the status quo, work as disciplined members of an effective team and be satisfied with the outcome. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With freedom and concert of action, it has enabled us to contend successfully on the battlefield against foreign foes, has elevated the feeble colonies into powerful States, and has raised our industrial productions and our commerce which transports them to the level of the richest and the greatest nations of Europe. And the admirable adaptation of our political institutions to their objects, combining local self-government with aggregate strength, has established the practicability of a government like ours to cover a continent with confederate states. ”

“ On the other hand, an extensive and well-organized system of national [220] education has been established throughout the empire; the slumbering intellectual powers of the nation have been aroused; wealth and intelligence developed; political and military ambition awakened; commercial enterprise created; agriculture revived; and of all those mighty powers which move and mould societies, the controlling influence of religion has alone remained stationary. ”

“ Each{102} nation, by preserving the integrity of its own territory, is more at liberty for intercourse with its neighbours, and for the development of the high ideals which are urging the peoples towards economic unity. ”

“ Do you not know that all progress comes from successful and peaceful industry, and that upon it is based your superstructure of education, of morals, of self-respect among your people, as well as every measure for extending and consolidating freedom in your public institutions? I am not afraid to acknowledge that I do oppose—that I do utterly condemn and denounce—a great part of the foreign policy which is practised and adhered to by the government of this country. ”

“ To develop the immense resources and wealth with which nature has so wonderfully endowed these countries; to render their territory accessible to labor and civilization by opening up means of communication, granting all facilities and giving security for the life, health, and welfare of their inhabitants; to obtain the population which their immense territories require: to educate and instruct the people, making them understand their liberty, their duties, and their rights; to develop their faculties and energies, their labor forces, their industrial and commercial capacity and power ”

“ As a nation develops in civilisation, or foreign policy, or in specialised ambitions, or in consciousness of nationality, or in peculiar constitutional identity, it has to develop new branches or systems of law, or to borrow them ready-made from nations whose polity is in advance of its own, who have made themselves representative nations in the particular branch of sociology in which it desires to regulate itself. ”

“ The public safety, and the relative interests of states; political establishments, the pretensions of party, commerce, and arts, are subjects which engage the attention of nations. The advantages gained in some of these particulars, determine the degree of national prosperity. The ardour and vigour with which they are at any one time pursued, is the measure of a national spirit. When those objects cease to animate, nations may be said to languish; when they are during a considerable time neglected, states must decline, and their people degenerate. ”

“ The nation and the national government will be the custodian of the national literature and the common law, the controller and perhaps the vehicle of intermunicipal and international trade, and an intermediary between its municipal governments and that great Congress to which all things are making, that permanent international Congress which will be necessary to insure the peace of the world. ”

“ Combining the strength of a great empire with unspeakable blessings of local self-government, having a central power to defend the general interests, and recognizing the authority of the States as the guardians of industrial rights, it is "the sheet anchor of our safety abroad and our peace at home." ”

“ The first goal was success in the struggle for survival. Collective uniformity and expansion opened the path to wealth and power, in the city, state, the empire, the civilization. From a multitude of local beginnings the struggle for expansion and consolidation led to ever larger aggregations of land, population, capital and wealth concentrated in the hands of an increasingly rich, powerful oligarchy, protected and defended by a military elite pushing itself ceaselessly toward a position from which it could make and enforce domestic policy and order. ”

“ If ever there were a period more suitable than another, for engaging in national improvements, it must be the present; governed as we are by a Sovereign, the munificent and accomplished Patron of the Arts, beneath whose mild and paternal sway, by the blessing of Divine Providence, we now enjoy profound peace; living under a government, by the enlightened policy of which, our trade and manufactures so extensively flourish; and represented by a Parliament, ever ready to foster, by the most liberal grants, any plans for the improvement of the Empire ”

“ As the competitive survival struggle develops, one of the contending parties establishes its superiority by winning military victory. In the course of this struggle the commonwealth, a cluster of equals, yields place to the pattern of empire--a center of wealth and authority with its associates, subordinates and dependencies.
The strong right arm of politics includes man-power, money and weapons. The politics of civilization faces a simple mandate: establish, stabilize and perpetuate a nucleus of wealth and authority; build around the nucleus a periphery of associates and dependencies. ”

“ When the inhabitants of the Low Countries had formed their system of government, and some remission of the war gave them leisure to form schemes of future prosperity, they easily perceived, that, as their territories were narrow, and their numbers small, they could preserve themselves only by that power which is the consequence of wealth; and that, by a people whose country produced only the necessaries of life, wealth was not to be acquired, but from foreign dominions, and by the transportation of the products of one country into another. ”

“ The foundation principle of that policy will be preference—preference in every market under the flag, at home, in the Colonies, and in the dependencies alike, for those members of the Imperial State who bear its burthens, increase its resources, strengthen its defence, and whose morale and organization, whose sufficiency in numbers and efficiency in spirit, can alone perpetuate its existence. ”

“ But, after a time, the people rise into greater power as an element of government, which assumes a more definite and responsible shape; industry and wealth, which serve to bind distant nations, are prodigiously developed; men unite more closely, not merely for purposes of Avar, but to cultivate the innumerable arts of peace; laws are digested into complete systems; the industrial and social relations and interests of various classes are consolidated; all the arrangements of society grow more intimate and complex. ”

“ Third comes nationalism. The government should help and guide the weak and small racial groups within its national boundaries toward self-determination and self-government. It should offer resistance to foreign aggression, and simultaneously it should revise foreign treaties in order to restore our equality and independence among the nations. 5. The program of national reconstruction shall be divided into three periods:- First the military period ”