less
severely blamed for their behaviour in this matter, than for far more
excusable offences. American historians, for example, usually condemn
them without stint because in 1814 the army of Ross and Cockburn burned
and looted the public buildings of Washington; but by rights they should
keep all their condemnation for their own country, so far as the taking
of Washington is concerned; for the sin of burning a few public
buildings is as nothing compared with the cowardly infamy of which the
politicians of the stripe of Jefferson and Madison, and the people whom
they represented, were guilty in not making ready, by sea and land, to
protect their Capital and in not exacting full revenge for its
destruction. These facts may with advantage be pondered by those men of
the present day who are either so ignorant or of such lukewarm
patriotism that they do not wish to see the United States keep prepared
for war and show herself willing and able to adopt a vigorous foreign
policy whenever there is need of furthering American interests or
upholding the honor of the American flag. America is bound scrupulously
to respect the rights of the weak; but she is no less bound to make
stalwart insistance on her own rights as against the strong.
Their Treachery towards Both the Indians and the Americans.
The count against the British on the Northwestern frontier is, not that
they insisted on their rights, but that they were guilty of treachery to
both friend and foe. The success of the British was incompatible with
the good of mankind in general, and of the English-speaking races in
particular; for they strove to prop up savagery, and to bar the westward
march of the settler-folk whose destiny it was to make ready the
continent for civilization. But the British cannot be seriously blamed
because they failed to see this. Their fault lay in their aiding and
encouraging savages in a warfare which was necessarily horrible; and
still more in their repeated breaches of faith. The horror and the
treachery were the inevitable outcome of the policy on which they had
embarked; it can never be otherwise when a civilized government
endeavors to use, as allies in war, savages whose acts it cannot control
and for whose welfare it has no real concern.
Doubtless the statesmen who shaped the policy of Great Britain never
deliberately intended to break faith, and never fully realized the awful
nature of the Indian warfare for which they were in p
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