works on
French History.

The American public has been carefully trained to avoid entanglement
with foreign affairs. This European war was so unexpected, so entirely
unforeseen, that we were at first bewildered, and then exasperated, by
our unreadiness to meet our own emergencies.

In our effort to fix responsibility we then became partisan to the verge
of moral participation and had to be called to our senses by the wise
proclamation and warning of our Chief Magistrate.

Western Europe is a nearer neighbor than either Central or Eastern, and
what stern censors permit us to know is nicely calculated to arouse our
prejudice on one side or the other. Believing that, owing to cable
cutting and neutrality restrictions of wireless, as yet the plain truth
is not available, we ask for a suspension of judgment on both sides in
order that our Government may enjoy the undivided support of all
American citizens in its desire to secure a minimum of disturbance to
the normal course of our commercial, industrial, and agricultural life
by convulsions that are not of our making.

Fairness to ourselves means justice in the formation and expression of
opinion about not one or two but all the participants in a struggle for
European ascendency, with which we have nothing to do except as
overwhelming victory for either side might bring on a struggle for world
ascendency, with which, unhappily, we might have much to do. To
contemplate such a terrible event should sober us; the best preparation
for it is absolute neutrality in thought, speech, and conduct.

Our own history since independence is an unbroken record of expansion
and imperialism. Our contiguous territories have been acquired by
compulsion, whether of war, of purchase, of occupation, or of exchange.
We have taken advantage of others' dire necessity in the case of Great
Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico.

To rectify our frontier we compelled the Gladsden Purchase within the
writer's lifetime. As to our non-contiguous possessions, we hold them by
the right of conquest or revolution, salving our consciences with such
cash indemnity as we ourselves have chosen to pay, and even now we are
considering what we choose to pay, not what a disinterested court might
consider adequate, for the good-will of the United States of Colombia, a
good-will desired solely and entirely for an additional safeguard to the
Panama Canal and a prop to the policy or doctrine substituted