om, peace on earth, and good-will
to men,--the United States, heretofore and seen in a large way, has,
among nations, assumed a peculiar, and, from the moral point of view,
unquestionably a lofty attitude. Speaking historically it might, and
with no charge of levity, be compared with a similar moral attitude
assumed among men eighteen centuries before by the Saviour. It
discountenanced armaments and warfare; it advocated arbitrations, and
bowed to their awards; spreading its arms and protection over the New
World, it refused to embroil itself in the complications of the Old;
above all, it set a not unprofitable example to the nations of benefits
incident to minding one's own business, and did not arrogate to itself
the character of a favorite and inspired instrument in the hands of God.
It even went so far as to assume that, in working out the inscrutable
ways of Providence, character, self-restraint, and moral grandeur were
in the long run as potent in effecting results as iron-clads and
gatling-guns.

Those who now advocate a continuance of this policy are, as neatly as
wittily, referred to in discussion, "for want of a better name," as
"Little Americans," just as in history the believers in the long-run
efficacy of the doctrines of Christ might be termed "Little Gospellers,"
to distinguish them from the admirers of the later, but more brilliant
and imperial, dispensation of Mohammed. That the earlier, and less
immediately ambitious, doctrine was, in the case of the United States,
only temporary, and is now outgrown, and must, therefore, be abandoned
in favor of Old World methods, especially those pursued with such
striking success by Great Britain, is possible. As historical
investigators we have long since learned that it is the unexpected which
in the development of human affairs is most apt to occur. Who, for
instance, in our own recent history could ever have foreseen that, in
the inscrutable ways of the Almighty, the great triumph of Slavery in
the annexation of Texas, and the spoliation of that inferior race which
inhabited Mexico, was, within fifteen years only, to result in what
Lincoln called that "terrible war" in which every drop of blood ever
drawn by the lash was paid by another drawn by the sword? Again, in May,
1856, a Representative of South Carolina struck down a Senator from
Massachusetts in the Senate-chamber at Washington; in January, 1865,
Massachusetts battalions bivouacked beside the smoking ru