[2

v.] pROISIVE IMPORTANCE OF AMERICAN COMPETITION

how many cases of intervention by England does &w
Englishman now not admit that they were monstrc
and inexcusable blunders, and that if we had pursued
the alternative method of doing the work of government
well at home and among our dependencies, improving our
People, lightening the burdens of commerce and manufacbureg,
 husbanding wealth, we should have augmented our
Wn material power, for which great national wealth is only
Snother word ; and we should have taught to the govern-“06nts
 that had been exhausting and impoverishing themselves
 jn war, the great lesson that the way to give conbent,
 enlightenment, and civil virtues, to your people,
nd a solid strength to their government, is to give them
Peace. Tt is thus, Cobden urged, that the virtues of nations
Operate both by example and precept; and such is the
Power and rank they confer, that in the end * states will all
burn moralists in self-defence.”
These most admirable pages were no mere rhetoric. They
represented no abstract preference, but a concrete necessity.
The writer was able to point to a nation whose example
of pacific industry, wise care of the education of her
young, and abstinence from such infatuated intervention as
ours in the affairs of others, would, as he warned us, one
day turn us into moralists in self-defence, as one day it
assuredly will. Tt is from the peaceful nation in the west,
and not from the military nations of the east, that danger
to our strength will come. “In that portentous truth,
The Americas are Sree, teeming as it does with future change,
there is nothing that more nearly affects our destiny than
the total revolution which it dictates to the statesmen of
Great Britain in the commercial, colonial, and foreign policy
of our Government, America is once more the theatre upon
which nations are contending for mastery; it is not, how-Bver,
 a struggle for conquest, in which the victor wili

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