Peace Given As the World Giveth Or the Portsmouth Treaty And Its First Years

war between the empires of Russia and Japan. Deeming such a step on his part most indiscreet and unlikely to be successful, except upon terms which any representative of a republic would have reason to deplore, I wrote the following letter LES BAINS June 3, 1905. My dear Mr. President You have the ear of Dionysius, but you do not use it for the same purpose. The tyrant 1 Peace I leave with you my peace I give unto you not as the world giveth give I unto you. John xiv, 2T. PEACE GIVEN they are, haye yet reached or apparently ap proached the level of the evils and foul in humanities which are to be expiated. The rulers of Russia for the last two cen turies have been to Europe what the sons of Anakim were to the Hebrew emigrants from Egypt in the time of Moses, a menace and a terror. We have heard all our lives the cry, Who can stand before these sons of Anak From their first emergence in history as a nation they have preyed upon all neighboring territories like a cancer, and by predatory habits compelled the rest of the civilized world not only to go constantly armed but to provide weapons of ever-increasing number and costliness for self-defense. It would seem as though the beginning of the end of this international terror was at hand, but I think those have read history to little purpose who think the end itself and a durable peace is at hand. The Master who is a silent party to all wars is not worrying about the holders of Russian securities in St. Petersburg and Frankfort and Paris and London, or in Wall Street. AS THE WORLD GIVETH He is not worrying either about the slaughter of His creatures whose blood is staining the soil of Manchuria and the waters that bathe the shores of Korea. He is thinking rather of the government and institutions to be provided for the training of countless future generations for a higher seat in His King dom. Such changes in a population to be counted not by millions but by hundreds of millions are not wrought in a day or a year. They re quire more frequently centuries. The Ameri can colonists, in the main a very superior class of people, had to endure the caprices and tyr anny of a crazy monarch for nearly fifty years before they were brave enough, strong enough, and wise enough to assert their independence. We had to endure for more than a century and then fight the bloodiest and most costly war of which history had then any record, be fore we were able to eliminate from our Con stitution the shameful privilege of property representation which was shared only by a minority of our States and population an inequality which was utterly unreconcilable PEACE GIVEN with the elementary principles of popular sovereignty. Beginning with the revolution in France of 1793, succeeded by perpetual agitation and repeated political convulsions which lasted for nearly a century, and then only after a fear fully bloody dynastic war, did the French people succeed in the expulsion or extinction of the several races of her oppressors and in the establishment of a constitutional popular government which has already endured more than three times as long as the average dura tion of her dynastic governments for the three preceding centuries. What it took France nearly a century to accomplish, who can name the limits of the time it may take Russia to accomplish, with fully twenty times the popu lation that France had in 1793, that can neither read nor write and who probably never had an ancestor that could ...