Essays from the Chap-Book: Being a Miscellany of Curious and interesting Tales, Histories, &c; newly composed by Many Celebrated Writers and very delightful to read.Various
History
Essays from the Chap-Book: Being a Miscellany of Curious and interesting Tales, Histories, &c; newly composed by Many Celebrated Writers and very delightful to read.
Various
American essays; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism
IN a certain colored regiment there was a chaplain who was habitually
called by the negroes, with their usual gift at lucky misnomers, “Mr.
Chapman.” He was very fond of risky adventures, and one of the negroes
once said: “Woffor Mas’ Chapman made preacher fo’? He’s de fightin’est
mos’ Yankee I ebber see in all my days!” It is impossible not to read
this in reading what is written by these friends of peace, who are
constantly using the olive branch for a war club and hammering away
at those who think differently. The excellent Mr. Angell, in the last
number of “Our Dark Friends,” announces in one column that the object
of his paper is “the humane education of the millions,” and in another
column that it is to be wished “that England had not only Venezuela,
but every other Spanish-speaking colony on the face of the earth.” In
this manner, more prosaically, do Mr. Edward Atkinson and Mr. Edward D.
Mead hold it up as the highest desideratum for every part of Spanish
and Portuguese America to pass into English hands. Grant the force of
all their arguments, can this be regarded as the gospel of serenity and
brotherly love? It rather recalls Heine’s glowing description of one of
his early teachers, one Schramm, who had written a book on Universal
Peace, and in whose classes the boys pommelled each other with especial
vigor.
If jingoism there be on earth, where are its headquarters, its normal
school, its university extension system? Where, pray, but in the
example of England? No one who has watched the course of things at
Washington can help seeing the influence of that vast object-lesson.
Seeley’s book, “The Expansion of England,” is of itself enough to
demoralize a whole generation of Congressmen. It is the trophies of
Great Britain which will not allow Lodge and Roosevelt to sleep.
Logically, they have the right of it. If it be a great and beneficent
thing for England to annex, by hook or crook, every desirable harbor
or island on the globe; to secure Gibraltar by a trick, India by a
lucky disobedience of orders, Egypt by a temporary occupation of which
the other end never arrives,—why not follow the example? This impulse
lay behind the whole Hawaiian negotiation; it asserts itself in all
the Venezuela interference, in all the Cuban imbroglio. Moreover, it
is absolutely consistent and defensible, if England is, as we are
constantly assured, the great, beneficent, and civilizing power on the
earth. If so, let us also be beneficent; let us proceed to civilize;
let us, too, say, especially to all Spanish-speaking peoples, “Sois mon
frère, ou je te tue!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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