Never in my life shall I forget the hours in which I wrestled with these problems—the weeks and the months of perplexity and despair. It happened long before I ever heard of Mr. Adams—for of course these thoughts of his are the thoughts of the time, there is a whole literature of them, from Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. And to look back over the weary wastes of history—the blind, hideous nightmare of blood and tears—and then to look forward, and in all the future see nothing else! To see never any rest for agonised humanity, only kill or be killed for ages upon ages! To see this newest and noblest effort of man after freedom and peace—the American Republic—turned into an engine of slaughter and oppression! To be shown by cold, scientific formulas that my reverence for the traditions of Lincoln was merely an “emotional impulse,” and that the end of it could only be that my country would share “the fate of the discarded!” I could not believe it—I cried out in the night-time for deliverance from it. [1]There is a certain relentlessness about Mr. Adams, which fills the reader with rebellion, and makes him think. The average imperialist carefully avoids doing this; he veils his doctrines with moral phrases, with the decent pretence of “destiny” at the very least. But Mr. Adams dances a very war-dance upon the thing called “moral sense”—never before was it made to seem such an impertinent superfluity. Footnote 1: Portions of the following argument were published as an article in the _North American Review_. Have you, the reader, never had one smallest doubt? Does it not, for instance, seem strange to you now, when you think of it, that this mighty people cannot stay quietly at home and live their own life and mind their own affairs? How does it happen that our existence as a nation depends upon expansion? Is it that our population is growing so fast? But here is our Imperialist President lamenting that our population is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find room for our children; and we have to have more children in order that we may be able to fight! We deplore race suicide, and we give as our reason that it prevents race-murder! Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an island. If the island be fertile they can get along without any foreign trade, can they not? And then why cannot a _nation_ do it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two millions of our agricultural labourers were raising food for foreign countries. And all our imports are luxuries, save a few things such as tea and coffee and some medicines! And still our existence as a nation depends upon foreign trade—trade with Filipinos and Chinamen, with Hottentots and Esquimaux! Why?