Page 186 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

American Naval Power. 167

ist, is as little to the point as the morality of
an earthquake; the general action was justified
by broad considerations of moral expediency,
being to the benefit of the world at large, and
of the people of Egypt in particular— however
they might have voted in the matter.
But what is chiefly instructive in this occur-
rence is the inevitableness, which it shares in
common with the great majority of cases
where civilized and highly organized peoples
have trespassed upon the technical rights of
possession of the previous occupants of the
land — of which our own dealings with the
American Indian afford another example.
The inalienable rights of the individual are
entitled to a respect which they unfortunately
do not always get ; but there is no inalienable
right in any community to control the use of a
region when it does so to the detriment of the
world at large, of its neighbors in particular,
or even at times of its own subjects. Witness,
for example, the present angry resistance of the
Arabs at Jiddah to the remedying of a condi-
tion of things which threatens to propagate a
deadly disease far and wide, beyond the local-
ity by which it is engendered ; or consider the