Page 249 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

230 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

now have reached. Decline, as well as rise,
must be gradual; and gradual likewise, grant-
ing the utmost possible spread of Christian
beliefs among them, will be the approximation
of the Eastern nations, as nations, to the prin-
ciples which powerfully modify, though they
cannot control wholly even now, the merely
natural impulses of Western peoples. And
if, as many now say, faith has departed from
among ourselves, and still more will depart in
the coming years; if we have no higher sanc-
tion to propose for self-restraint and righteous-
ness than enlightened self-interest and the
absurdity of war, war — violence — will be
absurd just so long as the balance of interest
is on that side, and no longer. Those who
want will take, if they can, not merely from
motives of high policy and as legal opportunity
offers, but for the simple reasons that they have
not, that they desire, and that they are able.
The European world has known that stage
already; it has escaped from it only partially
by the gradual hallowing of public opinion and
its growing weight in the political scale. The
Eastern world knows not the same motives,
but it is rapidly appreciating the material