Page 281 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

262 A Twentieth- Century Outlook.

sors, and may be faithless to its charge quite
as truly by inaction as by action, by omission
as by commission. Failure to improve oppor-
tunity, where just occasion arises, may entail
upon posterity problems and difficulties which,
if overcome at all — it may then be too late —

will be so at the cost of blood and tears that
timely foresight might have spared. Such
preventive measures, if taken, are in no true
sense offensive but defensive. Decadent con-
ditions, such as we observe in Turkey — and
not in Turkey alone — cannot be indefinitely
prolonged by opportunist counsels or timid
procrastination. A time comes in human
affairs, as in physical ailments, when heroic
measures must be used to save the life of a
patient or the welfare of a community ; and if
that time is allowed to pass, as many now
think that it was at the time of the Crimean
war, the last state is worse than the first, — an
opinion which these passing days of the hesi-
tancy of the Concert and the anguish of
Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages,
surely indorse. Europe, advancing in distant
regions, still allows to exist in her own side,
unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-

/