Arizona republican., 1899-02-11
COMPULSORY CIVILIZATION.

The horror of the force expressed in newspapers and in the halls of con- gress; the extreme abhorrence with which the word conquest is men- toned; tine changes which are rung- on the horrors of war by gentlemen who. few months since, were clamoring for it's declaration, strike a great many disinterested hearers and readers as extremely curious when their source is considered; so strange are they, in- deed, as to create the suspicion that the utterances are not sincere; that the writers and orators do not believe what they say themselves.
 This talk against force, conquest, war and it's natural consequences ccmes from Americans, from citizens Of a nation which owes it's existence to war; it's pos tion among nations to con- quest and consequent expansion, and which, at no period of it's existence, has shrunk from force. Every British colony which effected a landing on these shores came here armed. Those devout Christians, Ethe Pilgrims, and, later, their Puritan fellow countrymen, formed no exception. They were as good men and Christians as lived in their day on tho earth, but they came to hold and to conquer. When in the earliest days they received from the savages a bunch of arrows tied up with a serpent's skin they returned to the senders the skin filled with powder and balls as a final answer. They kept the frank promise made to the heather; they stood by their altars and their fires; they defended their wives and little ones against the ruthless barbar ians; they stormed the strong places of the PequOts and other saVages; they drove the red demons like the chaff before the wind; they possessed their hunting grounds, the scenes of their brutish rites and orgies and torturings, and they never gave them back again. There was no talk in their day of yield ing ground merely because it had been taken by the strong hand f:Cm the en- emy. Later on the American people, had they been so disposed, could have get along peaceably with the mother country; they could have paid the stamp tax and the tea tax and all the other taxes; and could have lived along and submitted to taxation without rep resentation. since the larger number of true-born Englishmen at that time were not voters; but, instead they flew to arms. in the face of fearful odds, and won their independence, and many American gentlemen who now declaim against force and conquest and war are extremely proud that they are descend ed from the ragged and barefooted and i'll armed soldiers, who fought in sum mer's blaze and winters snow to es- tablish the imperialism of America.
 The expansion of the United States, from the first to the last, has been at tended by the exercise or the show of force. We made a peaceful purchase of Louisiana, but it was an American army officer, with his men at his back, who raised our flag at St. Louis, as it was a Spanish officed who lowered the flag of Spain and marched out the Spanish garrison. When we defeated the Mexican armies and took the Mexi- can capital we conquered the territory we afterwards took from Mexico. Jack son conquered Florida before it was ours. Does anybody propose to give back to the Indians, or Great Britain, or Spain, or Mexico, anything we won from them by the exercise and the right of war?
 Civilization has been maintained and extended in the world by war and con- quest It is the most civilized nations who in the end have conquered the less civilized and the uncivilized. It is be- cause of this that the tangled wilder ness has become a garden that the re- mote bay that mirrored but the rude canoes of painted savages has come to reflect the navies of commerce; that the squalid huts of hideous cannfbals have given way to marts and fanes and palaces; that the skull-built thrones of lbrutish chiefs have been supplanted by the seat of law and justice; that men innumerable have been raised to their feet to bear the likeness and image of manhood; and women have been lifted from filthy degradation and hopeless toll and the denial of souls fit even for a pagan heaven to love and hope and joy. All these have come through the triumph of civilization, and that as ccndancy has been gained, in the first instance, by war.-Kansas City Star