The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1900-01-26
THE VOICE OF ENaLIss CONSCIENCE.
(From an article by Dr. Fairbairn, the
head of Mansfield college, oxford,
in the London Speaker,)

in the London Speaker)
Did we go into this war with clean
hands?
We have been often told of late that
we are an imperial race. The mark of
an imperial race is that it knows how to
govern, which is an art of peace-and
England has never been greater in rule
than in war. She holds India and her
colonies not by force of arms, but by
the rigor of her equality, the justice of
her laws, the honor, the wisdom and the
statesmanship of the men she has COM
missioned to govern in her name She
has had her heroes who have done
brave deeds on sea and on land, but
they did not make her empire, though
they may have been minor factors in
it's making, factors of its possibility
rather than of it's actuality. Her en-
pire was made by the men who repre-
sented to the subject of nascent peo-
pies English justice and English law.
And 1t is remarkable that the CEN
tury which has built up our immense
empire has not been a century that
loved war. It's supreme achievements
have been attempts to create self-gov-
erning communities, to found colonies
that were children not of the bondwo-
man but of the free, to emancipate the
slave, to secure liberty and light for the
lower races, protecting them from the
brutalizing hands of civilized greed,
and supplying them with the opportu-
nifty of profiting by the wealth and in
dustry of more advanced peoples.
These deeds which have made our
empire have created for us a character
which we have not been slow to boast.
We have hidden oppressed nations look
to us as a helper and friend. In our
more heroic moods we helped to liberate
Greece, to unity Italy, to crush the fe-
rocity Of the Turks to rebuke the states
that dismembered Poland and oppress-
ed Hungary. But now when our policy
and opportunity have come, what have
we done?
The Beers may be rude and intolerant,
but at any rate they so loved freedom
that they wandered into the wilderness
rather than struggle with us on the soil
which they had by their labor and
sweat of generations made their own.
And when some men Of our race and
blood, trading on the fair name of En-
gland, tried to raid their territory and
steal their freedom, what did we do?
Did we gravely and seriously deal with
the offense as wrong to a sister state,
with all the greater a claim on our con-
sideration that it was so much weaker
than ourselves? Did we not rather,
by the mouth of our most responsible
minister, declare that the man who had
been, by a committee of our own par
lament, found most seriously to blame,
had done nothing unbecoming an hon.
orable statesman? How this affected a
icti cta r
ed the party of the ministers may be
read in Mr.. Leckys latest book.
But if it so affected an English poll
tician who was a scholar and gentle
man, how must it have affected the
state which suffered from the wrong
that England had not the courage to
redress? Were we within our right in
asking the Beers to redress the griev-
ances Of foreigners while we ourselves
left their unredressed?
1t is not a question of what the Beers
.lwere, but of what we owed to ourselves
to the principles we had professed and
the policy we had prided ourselves on
being able to pursue.
In one respect England is the richest
country in the world in another she is
one of the poorest. Her wealth is well
nigh ineXhaustible, but the same can
not be said of her supply of sons.
No state in the history of the world
ever levied such a tax upon the man
hood of her people as England does!
For her services at home and abroad
in her dependencies and her colonies
she asks men of quality and in guam
tity without a parallel in the history OF
states. If we need to husband any
where it is in the matter of our men
here our wealth is most exhaustible
and every capable unit is a force above
money and above price.
And what has happened to US in Soutf
Africa? Can any man measure the los.
we have sustained and are destined still
to sustain? There is hardly a family
from peasant to prince who does no
mourn a son or a brother. I know {
city which sits desolate amid the hills
and feels as If she had suffered from {
second Flodden. No one would lament
however much they might mourn, losse
in a just, a noble or a necessary cause
but what turns our lamentations int
anger Is the loss in a cause so dispropor
tionate to the cost of so many of tn
bright and brave sons which our moth
erland, our daughter colonies and on
most dependent dependencies so sorel
need.
The English are patient people, wit
a conscience not easily touched whe
the world is looking on; but once the
are awake they do not again slumbe
until they have executed judgment an
exact retribution for wrong.