The Nome daily nugget., 1915-08-24
SEES FREEDOM IF OCEAN
 IN LUS|TAN|AS SINKING


 or the dropping of explosive bombs | npon quiet towns. but the fact that England, in the hope to suppress a r.Vai, has turned To ,se the Mongol, with 1 all that this fact means in the future of the world. The hrunt of the evil consequences will fall not on Germany but on America. Ana he next most wicked event was the agreement Eng + nd made with Japan that she would not cease to fight until Japan should be satisfied.
 This war is a horrible struggle for existence, for the opportunity for the heart to beat and the lungs to breathe the air. and we may we'll sympathize with all of the peoples engaged In it, but we should first have concern for our own welfare
 It is entirely plain what the course of America ought to have been in this gigantic struggle. The duty imposed upon her by the fact that she was the most influential of the non- -combat atant countries was to assert the rights of neutrals with such firmness as to com mand respect and to give proof that she was not pretending to be evenly poised between the belligerents while her opportunity to give reasonable ex- tension to those rights
 She ought to have told Germany that We had absolute legal justification for selling arms and ammunition to whom soever we pleased, and if we refrained it would be because of those human- tarian sentiments which MT. Wilson so unctuously upholds in his recent letter She ought to have told England that if we wanted to buy ships we would buy them from the Germans or from any one else who had them to sell. We ought to have demanded the right of neutrals to have some part in deter mining what shall be contraband of war; and not to have permitted the bellfgerents to say that oil, copper. food and everything else that we have to sell were included in that class. We ought to have told England that the North Sea was an open sea and that we proposed, if need be. to go there and trade We ought to have forbidden the use of our flag as a means of enabling belligerent vessels to sneak safely into their home ports.
 The three mile limit of Jurisdiction along the coast was fixed in the days of sailing vessels. Now that guns send their balls and bombs fifteen miles, it is an obsolete and ineffective rule. If England does not hesitate to declare the North Sea closed, and Germany to declare the waters around the British Isles war zone, it is high time that something of like kind be done in behalf of neutral interests. We ought to have notified the belligerents that
 o,o of their war vessels would be per- n,itted within twenty-five miles oi an American port, and thus to nave es- tablished principle of great l"pof- 4o odanted to existing conditions. We ought not to have been hunlliialeo hv asking England for permission to get ;,formation |, by way of the inter-oceanlc cable service due to Amerlcah thought and enterprise, and by having tha request refused. That commerce. of which our cousins deprived us by the depredations of the Alabama whiie we were at war fifty years ago. might have been regained with increase While thev are at war and it could have been done without sending our privateers to prey on them. At least an earnest ef- ! fort could have been made.
 1 It is perhaps too much to have eX- pected America to have struck the blow necessary to overthrow the domination lby one nation of the ocean, three- fourths of the surface of the earth Thraldom is a possible state only be- cause the thrall himself comedies its propriety The horse has long for gotten the steppes of Asia over which he roamed bidding defiance to wolf an6 tiger and he has become patient beast of burden. Slavery in the South would have been an impossible institu- ton had not the negroes come to re- gard it as the natural condition TOT themselves, their wives and their chii- dren And We have had sung to us SC loften from infancy to manhood: "Bri' ltannia Rules the Waves" that we ar' ' lstartled when we hear the propriety O 1.-the proposition queried. Sefptude Il normal and mental as well as physical !, It has remained for another race O linen of keen intelligence and stroni fibre to cut the withes which boun f Samson and to open up for us Vlst