feel herself in a state of chronic strangulation; and a man who feels strangled will struggle ruthlessly for breath.  To get breathing space, to secure frontiers which would ease an intolerable pressure, Frederic the Great could seize Silesia in time of peace in spite of his father’s guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, and could suggest the partition of Poland.  Frontier pressure thus led to ruthless conquest irrespective of rights; and that tradition has sunk deep.  It has been easier for England, an island state in the West exempt from pressure, to think in other terms:  it has been possible for Russia, secure in the East, to think, and to think nobly (as the present Tsar has done), of international obligation.  Nor is it an accident that sees England and Russia united in the common cause of Europe to-day—­that sees both championing the cause of small nations, one in the East, the other in the West.[185]

But in whatever way we may excuse Prussia we must fight Prussia; and we fight it in the noblest cause for which men can fight.  That cause is the public law of Europe, as a sure shield and buckler of all nations, great and small, and especially the small.  To the doctrine of the almightiness of the state—­to the doctrine that all means are justified which are, or seem, necessary to its self-preservation, we oppose the doctrine of a European society, or at least a European comity of nations, within which all states stand; we oppose the doctrine of a public law of Europe, by which all states are bound to respect the covenants they have made.  We will not and cannot tolerate the view that nations are ’in the state and posture of gladiators’ in their relations one with another; we stand for the reign of law.

Our cause, as one would expect from a people that has fought out its own internal struggles under the forms of law, is a legal cause.  We are a people in whose blood the cause of law is the vital element.  It is no new thing in our history that we should fight for that cause.  When England and Revolutionary France went to war in 1793, the cause, on the side of England, was a legal cause.  We fought for the public law of Europe, as it had stood since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.  We did not fight in 1870, because neither France nor Germany had infringed the public law of Europe by attacking the neutrality of Belgium, but we were ready to fight if they did.  A fine cartoon in Punch, of August, 1870, shows armed England encouraging Belgium, who stands ready with spear and shield, with the words—­’Trust me!  Let us hope that they won’t trouble you, dear friend.  But if they do——­’ To-day they have; and England has drawn her sword.  How could she have done otherwise, with those traditions of law so deep in all Anglo-Saxon blood—­traditions as real and as vital to Anglo-Saxon America as to Anglo-Saxon England; traditions which are the fundamental basis of Anglo-Saxon public life all the world over?  America once fought and beat England, in long-forgotten days, on the ground of law.  That very ground of law—­that law-abidingness which is as deeply engrained in the men of Massachusetts to-day as it is in any Britisher—­is a bond of sympathy between the two in this great struggle of the nations.