upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy.  It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force.  If there is no intention of providing and of keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.

The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice.  There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war.  Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace.  Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace.  The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war.  The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward others.  Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due-first to the cause of righteousness.  Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should be shunned.  The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced.  One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards.  Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it.  The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings.

If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger aspects should be.  It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other.  But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to