FROM PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT
Personal.
I thank you for your congratulations. As to what you
say about disarmament—which I suppose is the rough
equivalent of “the gradual diminution of the oppressive
burdens imposed upon the world by armed peace”—I am not
clear either what can be done or what ought to be done. If
I had been known as one of the conventional type of peace
advocates I could have done nothing whatever in bringing
about peace now, I would be powerless in the future to
accomplish anything, and I would not have been able to help
confer the boons upon Cuba, the Philippines, Porto Rico and
Panama, brought about by our action therein. If the Japanese
had not armed during the last twenty years, this would
indeed be a sorrowful century for Japan. If this country had
not fought the Spanish war; if we had failed to take the
action we did about Panama, all mankind would have been
the loser. While the Turks were butchering the Armenians
the European Powers kept the peace and thereby added a
burden of infamy to the nineteenth century, for in keeping
that peace a greater number of lives were lost than in any
European war since the days of Napoleon, and these lives
were those of women and children as well as of men; while the
moral degradation, the brutality inflicted and endured, the
aggregate of hideous wrong done, surpassed that of any war
of which we have record in modern times.
Until people get it firmly fixed in their minds that peace is valuable chiefly as a means to righteousness, and that it can only be considered as an end when it also coincides with righteousness, we can do only a limited amount to advance its coming on this earth. There is, of course, no analogy at present between international law and private or municipal law, because there is no sanction of force for the former while there is for the latter. Inside our own nation the law-abiding man does not have to arm himself against the lawless simply because there is some armed force—the police, the sheriff's