As with the individual, so with the nation:  there come high moments in a nation’s life, when a strong people might resist and deliberately chooses not to.  As an illustration, take our Mexican problem.  The announcement that under no circumstances would we intervene, may have led to misunderstanding.  Our purpose to let the Mexican people work out their own problem may have been taken to mean that we would not justly protect ourselves, with consequent encouragement to border raiding.  Nevertheless, if there has been any error in handling the situation, it has been on the better side—­on the side of patience, generosity, long-suffering, giving the other fellow another chance, and another and another, even though he does not deserve them.  Now that is not the side on which human nature usually errs.  The common temptation is to selfishness and unjust aggression.  Since that is the case, if we cannot strike the just balance, it is better to push too far on the other side and avoid the common mistake.

Suppose, after the War, Japan, alone or in conjunction with one or another European power, closes the door to China:  one can imagine circumstances where we, with the right to insist that the door be kept open, and perhaps, by that time, something of the strength to enforce that right, might deliberately say, “No, we will not resist.”  Not that, with our present situation, such action is desirable, but that one can imagine conditions arising where it might be the higher choice.

Let me repeat that, for the nation as with the individual, these high moments must rest on something else.  They are the high mountain peaks of the moral life; but detached mountain peaks are impossible,—­except as a mirage.  They must rest upon the granite foundation of the hills and plateaus below.  So these high virtues of non-resistance, magnanimity and self-sacrifice must always rest upon the granite foundation of the masculine virtues of self-affirmation, endurance, heroism, strong conflict with evil.  It takes strength to make magnanimity and self-sacrifice possible, if their lesson is not lost.  A weak man cannot be magnanimous, since his generosity is mistaken for servile cowardice.  After all, the best time to forgive your enemy, for his good and yours, is not when he has his foot on your neck:  he is apt to misunderstand and think you are afraid.  It is often better to wait until you can get on your feet and face him, man to man, and then if you can forgive him, it is so much the better for you, for him and for all concerned.

Thus there are two opposite lines of error in the moral life.  The philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain extremes of his teaching, represents the other.  Nietzsche, I suppose, should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with their splendid gospel of self-realization.  Nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation apart—­Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house.  It has always seemed to me not without significance that his own life ended there.