nor yet only in a fundamental similarity of character and institutions.  Besides these, useful as they are to mutual understanding, that government has an extensive and varied experience, extending over centuries, of the vital importance of distant regions to its own interests, to the interests of its people and its commerce, or to its political prestige.  It can understand and allow for a determination not to acquiesce in the beginning or continuance of a state of things, the tendency of which is to induce future embarrassments,—­to complicate or to endanger essential welfare.  A nation situated as Great Britain is in India and Egypt scarcely can fail to appreciate our own sensitiveness regarding the Central American isthmus, and the Pacific, on which we have such extensive territory; nor is it a long step from concern about the Mediterranean, and anxious watchfulness over the progressive occupation of its southern shores, to an understanding of our reluctance to see the ambitions and conflicts of another hemisphere approach, even remotely and indirectly, the comparatively peaceful neighborhoods surrounding the Caribbean Sea, bearing a threat of disturbance to the political distribution of power or of territorial occupation now existing.  Whatever our interests may demand in the future may be a matter of doubt, but it is hard to see how there can be any doubt in the mind of a British statesman that it is our clear interest now, when all is quiet, to see removed possibilities of trouble which might break out at a less propitious season.

Such facility for reaching an understanding, due to experience of difficulties, is supported strongly by a hearty desire for peace, traditional with a commercial people who have not to reproach themselves with any lack of resolution or tenacity in assuming and bearing the burden of war when forced upon them.  “Militarism” is not a preponderant spirit in either Great Britain or the United States; their commercial tendencies and their isolation concur to exempt them from its predominance.  Pugnacious, and even warlike, when aroused, the idea of war in the abstract is abhorrent to them, because it interferes with their leading occupations, and its demands are alien to their habits of thought.  To say that either lacks sensitiveness to the point of honor would be to wrong them; but the point must be made clear to them, and it will not be found in the refusal of reasonable demands, because they involve the abandonment of positions hastily or ignorantly assumed, nor in the mere attitude of adhering to a position lest there may be an appearance of receding under compulsion.  Napoleon I. phrased the extreme position of militarism in the words, “If the British ministry should intimate that there was anything the First Consul had not done, because he was prevented from doing it, that instant he would do it.”