To one of my political opponents, Mr. Schurz, who wrote me congratulating me upon the outcome at Portsmouth, and suggesting that the time was opportune for a move towards disarmament, I answered in a letter setting forth views which I thought sound then, and think sound now.  The letter ran as follows: 

OYSTER BAY, N. Y., September 8, 1905.

My dear Mr. Schurz:  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 as to 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 posse, the national guard, the regulars—­which can be called out to enforce the laws.  At present there is no similar international force to call on, and I do not as yet see how it could at present be created.  Hitherto peace has often come only because some strong and on the whole just power has by armed force, or the threat of armed force, put a stop to disorder.  In a very interesting French book the other day I was reading how the Mediterranean was freed from pirates only by the “pax Britannica,” established by England’s naval force.  The hopeless and hideous bloodshed and wickedness of Algiers and Turkestan was stopped, and could only be stopped,