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Show I WHY FOREBODINGS OF EVIL? I Periodically we are informed that Europe is I Preparing to combine against the United States and to either dismember this country or smash the I Monroe Doctrine and partition Spanish America, I each seizing its portion. Of course only seers and prophets can raech into the future and bring back its story for men I to road in advance, but on what solid ground can I theso forebodings of evil rest? Are the Latin I states to combine for this purpose? Not in the I nea' future, for the memory of Spain Is good, and I sho win decline. Is it to be Great Britain and Ger- many? N0t so jong Qreat Britain owns more 'and on this continent than the total area of the Unitod States, including Alaska, measures, and while Ireland, while continuing her truce, still re-fV re-fV ftisos to make a treaty. Supposing in their desire for more territory France should patch up her ancient an-cient enmity to Germany and join with Austria and Italy for a common purpose, what would Russia be doing? What did the British admiral In Manila Bay do the day previous to the land and sea assault as-sault on the city by the Americans? Such a war would necessarily be mostly a war by sea, and the Europeans would have to make their fight three thousand miles from their base, while every port of Mexico, Central and South America would be a home port for United States ships. Then the long purse, as a rule, decides wars, and the property prop-erty values of the United States have increased ' more in the past four years than all the wealth of either Russia, Austria or Italy amounts to. Again, as railroads increase in the southlands the danger every moment lessens. No, no. The danger or trouoie In this country is much nearer than any prospect of a foreign war. A war might easily have grown out of the anthracite anthra-cite strike last summer. Then there is a race problem in the south over which the rrlctlon Increases In-creases daily, and there are many Tillmans there. Then the gathered wealth of the east is giving loose hand to the vices which finally destroyed even old Rome, and the influence of that wealth makes disquietude, over all our country. There is a growing thought that the products of labor are not equally divided, and there are demagogues dema-gogues in plenty to feed this discontent. Our country has vastly more to fear from within than from without, and still there is hope ior the Republic has met and outrode far more dangerous storms than any that threaten now. If our statesmen were a little wiser and a little less conservative, they would favor giving guarantees to the railroad bonds of three or four South American Amer-ican states as insurance for future peace; for the men of the United States would build the roads, every one of which would be a rolling fort to protect those lands from assault from without and they would open lands to which the restless souls of the United States would gravitate by millions, mil-lions, so that the roads would really be a double guarantee of peace and would eventuate in a peaceable Anglo-Saxon conquest of those lands. |