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Show DANGEROUS BLUFFING. A study of the events that transpired in Eu-pp Eu-pp during the upward and downward career of arx-eon. reveals the fact that national promises d "ational covenants counted ror nothing; that therr -vras no SVLqx thing as national honor among Nte European governments. Napoleon scourged foerri all in turn, except Great Britain, and he 0 kept Great Britain trembling for fifteen years; they all inveighed against him, but while the truth reveals that he was entirely unscrupulous in his methods and his words, the only difference between him and all the rest, save the then Empress Em-press of Prussia, was that he had genius and the rest had not. When the present Emperor of Germany sent his fleet to China to exact reparation for the killing kill-ing by a mob of seven or eight German missionaries, mission-aries, it was as clearly an intended land-grabbing scheme at the outset as it was when the despoiling de-spoiling was accomplished. Except for the presence pres-ence and influence of tho American soldiers and government the rescue of the beleagured missionaries mission-aries would have been followed by the seizure and partition of the Chinese empire. The same thought is behind the insistance that the indemnity indem-nity levied upon China shall be paid in gold. The' bullying of poor Venezuela has the same look. It is possible that the Emperor of Germany has convinced his uncle of Great Britain that it is possible to put up a bluff too pretentious for the United States to call? Has he said, "With your navy and my army we can batter down the Monroe Doctrine and open the weak states of South America to our colonies. The show of force will be enough. The United States has no special love for the Latins to the South, as instance the giving back of Cuba to her people, a weakness no great power was ever guilty of before." If in his eagerness for fame and territorial aggrandizement ag-grandizement he has reached that point, he will be terribly humiliated before he gets through. Why the little South African war strained the resources re-sources of Great Britain almost to the breaking point and there the opposition was by only a few thousand "embattled farmers." The real countries coun-tries coveted are Southern Brazil, Paraguay, Ura-guay Ura-guay and Argentine. We very much doubt whether both Great Britain and Germany could take and hold those countries even if they had no help. They could capture tho coast cities all right enough, but with modern firearms in the hands of those people their marches into the Interior In-terior would be most disastrous. Then what would the United States be doing? There is a President in the White House just now who has had hard work all his life in keeping his belligerent propensities under control, there are behind him a martial people some millions of whom would hail a big war as a glorious opportunity. oppor-tunity. Then out In the Caribbean sea is a sailor who on one rather festive occasion advised a somewhat aggressive German admiral to "keep out of the line of my fire." Then what would France and Russia be doing? do-ing? Why such a war would cause the disintegration disintegra-tion of the British empire; it would leave Emperor William as desolate as was his great-grandmother under the brutalities of Napoleon. He knows this, too, and hence we take it he is merely attempting a monumental bluff with the hope that the United States is so much absorbed ab-sorbed in business that she will not call that Vuff. It must be so for he ought to know that there are German-Americans enough in this country to take in any armies that he might send this way, and Irish-Americans enough not only to whip in open battle any forces that Great Britain could send, but to take in Canada besides. If there is a new Anglo-German alliance, formidable for-midable as it may seem, It must not attempt the founding of colonies on American soil, for should it, both nations will be more distressed before the matter is finished than they were when Napoleon started on his fatal march to Moscow. |