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Show RUSSIA'S PURPOSE. The Czar in his letter to his commander in the Orient exactly outlined Russia's policy in the present war. It is nothing less than the domination domina-tion of the Pacific. At last we have a frank and honest declaration of purpose. No doubt that was the purpose when Russia simulated such astonishment as-tonishment that Japan should begin the war just when Russia was seeking with so much solicitude to maintain peace. Japan saw not only the intention, inten-tion, but the ceaseless, insidious preparations that her great enemy was making and struck not only for victory, but for her own national life. She only anticipated what Russia would, if Japan had not moved, have precipitated in June or July. Judged as men judge each other, Russia was, for months and years, not only lying to Japan, but to all the impbrtant powers of the world. It comes then in bad grace for her to affect to be grieved that the world's sympathy is not with her, especially espe-cially American sympathy. We owe Russia a great measure of gratitude for what she did when our national life was in peril. No matter whether it was love for us or hate of England and France the gratitude is due just the same, for the service serv-ice was immeasurable. But that gratitude does not, at least it should not, make us incapable of judging between right and wrong. Japan has never wronged us. It was the ships of the Unit- ed States that broke down the barriers that she had raised between herself and the world. She asked for nothing save to be let alone. "When her gates were swung back for the world to enter, en-ter, she presented a marvelous spectacle. Forty millions of people crowded into her narrow Island Kingdom, all happy, all at work, very few rich few very poor, and everywhere order and peace. She had solved the problem which the world before be-fore her could not solve, which since it has been unable to solve the problem of clothing and feed-ing feed-ing tens of millions of people on circumscribed areas of land and at the same time securing order or-der and peace and happiness. Since then, in a brief fifty years we have seen that country advance ad-vance until in the arts of both peace and war she is abreast of the world's foremost nations. On the other hand Russia that has claimed to be a Christian nation for centuries, is a despotism and in her thirst and hunger for more land she has neglected her own brave people until quite 100,000,000 of them are poor beyond discription pitiably ignorant, living merely from hand to mouth and without hope. But while cruelly neglecting ne-glecting her own people she is willing to go to war and sacrifice thousands and tens of thousands thou-sands of her brave subjects rather than surrender sur-render an assumed claim on a little peninsula about the size of Utah, that pushes its lower point out into the Pacific. She is moved by the same avarice that caused the colored man in the story to declare that all he wanted was the little land that joined his. But Russia's expressed determination to dom inate the Pacific has an interest to more than the Japanese. On this side of the Pacific is a country with more coast line on the great ocean than Russia owns. It is inhabited, too, by an alert and gifted and brave people; its trade is much more important than Russia's trade; it has demanded de-manded no land, no stations, no dominion our r part o tka-Asian coast, but it has demanded that for the trade off the Orient there should be door open to all nations alifcex And Russia with the others agreed to that and she will have to keep that agreement or she will have to deal with a nation of twice forty millions of people and with the ships of a power that never yet have been vanquished, not once since "old Ironsides" Iron-sides" set a new pace for sea-fighters and the smoking wrecks of Spain's fleets at Manila and on the beach outside of Santiago gave fearful proof that the old pace was still maintained. |
