THE KING AMONG NATIONS IN HIS HALL by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 15, 1899

THE KING AMONG NATIONS IN HIS HALL.

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson

[By Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Saturday Evening Post.]

If we must accept imperialism under the name of expansion; if we must lay the policy of Washington forever aside; if we must set up our flag all over the globe to follow the morning drum-beat of England, let it be so, tho not without some final words of plain speaking. But, above all things, do not let us throw dust on the memory of our fathers, or ignore the stupendous work they did. Nothing in the present phase of discussion seems to me so curious as the assumption, more and more constantly made, that this nation has pursued a policy of selfish isolation, or needs to apologize for having done no more. Let us consider this a moment.

There are two forms of usefulness: that exerted by a man or nation through staying at home and bringing others within his sphere of influence, or that of going abroad and hunting up opportunities. The fine old writer, John Selden, in his 'Table Talk,' in speaking of the early English kings, does not tell us what foreign wars they waged, but he says, 'The king himself used to eat in the hall, and his knife with him, and thus he understood men.' King Richard, neglecting his kingdom to wage useless war for the Holy Sepulchre, was not so fine a figure, or worth so much to the world, as this king, who learned to understand men by remaining in his own hall, and welcoming them there.

This nation of ours has hitherto been such a king among nations. I saw at the Queen's Jubilee last year, in London, the hitherto unknown premiers of English colonies,—places sometimes little and unimportant,—summoned from all parts of the world to pose as representatives of the glory of England; and I said to a member of the Privy Council: 'Why not recognize the fact that there are in the United States three times as many natives of the British Isles as are to be found in all the British colonies put together?' He said in reply, 'That is our skeleton in the closet; we do not speak of that.' (For the exact figures, see Dilke's 'Problems of Greater Britain,' page 17, and Besant's 'Rise of the Empire,' page 116.) Which is greater, to receive the subjects of another government and bid them prosper, or to send our own children to fight and die in creating new colonies?

That which is spoken of so lightly by the imperialists of to-day, as if it were a merely trivial duty, has been the magnificent work of continental expansion. This was impossible for England, having no continent to expand in. It was universally recognized that England, like Holland, must shrink into insignificance, or else colonize; but for a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific there is no such alternative. There could be no insignificance for it.

The nation which has seen its own self-governing States multiply from thirteen to fifty, which has sacrificed nearly half a million lives to abolish slavery within its borders; which has spread its inventions and its natural products over all the earth, does not need to apologize for itself. Whatever faults have been charged upon the American, no one has ever called him a drone upon the earth's surface. The test of his success is not in the colonies which he has sent out to the islands of the sea, nor the military expeditions by which he governed them, but in the way in which he has brought the natives of far-off islands,—for instance, the British,—to take refuge with him. When Sir Charles Dilke writes, 'The English emigrant still resorts mainly to the United States,' he vindicates our claim to the world's gratitude more than if he could give a list of a hundred of our colonies.