But what we really can do is to build up, especially
with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good
neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties of commerce and esteem.
The war may tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of
affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying
awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard
to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of
the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of one of those very
few countries referred to.
Europe's preoccupation with the war temporarily deprives such a country
and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera,
the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in
the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones
that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even
these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak
country in contact with European powers, who once said: "If we only had
the United States for a neighbor! What I can't understand is that your
neighbors do not realize their good luck." Turning from these
exceptional phenomena, the very fact of the war leaves the United States
in a general position of greater political prestige.
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