Page:Americans (1922).djvu/255

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on the new religious spirit which is to embrace all mankind.

Miller's visitors did not always, however, find him preaching peace. His pacificism, like the popular American variety, was tempered by hatred of oppression and readiness to fight "on the side of the Lord." He accepted the "idealistic" interpretation of the Spanish-American War, and chanted lustily his encouragement of the struggle to free the Cubans from the tyranny of Spain. On the other hand, in his Chants for the Boer, 1900, he protested indignantly against the British imperial policy in South Africa; and his strong pro-English sympathies give a certain moral quality to his indignation. "Find here," he cries, "not one ill word for brave old England; my first, best friends were English. But for her policy, her politicians, her speculators, what man with a heart in him can but hate and abhor these? England's best friends to-day are those who deplore this assault on the farmer Boers, so like ourselves a century back."

There was an interesting element of inconsistency between the popular American humanitarianism which Miller had gradually adopted as his religion and his strongest poetical impulses, which were adventurous and imperialistic. In these later years the fire of his fighting youth slumbered in the veins of the white-bearded seer, but it was never extinguished, and, every now and then, it flashed out. In such seasons pilgrims to The Hights found that