Politics & Power Quote by George William Norris

Norris is doing something slyly radical here: he smuggles a moral argument into the dry, procedural language of policy options. “Fourth” signals committee-room pragmatism, not crusading idealism. But the proposal is anything but neutral. An embargo “against the shipping from American ports” turns the United States’ real leverage - commerce - into a disciplinary tool aimed at “either one of these governments,” a deliberate refusal to pick favorites. In an era when neutrality was often a costume for business-as-usual, Norris is insisting that neutrality should bite.

The key phrase is “persisted in maintaining its military zone.” That’s a polite way to describe a coercive expansion of state power into supposedly open space - the sort of “zone” that rewrites rules by force and then dares others to accept the new normal. Norris’ intent is to punish that behavior without marching Americans into war: make the cost of aggression economic rather than human.

The subtext is aimed as much at domestic elites as at foreign capitals. He’s warning that American merchants, shippers, and political patrons can become silent accomplices to militarization abroad, laundering aggression through trade. An embargo would sever that pipeline and, crucially, shift the burden from taxpayers and soldiers to the parties profiting from continued exchange.

Context matters: Norris was a leading progressive, a skeptic of militarism, and a fierce critic of corporate influence in foreign policy during the interwar period. This line reads like an early blueprint for the sanctions era - an attempt to replace the romance of “honor” with the blunt arithmetic of access, markets, and ports.