War & Peace Quote by Townsend Harris

Geography, in Harris's telling, isn’t just destiny; it’s a restraining order. His line turns the Pacific into a moral alibi for Western restraint: Japan survived not because Europe was enlightened, but because it was inconvenient. The implication is acid for anyone still clinging to mid-19th-century rhetoric about “civilization” and benevolent trade. Put Japan within cannon range of Dover or Calais, and the usual European reflexes - gunboat diplomacy, punitive expeditions, opportunistic annexation - would have kicked in “long ago.”

Harris, a businessman turned America’s first consul to Japan, is speaking from the pressure-cooker years around the 1850s, when Western powers were prying open Asian ports. Britain had just demonstrated how commerce could be enforced at gunpoint in China; France was expanding its imperial footprint. Harris is effectively saying: don’t mistake Japan’s continued sovereignty for a special respect earned. It’s an accident of distance.

The quote also doubles as a pitch for urgency. If proximity breeds war, then new steam routes, coaling stations, and faster navies collapse the very buffer he’s describing. The future will bring “nearness” even if the map doesn’t change. Underneath is a hard-nosed realism: international relations are less about mutual understanding than about reach, logistics, and appetite. Harris isn’t praising peace; he’s diagnosing the conditions that delay conquest - and warning Japan, and his own government, that the clock is already ticking.