The balance of probabilities is still on the side of peace. That is to be said with confidence, despite the alarmist rumors and truculent menaces so generally extant. Delay is making for peace by giving reason time to conquer passion. Men do not keep at white heat permanently. They either cool off or are consumed. A dozen times since the Cuban war began there has been a fierce clamor for intervention. Those who were loudest then see now that such action would have been a deplorable mistake. When Antonio Maceo was killed, men demanded war. But peace was kept, and with it the credit and honor of this Nation. When the Maine was destroyed indignation rose to fever pitch. But seven weeks have passed, and the peace is still unbroken. Again, the report on the Maine was to be the signal for hostilities. But it was not. It was a report that satisfied the American people. So did the Message [from President McKinley] that accompanied it. And they are now a week old and there is no war. The chances are that, thus kept off week after week, the dreaded catastrophe will be altogether averted. . . . The honor and welfare of the Nation are safe in William McKinley's hands. It will be well to leave them there.
Not least of all, the outlook is still peaceful, and we trust increasingly so, because peace--so long as justice is supreme--is right, and war--unless justice and honor are at stake--is wrong.
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It is to be feared that the exceedingly able and energetic manner in which the newspapers intrusted with the National honor have conducted the war up to the present time may lead to overconfidence on the part of the seventy million American citizens who catch the newspapers on the fly as they come from the press and read them while they are hot. . . . If it isn't war that we have been enjoying at the comparatively low price of twenty-four pages for a cent then nothing is war; all the verities have vanished; truth crushed to earth under job type six inches deep cannot rise again. An Error clad in the most gorgeous garb of the spacewriter's opulent vocabulary, instead of writhing and dying, just stalks abroad with several bands in front of a procession of her worshippers.
War: Of course it's war. If it isn't war then the newspapers which have consented in the most self-sacrificing way to become the custodians of the National honor have been emitting lies at the rate of about a million a minute, and that is simply inconceivable. That is to say, it was inconceivable before the possibility of issuing and selling for cash a million newspapers a minute had been demonstrated by the actual affidavits of well-known votaries [devoted adherents] of the truth. . . . So as soon as the issue can be made plain to the American people, and the fact is established beyond a doubt that President McKinley has violated the unwritten law of the Republic which makes it obligatory upon him to declare war whenever any newspaper with a circulation of a million a minute demands it, this war will be concluded with the impeachment of McKinley and the general uprising of the outraged sentiment of the American people under Joseph Bailey of Texas against the Republican party.
New York Herald Tribune, 5 April 1898.