From that time on, there has been further extension of the a

THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD WAR

IN RELATION TO HUMAN LIBERTY

BY

EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS

Man for the State means autocracy and imperialism;

MAN FOR MANKIND is the soul of democracy.

1918

CONTENTS

I THE WORLD TRAGEDY

II THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR

III THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT

IV MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER

V THE PRESENT STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

VI THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP

VII AMERICA'S DUTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

VIII THE GOSPEL AND THE SUPERSTITION OF NON-RESISTANCE

IX PREPAREDNESS FOR SELF-DEFENSE

X RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE WAR

XI THE WAR AND EDUCATION

XII SOCIALISM AND THE WAR

XIII THE WAR AND FEMINISM

XIV THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY

XV DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

XVI MENACES OF DEMOCRACY

XVII THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY

XVIII PATERNALISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY

XIX THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY

XX TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADERSHIP

XXI DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE

XXII THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE

THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY

I

THE WORLD TRAGEDY

We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the

history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman empire was

so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it.

Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed

mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it

overwhelms our vision. Man had been going forward steadily, inventing

and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole world had

been transformed. Suddenly the entire range of invention is turned

against Man. The machinery of comfort and progress becomes the enginery

of devastation. Under such a shock, we ask, "Has civilization

over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its maker?" The

imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to see across

the storm.

When the War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the

last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to

which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of

something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as

we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have

passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become

benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to think

deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in

the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused

to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt

the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing

ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of

it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the

most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that

the future will look back upon them as the years determining the destiny

of mankind for ages to come.

How this terrible fact of War falls across all philosophies! Complacent

optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The

pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn

to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face

with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the

ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened,

while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one

certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--_what_ it will

be, no one knows.

Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking

will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be

impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely

hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live

to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to

abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with

them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution

Christianity and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be

rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effect on the thought

life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the

French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the

nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the

relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so

far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth

century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the Athenian

tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.

Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We Americans

are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to

political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise.

All across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion

--if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are

suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly

trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for

moral evils. It is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by

legislation, but not to create virtue. Virtue can be developed only by

conduct and education. You cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven

with the whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the

atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road.

If our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it

down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and

commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age,

into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into

our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental

attitude of mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political

forms, but a way of life.

Thus the War will be the supreme test of democracy. The question it

will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an

efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to

stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive

ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally from

the top? If they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the

highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will

pass and be succeeded by some other social order.

That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we have

entered it so late. As we look back upon the struggle of Athens and the

other free Greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of Asia, at

Marathon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for Europe

and made possible the civilization of the Occident, so it is probable

that the world will look back upon this colossal War as the same

struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions employed,

the struggle determining the future of democracy and civilization for

generations, perhaps for all time.

II

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR

The world has been confused as to the issue in this War, because of the

multitude of its causes and of the antagonisms it involves; yet under

all the national and racial hatreds, the economic jealousies, certain

great ideas are being tested out.

Apologists for Germany have told us, even with pride, that in Germany

the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State. This was

not true of old Germany. Before the formation of the Prussian empire,

her spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood preeminently for

freedom of thought and action. It was this that gave her noble

spiritual heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters.

Froebel developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of

democracies. Luther and German protestantism represented the

affirmation of individual conscience as against hierarchical control.

It was this spirit that gave Germany her golden age of literature, her

unmatched group of spiritual philosophers, her religious teachers, her

pre-eminence in music.

Nevertheless, the Prussian state, autocratic from its inception,

received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating

in Hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the

state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He

justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically

made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by

its more fruitful idea in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in

being conquered, is judged of God. Here is the philosophic

justification of that Prussian arrogance which in Nietzsche is carried

into glittering rhetoric. Thus the Prussian state from afar back was

opposed to the general spirit of old Germany.

Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit is gone. With the

formation of the Prussian empire and for the half century of its

existence, every force of social control--press, church, state,

education, social opinion--was deliberately employed to stamp on the

German people one idea--the subordination of the individual to the

state, as the supreme and only virtue. How far has the policy succeeded?

Apparently absolutely. To the outside observer the old spirit seems

utterly gone. How far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of

the fear of the Slav, one cannot say. Looking at the map of Europe, one

sees that the geographical relation of Germany to the great Slavic

empire is not unlike the relation of Holland to Germany. Thus the

deliberate fostering of fear of the vast empire of the East has done

much to strengthen the hands of the Prussian regime in its chosen task.

Nevertheless, when one recalls the spiritual heritage of Germany: when

one thinks of Herder, Schiller and Goethe; Tauler, Luther and

Schleiermacher; Froebel, Herbart and Richter; Kant, Fichte and Novalis;

Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner; one feels that something of the old German

heritage must survive. When the German people find out what has happened

to them and why, that heritage surely ought to show in some reaction

against the present autocratic regime, after the War closes, if not

before, perhaps even to the extent of making Germany a republic. That

would be some compensation for the waste and destruction of the War.

Meantime Germany stands now, ruthlessly, for the dedication of Man to

the State.

One can understand why a Prussian minister forbade the teaching of

Froebel's ideas in Prussia during the latter period of the educator's

life. So one understands the hatred of Goethe because he refused

allegiance to a narrow nationalism and remained cosmopolitan in his

world-view. Similarly Hegel, with his justification of absolute

monarchy and his theory of the German state as the acme of all spiritual

evolution, was the acclaimed orthodox philosopher of Prussia, while the

individualist, Schopenhauer, was neglected and despised.

One must have lived in Germany to realize the absolute control of the

State over the individual--the incessant surveillance, the petty

regulations, the constant interference with private life. It was to

escape just this vexatious control, with the arduous militarism in which

it culminates, that so vast a multitude of Germans left their native

land and came to the United States--not all of whom have shown

appreciation and loyalty to the free land that welcomed them.

III

THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT

In contrast to the idea for which Germany now stands, the Anglo-Saxon

instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of

the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De

Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and,

after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he

could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are

to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time,

struggling to be born.

Nevertheless, Anglo-American ideas still dominate and inspire our

civilization. It is, indeed, remarkable to what an extent this is true,

in the face of the mingling of heterogeneous races in our population.

As English is our speech, so Anglo-American ideas are still the soul of

our life and institutions.

This is evident in the jealousy of authority. We resent the intrusion

of the government into affairs of private life, and prefer to submit to

annoyances and even injustice on the part of other individuals, rather

than to have protection at the price of paternalistic regulation by the

state. We resent any law that we do not see is necessary to the general

welfare, and are rather lawless even then. This shows clearly in our

reaction on legislation in regard to drink. The prohibition of

intoxicating liquor is about the surest way to make an Anglo-Saxon want

to go out and get drunk, even when he has no other inclination in that

direction. In Boston, under the eleven o'clock closing law, men in

public restaurants will at times order, at ten minutes of eleven, eight

or ten glasses of beer or whiskey, for fear they might want them,

whereas, if the restriction had not been present, two or three would

have sufficed.

Not long ago we saw the very labor leaders who forced the Adamson law

through congress, threatening to disobey any legislation limiting their

own freedom of action, even though vitally necessary to the freedom of

all.

The general behavior under automobile and traffic regulation illustrates

the tendency evenmore clearly. Thinking over the list of acquaintances

who own automobiles, one finds it hard to recall one who would not break

the speed law at a convenient opportunity. Even a staid college

professor, who has walked the walled-in path all his life: let him get a

Ford runabout, and in three months he is exultant in running as close as

possible to every foot traveler and in exceeding the speed limit at any

favorable chance. These are not beautiful expressions of our national

spirit, but they serve to illustrate our instinctive individualism.

Especially are we jealous of highly centralized authority. De

Tocqueville argued that we would never be able to develop a strong

central government, and that our democracy would be menaced with failure

by that lack. That his prophecy has proved false and our federal

government has become so strong is due only to the accidents of our

history and the exigency of the tremendous problems we have had to

solve.

The same individualistic spirit is strong in England. It has been

particularly evident, during the War, in the resentment of military

authority as applied to labor conditions. The artisans and their

leaders dreaded to give up liberties for which they had struggled

through generations, for fear that those rights would not be readily

accorded them again after the War. It must be admitted that this fear is

justified. The same spirit was evident in the fight on conscription.

This attitude has been a handicap to England in successfully carrying on

the War, as it is to us; but it shows how strong is the essential spirit

of democracy in both lands.

In France, the Revolution was at bottom an affirmation of individualism

--of the right of the people, as against classes and kings, to seek life,

liberty and happiness. The great words, _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,_

that the French placed upon their public buildings in the period of the

Revolution, are the essential battle-cry of true democracy,--as it is to

be, rather than as it is at present.

Through her peculiar situation, threatened and overshadowed by potential

enemies, France has been forced to a policy of militarism, with a large

subordination of the individual to the state. The subordination,

however, is voluntary. That is touchingly evident in the beautiful

fraternization of French officers and men in the present War. With our

Anglo-Saxon reserve, we smile at the pictures of grave generals kissing

bearded soldiers, in recognition of valor, but it is a significant

expression of the voluntary equality and brotherhood of Frenchmen in

this War. The reason France has risen with such splendid courage and

unity is the consciousness of every Frenchman that complete defeat in

this War would mean that there would be no France in the future, that

Paris would be a larger Strassburg, and France a greater

Alsace-Lorraine. While the subordination has been thus voluntary,

surely the French soldiers, man for man, have proved themselves the

equal of any soldiers on earth.

The anomaly of the first two years of the War was the presence of the

vast Russian autocratic empire on the side of the allied democracies.

For Russia, however, the War was of the people, rather than of the

autocracy at the top, and one saw that Russia would emerge from the War

changed and purified. What one could not foresee was that, under the

awakening of the people, Russia could pass, in a day, through a

Revolution as profound in its character and consequences as the great

explosion in France. It would be almost a miracle if so complete a

Revolution, in such a vast, benighted empire, were not followed by

decades of recurrent chaos and anarchy. If Russia avoids this fate, she

will present a unique experience in history. The tendency to abrogate

all authority, the spectacle of regiments of soldiers becoming debating

societies to discuss whether or not they shall obey orders and fight,

are ominous signs for the next period. Emancipated Russia must learn,

if necessary through bitter suffering, that liberty is not license, that

democracy is not anarchy, but voluntary and intelligent obedience to

just laws and the chosen executors of those laws. Meantime, whatever

her immediate future may be, Russia's transformation has clarified the

issue and justified her place with the allied democracies. However long

and confused her struggle, there can be no return to the past, and, in

the end, her Revolution means democracy.

Thus, in democracy, the State exists for Man. Other forms of society

seek the interest or welfare of an individual, a group or a class,

democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the liberty, happiness, growth,

intelligence, helpfulness of _all the people_. Under all the welter of

this world struggle, it is therefore these great contrasting ideas that

are being tested out, perhaps for all time. What is their relative

value for efficiency, initiative, invention, endurance, permanence;

beneath all, what is their final value for the happiness and helpfulness

of all human beings?

IV

MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER

There is only one moral order of the universe--one range of moral as of

physical law. For instance, the law of gravitation--simplest of

physical principles--holds the last star in the abyss of space, rounds

the dew-drop on the petal of a spring violet and determines the symmetry

of living organisms; but it is one and unchanging, a fundamental pull in

the nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: they are not

superadded to life by some divine or other authority. They are simply

the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must

obey to grow and be happy.

If the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to

it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth.

History is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical

standards.

For instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on

the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. The first

man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in

war, "I will not kill you and eat you; I will let you live and work for

me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was

distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse.

Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess

of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and

most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in

a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their

companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as

the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at

one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher

recognition of the moral order.

Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding

where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your

path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not

owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your

punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and

it is the worst punishment imaginable.

Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the

developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty

and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something

entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When

a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another

tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a

man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.

This gradual elevation of moral standards, or growth in the recognition

of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can

be traced historically as a long and confused process. There was a

time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the

strong arm. The man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong

enough, and others submitted to his superior force. Then follows an age

when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family

group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his

own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. This is the

condition among the Veddahs of Ceylon, studied so interestingly by

Haeckel. Living in isolated family groups, scattered through the

tropical wilderness: one man, one woman and their children forming the

social unit: they as nearly represent primitive life as any other body

of people now on the earth.

Then follows a long roll of ages when the tribe is the highest social

unit. Each member of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness of life of

all the other members and of some obligation toward them; but men of

other tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. Then comes a period

when appreciation of the sacredness of life is extended over all those

of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same

language. That was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew and

Gentile," "Greek and barbarian"--the very word "barbarous" coming from

the unintelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who spoke other than

the Hellenic tongue. Even Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism,

says, in the _Republic_, that in the ideal state, "Greeks should deal

with barbarians as Greeks now deal with one another." If one remembers

what occurred in the Peloponnesian war--how Greek men voted to kill all

the men of military age in a conquered Greek city and sell all the women

and children into slavery--one will see that Plato's dream of humanity

was not so very wide.

From that time on, there has been further extension of the appreciation

of the sacredness of life and of the consciousness of moral obligation

toward other human beings. We are far from the end of the path. Our

sympathies are still limited by accidents of time and place, race and

color; but we have gone far enough to see what the end would be, were we

to reach it: a sympathy so wide, an appreciation of the sacredness of

life so universal, that each of us would feel the joy or sorrow of every

other human being, alive to-day or to be alive to-morrow, as something

like his own. Moreover, in all civilized society, we have gone far

enough to renounce the right to private vengeance and adjustment of

quarrels: we live under established courts of law, with organized civil

force to carry out their judgments. This gives relative peace and

security, and a general, if imperfect, application of the moral law.

V

THE PRESENT STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The astounding anomaly of modern civilization is the way we have lagged

behind in applying to groups and nations of men the moral laws,

universally recognized as binding over individuals. For instance, about

twenty years ago we coined and used widely the phrase, "soulless

corporation," to designate our great combinations of capital in industry

and commerce. Why was that phrase used so widely? The answer is

illuminating: we took it for granted that an individual employer would

treat his artisans to some extent as human beings and not merely as

cog-wheels in a productive machine; but we also took it for granted that

an impersonal corporation, where no individual was dominantly

responsible, would regard its artisans merely as pieces of machinery,

with no respect whatever for their humanity.

The supreme paradox, however, is in the relation of nations: it is there

that we have most amazingly lagged behind in applying the moral laws

universally accepted in the relations of individuals. For instance,

long before this War began we heard it proclaimed, even proudly, by

certain philosophers, in more than one nation, that the state is the

supreme spiritual unit, that there is no law higher than its interest,

that the state makes the law and may break it at will. When a great

statesman in Germany, doubtless in a moment of intense anger and

irritation, used the phrase that has gone all across the earth, "_scrap

of paper_," for a sacred treaty between nations, he was only making a

pungent practical application of the philosophy in question.

Do we regard self-preservation as the highest law for the individual?

Distinctly not. Here is a crowded theater and a sudden cry of fire,

with the ensuing panic: if strong men trample down and kill women and

children, in the effort to save their own lives, we regard them with

loathing and contempt. On the other hand, it is just this plea of

national self-preservation that the German regime has used in cynical

justification of its every atrocity--the initial violation of Belgium,

the making war ruthlessly on civil populations, the atrocious spying and

plotting in the bosom of neutral and friendly nations, the destruction

of monuments of art and devastation of the cities, fields, orchards and

forests of northern France, and finally the submarine warfare on the

world's shipping. No civilized human being would, for a moment, think

of using the plea of self-preservation to justify comparable conduct in

individual life.

Consider international diplomacy: much of it has been merely shrewd and

skillful lying. If you will review the list of the most famous

diplomats of Europe for the last thousand years, you will find that a

considerable portion of them won their fame and reputation by being a

little more shrewd and successful liars than the diplomats with whom

they had to deal in other lands. In other words, their conduct has been

exactly on the plane that Ulysses represented in personal life, afar

back in classic antiquity.

Take an illustration a little nearer home. If you were doing business

on one side of the street and had two competitors in the same line,

across the way, and a cyclone swept the town, destroying their

establishments and sparing yours: you, as an individual, would be

ashamed to take advantage of the disaster under which your rivals were

suffering, using the time while they were out of business to lure their

customers away from them and bind those customers to you so securely

that your competitors would never be able to get them back. You would

scorn such conduct as an individual; but when it comes to a relation of

the nations: during the first two years of the War, from the highest

government circles down to the smallest country newspaper, we were urged

to take advantage of the disaster under which our European rivals were

suffering, win their international customers away from them and bind

those customers to us so securely that Europe would never be able to get

them back. Not that we were urged to industry and enterprise--that is

always right--but actually to seek to profit by the sufferings of

others--conduct we would regard as utterly unworthy in personal life.

If your neighbor were to say, "My personal aspirations demand this

portion of your front yard," and he were to attempt to fence it in: the

situation is unimaginable; but when a nation says, "My national

aspirations demand this portion of your territory," and proceeds to

annex it: if the nation is strong enough to carry it out, a large part

of the world acquiesces.

The relations of nations are thus still largely on the plane of

primitive life among individuals, or, since nations are made up of

civilized and semi-civilized persons, it would be fairer to say that the

relations of nations are comparable to those prevailing among

individuals when a group of men goes far out from civil society, to the

frontier, beyond the reach of courts of law and their police forces:

then nearly always there is a reversion to the rule of the strong arm.

That is what Kipling meant in exclaiming,

"There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three."

That condition prevailed all across our frontier in the early days. For

instance, the cattle men came, pasturing their herds on the hills and

plains, using the great expanse of land not yet taken up by private

ownership. A little later came the sheep men, with vast flocks of

sheep, which nibbled every blade of grass and other edible plant down to

the ground, thus starving out the cattle. What followed? The cattle

men got together by night, rode down the sheep-herders, shot them or

drove them out, or were themselves driven out.

So on the frontier, in the early days, a weakling staked out an

agricultural or mining claim. A ruffian appears, who is a sure shot,

jumps the claim and drives the other out. It was the rule of the strong

arm, and it was evident on the frontier all across the country.

This is exactly the state that a considerable part of the world has

reached in international relationship to-day. Claim-jumping is still

accepted and widely practised among the nations. That is, in fact, the

way in which all empires have been built--by a succession of successful

claim-jumpings. Consider the most impressive of them all, the old Roman

empire. Rome was a city near the mouth of the Tiber. She reached out

and conquered a few neighboring cities in the Latin plain, binding them

securely to herself by domestic and economic ties. Then she extended

her power south and north, crossed into northern Africa, conquered Gaul

and Spain, swept Asia Minor, until a territory three thousand by two

thousand miles in extent was under the sway of her all-conquering arm.

What justified Rome, as far as she had justification, was the remarkable

strength and wisdom with which she established law and order and the

protections of civil society over all the conquered territory, until

often the subject populations were glad they had come under the

all-dominant sway of Rome, since their situation was so much more

peaceful and happy than before. Such justification, however, is after

the fact: it is not moral justification of the building of the empire.

That represented a succession of claim-jumpings.

For an illustration from more modern history, take the greatest

international crime of the last five hundred years, with one exception--

the partition of Poland. It is true the Polish nobles were a nuisance to

their neighbors, ever quarreling among themselves, with no central

authority powerful enough to restrain them, but that did not justify the

action taken. Three nations, or rather the autocratic sovereigns of

those nations, powerful enough to accomplish the crime, agreed to

partition Poland among themselves. They did it, with the result that

there are plenty of Poles in the world to-day, but there is no Poland.

Consider the possession of Silesia by Prussia. Silesia was an integral

part of the Austrian domain, long so recognized. Friedrich the Great

wanted it. He annexed it. The deed caused him many years of recurring,

devastating wars; again and again he was near the point of utter defeat;

but he succeeded in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and

Silesia is part of Prussia to-day. The strong arm conquest is the only

reason.

So is it with Germany's possession of Schleswig-Holstein, with Austria

in Herzegovina and Bosnia, France in Algiers, Italy in Tripoli: they are

all instances of claim-jumping, reprehensible in varying degrees.

I suppose no thoughtful Englishman would attempt to justify, on high

moral grounds, the building up of the British empire: for instance, the

possession of Egypt and India by Britain. How does India happen to be a

part of the British realm? Every one knows the answer. The East India

Company was simply the most adventurous and enterprising trading company

then in the world. It grew rich trading with the Orient, established

the supremacy of the British merchant marine, got into difficulties with

French rivals and native rulers, fought brilliantly for its rights, as

it had every reason to do, conquered territory and consolidated its

possessions, ruling chiefly through native princes. It became so

powerful that it did not seem wise to the British government to permit a

private corporation to exercise such ever-growing political authority.

It was regulated, and in the end abolished, by act of Parliament; its

possessions were taken over by the Crown; the conquests were extended

and completed, and India today is a gem in the crown of the British

empire.

What justifies Britain, as far as she has justification, is the

remarkable wisdom and generosity with which she has extended, not

onlylaw and order and protection to life and property, but freedom and

autonomous self-government, to her colonies and subject populations,

with certain tragic exceptions, about as fast as this could safely be

done. It is that which holds the British empire together. Great

irregular empire, stretching over a large part of the globe: but for

this it would fall to pieces over night. It would be impossible for

force, administered at the top, to hold it together. The splendid

response of her colonies in this War has been purely voluntary. That

Canada has four hundred thousand trained men at the front, or ready to

go, is due wholly to her free response to the wise generosity of

England's policy, and in no degree to compulsion, which would have been

impossible. This justification of the British empire is, nevertheless,

as in the case of Rome, after the fact, and does not justify morally the

building up of the empire.

Our own hands are not entirely clean. It is true we came late on the

stage of history, and, starting as a democracy, were instinctively

opposed to empire building. Thus our brief record is cleaner than that

of the older nations. Nevertheless, there are examples of claim-jumping

in our history. The most tragic of all is a large part of our treatment

of the American Indians. It is true, with Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, we

tried to make every steal a bargain. Many an expanse of territory has

been bought with a jug of rum. The Indian knew nothing about the

ownership of land; we did. So we made the deed, and he accepted it.

Then, to his surprise, he found he had to move off from land where for

generations his ancestors had hunted and fought, with no idea of private

ownership. So we pushed him on and on. Of late decades we have become

ashamed, tried in awkward fashion to render some compensation for the

wrongs done, but the larger part of the story is sad indeed.

There is, of course, another side to all this: the more highly developed

nations do owe leadership and service in helping those below to climb

the path of civilization; but let one answer fairly how much of empire

building has been due to this altruistic spirit, and how much to

selfishness and the lust for power and possession.

VI

THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP

We have seen that all empires have been built up by a series of

successful aggressions, and that claim-jumping still characterizes the

relations of the nations. Nevertheless, there has been some progress in

applying to groups and nations the moral principles we recognize as

binding upon individuals. Consider again our internal life: it was

twenty years ago that we coined and used so widely the phrase "soulless

corporations" for our great combinations of capital in industry. To-day

that phrase is rarely heard. One sees it seldom even in the pages of

surviving "muck-raking" magazines. Why has a phrase, used so widely in

the past, all but disappeared? Again the answer is illuminating: there

has been tremendous growth in twenty years, on the part of our great

corporations, in treating their employees as human beings and not merely

as cog-wheels in a productive machine. When the greatest corporation in

the United States voluntarily raises the wages of all its employees in

the country ten per cent., five several times, within a few months, as

the Steel trust has recently done, something has happened. It may be

said, "they did it because it was good business": twenty years ago they

would not have recognized that it was good business. It may be said,

"they did it to avoid strikes": twenty years ago they would have

welcomed the strikes, fought them through and gained what selfish

advantage was possible. The point is, there has been vast increase in

the consciousness of moral responsibility on the part of corporations

toward their artisans. This has been due partly to legislation, but

mainly to education and the awakening of public conscience. If you wish

to find the greatest arrogance and selfishness now, you will discover

it, not among the capitalists: they are timid and submissive--strangely

so. You will find it rather in certain leaders of the labor movement,

with their consciousness of newly-gained powers.

Some growth there has been in the application of the same moral

principles even to the relations of the nations. For instance: a

hundred years ago the Napoleonic wars had just come to an end. In the

days of Napoleon men generally gloried in war; to-day most of them

bitterly regret it, and fight because they believe they are fighting for

high moral aims or for national self-preservation, whether they are

right or wrong.

When Napoleon conquered a country, often he pushed the weakling king off

the throne, and replaced him with a member of his own family--at times a

worse weakling. Think of such a thing being attempted to-day: it is

unimaginable, unless the worst tyranny on earth got the upper hand for

the next three hundred years of human history.

A more pungent illustration of progress is the feverish desire, shown by

each of the combatants in this world struggle, to prove that he did not

begin it. Now some one began it. A hundred years ago belligerents would

not have been so anxious to prove their innocence: then victory closed

all accounts and no one went behind the returns. The feverish anxiety

each combatant has shown to establish his innocence of initiating this

devastating War is conclusive proof that even the worst of them

recognizes that they all must finally stand before the moral court of

the world's conscience and be judged. The same tendency is shown in the

efforts of Germany--grotesquely and tragically sophistical as they are--

to justify her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atrocities. At least

she is aware that they require justification.

This explains why we react so bitterly even on what would have been

accepted a century ago. What was taken for granted yesterday is not

tolerated to-day, and what is taken for granted to-day will not be

tolerated in a to-morrow that maybe is not so distant as in our darker

moments we imagine.

What would be the conclusion of this process? It would be, would it

not, the complete application to the relations of the nations, of the

moral principles universally accepted as binding upon individuals? If

it is true that the moral order of the universe is one and unchanging,

then _what is right for a man is right for a nation of men, and what is

wrong for a man is wrong for a nation_; and no fallacious reasoning

should be allowed to blind us to that basic truth.

This would mean the end of all diplomacy of lying and deceit. The

relations of the nations would be placed on the same plane of relative

honesty and frankness now prevailing among individuals: not absolute

truth--few of us practice that--but that general ability to trust each

other, in word and conduct, that is the foundation of our business and

social life.

It would mean the end of empire building. Those empires that exist

would fall naturally into their component parts. If those parts

remained affiliated with the central government, it would be only

through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling

upon the territory. Thus every people would be affiliated with the

government to which it naturally belonged and with which it wished to be

affiliated.

It would mean finally a voluntary federation of the nations, with the

establishment of a world court of justice; but no weak-kneed, spineless

arbitration court: rather a court of justice, comparable to those

established over individuals, whose judgments would be enforced by an

international military and naval police, contributed by the federated

nations.

People misunderstand this proposal. They imagine it would mean the

giving over of the entire military and naval equipment of each federated

nation to the central court. Far from it: each nation would retain, for

defense purposes, the mass of its manhood and the larger fraction of its

limited equipment, while a minor fraction would be contributed to the

world court.

When this is achieved there will be, for the first time in the history

of the world, the dawn of the longed-for era of universal and relatively

permanent peace for mankind.

It is a far-off dream, is it not? Let us admit it frankly, and it seems

further off than it did four years ago; for the approximations to it,

achieved through international law, we have seen go down in a blind

welter, through the invention of new instruments of destruction and the

willful perpetration of illegal and immoral atrocities in this horrible

War.

Nevertheless, it is not so far off as in ourdarker moments we fear. If

this world War ends justly; which means if it ends so that the people

dwelling on any territory are affiliated with the government to which

they naturally belong and with which they wish to be affiliated, the

dream will be brought appreciably nearer. If the War ends unjustly,

which means if it ends with the gratification of the ambitions of

aggressive tyranny, the dream will be put remotely far off. If a peace

is patched up meantime, with no solution, it will mean Europe sleeping

on its arms, and the breaking out of the war with multiplied devastation

within twenty years. That is why these blithely undertaken peace

missions and other efforts at peace without victory, even when not

cloaks for pro-German movements, are such preposterous absurdities or

else play directly into the hands of tyranny.

At best, however, the dream is a long way ahead. Men dislike to give up

power, nations equally. It will take a long process of international

moral education to induce the nations to renounce their arbitrary

powers, their right to adjust all their own quarrels, and lead them to

enter voluntarily a federation under a world court of Justice. This,

nevertheless, is the hope of the world, toward which we should work with

all our might.

VII

AMERICA'S DUTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Since the world solution is, at best, so remote, our question is: what

are we to do meantime? Our entrance into the War partially answers the

question. We have before us the immediate task of aiding in

overthrowing autocracy and tyranny and of defending our liberties and

those of the nations that stand for democracy. This is the first duty,

but not the only one.

More definitely than any other nation we have thrown down to the world

the challenge of democracy. We have said, "Away with kings, we will

have no more of them! Away with castes and ruling classes, we will have

no more of them!" As a matter of fact, democracies have no rulers--the

word survives from an older order of society--they have guides, leaders

and representatives. If you wish to use the word, in a democracy every

man is the ruler--and every woman too, we hope, before long. To this

ideal we are committed and it carries certain obligations; for every

right carries a duty, and every duty, a right. Often the best way to

get a privilege is by assuming a responsibility. That is a truth it

would be well for the leaders of the feminist and labor movements to

recognize. The obligations carried by the challenge of our democracy are

clear.

We Americans should have done, once and for all time, with the diplomacy

of lying and deceit. Fortunately our recent traditions are in harmony

with this demand; but we should not depend upon the happy accident of an

administration which takes the right attitude. It should be the open

and universal demand of the American people that those who represent us

shall place the relations we sustain to other nations permanently on the

same plane of frank honesty, generally prevailing among individuals.

Incidentally, any politician or statesman who, at this heart-breaking

crisis of the world's life, dares play party politics with our

international relations, should be damned forever by the vote of the

American people.

Further, it is our duty to have done with all dream of empire building.

It is not for us: let us abandon it frankly and forever. Those

dependencies which have come to us through the accidents of our history

should be granted autonomous self-government at the earliest moment at

which they can safely take it over--which does not necessarily mean

to-morrow. If they remain affiliated with us it should be only through

the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon

them.

It is, moreover, our duty to lead the world in the effort to form a

federation of the nations and establish the aforesaid world court of

justice, with the international military and naval police to enforce its

judgments.

More than this is demanded: on the basis of the challenge of our

democracy, it is our duty to rise to the point of placing justice higher

than commercial interest. It is a hard demand; but, with the latent

idealism in our American life, surely we can rise to it. For instance,

the vexed puzzle of the tariff will never be justly and permanently

settled, till it is settled primarily as a problem of moral

international relationship, and not as one merely of economic interest

and advantage.

For example, a tariff wall between the United States and Canada is as

preposterous an absurdity as would be a long line of bristling

fortifications along the three thousand and more miles of international

boundary. We are not protecting ourselves from slave labor over there.

They are not protecting themselves from slave labor here. Barring a few

lines of industry, there are the same conditions of labor, production

and distribution both sides of the line. The only reason for a tariff

wall is their wish, or our wish, or the wish of each, to gain some

advantage at the expense of the other party. Now every business man

knows that any trade that benefits one and injures the other party to it

is bad business, as well as bad ethics, in the long run. Good business

benefits both traders all the time.

On the other hand, when it comes to protecting our labor from

competition with slave labor in other quarters of the earth, we have not

only the right, but the duty to do it. So when it is a matter of

protecting our industries from being swamped by the unloading of vast

quantities of goods, produced under the feverish and abnormal

conditions, sure to prevail in Europe after the War, we have again, not

only the right, but the duty to do it.