a _young_ nation, and young people are fond of trying experiments.
And, next, they are burdened, perhaps I should say cursed, with the
most violent, anti-cosmopolitan Press anywhere existent. A set of
fire-eaters appear to control the New York section, of it, and in the
judgment of many sober-minded Americans, with some of whom I have
myself spoken, the late war was wholly due to their ceaseless,
incessant clamour, and that, given a few months' patience, the Cuban
people might have by plebiscite been able to settle their own destiny.
The starving peasants concentrated in the towns were the alleged object
of the hurry. Long months passed before any succour reached them. If
they were veritably starving, surely every man of them must have died
long before an American army of liberation could have been effectually
landed for their relief. The sympathies of this country were not with
Spain, for it is by her misrule, her acknowledged misgovernment of her
colonists, that all the mischief has been brought about. One regrets
to have to say it, but Spain has been strangled in the coils of her own
superstition, and progress for her ceased to be when she elected to
live by the light of ideals and principles which are henceforth
impossible. It is the frantic endeavour of France and Italy to escape
Spain's doom which explains their incessant strife between Church and
State. The enlightened Frenchman or Italian has a horror of
sacerdotalism as the beginning of the end, always and everywhere, and
as the only religion in those countries is sacerdotal, they are, alas,
in their national capacity, bereft of any religious guidance or
inspiration. We are, therefore, unable to see anything in Spain's
present position, but the working of the inevitable law of
Compensation, which is sovereign over States as over individuals,
though there are many of us who believe that the avowed humanitarian
objects of the American Government might have been attained by peaceful
methods, had not the country been goaded into a fever of restlessness
and impatience by that deplorable phenomenon of democratic institutions
known as the "yellow press".
At all events, the feeling universal in this country in the early
spring of this year, showed how far and fast we are travelling along
the road which will lead us to the final abandonment of warfare as
unworthy of rational men. Doubtless we are in advance of other nations
in this respect. But that is only what history leads us to expect. We
were the first to free slaves, abandon duelling, reform prisons and
criminal law, and erect humanitarianism into a veritable religion. And
have we not taught representative institutions to the world? We are
evidently destined, I believe, to lead the way towards the final
surrender of war. We keep no standing army. We shall never again
enter on a war of conquest or aggression. Our naval armaments and such
military power as we possess are notoriously created and maintained for
defensive purposes only. Brigandage and pillage we have most certainly
been guilty of in past times, but such a policy could not now survive
the day it was mooted. We are in the last trenches, preparatory to
finally abandoning the field.
But here it will be urged that there are circumstances which render war
absolutely inevitable, such for instance as an unjust aggression upon
the territory we own, or even live upon; an attack on the national
honour, or a reckless disregard of rights sanctioned by treaty or
international usage. Were arbitration in such cases even admissible,
we may conceive the would-be aggressor unwilling to have recourse to
it, or possibly to abide by its award. What is a government to do then?
Now, arguments and pleas such as these are valid enough against a
proposal of universal disarmament to be compulsorily carried out in six
months or a year's time, but they in no wise, I submit, constitute an
inseparable bar to the realisation of "that sweet dream," as Immanuel
Kant called it, of a "perpetual peace". The ideal is none the less
real because it cannot be at once put into practice; and had we to wait
another whole century, it would still be the duty of our movement to
stand by Kant and boldly set up the grand conception of an universal
peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably
making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the
ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves
to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a
limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the
swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could
name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this
implies no insuperable, or rather, no serious, obstacle to our belief
that the ideal of universal arbitration, through the medium of a
congress of all nations, must in the future, near or distant, be
realised, because it is an ideal which is alone worthy of rational men.
And, moreover, the essential rationality of the ideal gives us a right
to demand that it should be recognised by all public men, by our
legislators who represent us, the Press which aims at reflecting the
life and thought of the age, the professors and masters who have the
care of our youth, and above all by fathers and mothers to whom tender
children are confided, and those men who assume the responsibility of
speaking to their generation in the sacred name of religion.
I say the ideal gives us the right to demand its recognition by men in
such positions of responsibility, and implies a corresponding
obligation on their part, no less than on our own, to labour seriously
for its speedy realisation. We are, every one of us, agreed that war
is essentially a cruel, barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading
method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man,
namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or
killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now
even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become
too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the
semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable
barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of
hundreds of thousands of innocent men--men who in their simplicity or
ignorance are positively unable to even dimly comprehend why they are
being lashed into a blind fury and goaded to the madness of steeping
their hands in each other's blood--what barbarity, what savagery to
invoke as the minister, as the vindicator of justice! Let us keep our
eyes steadily fixed on this central, essential wickedness of the whole
business, that it dares to offer its polluted services in the interests
of justice and thereby to profane the holiest thing we know.
Remembering this, therefore, let us ask ourselves what help we get in
our endeavours to effect its overthrow from the recognised ministers of
religion. Why, it is notorious that what has long been clear to
philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and philanthropists among humble
laymen, has not yet dawned upon the imagination or touched the
consciences of bishops or priests. Popes, themselves, have created
military orders, "knights and commanders of Christ and the Cross,"
whose profession it was to destroy life in the name of the most
merciful, pitiful man known to us Western people. Popes have led
military expeditions, conducted campaigns and crossed swords with the
most daring, though the impetuous fisherman, founder of their line, was
bidden by Christ to put up his sword into its scabbard, "for all they
that take up the sword shall perish by it". Can any man point to one
single condemnation of war as immoral, irrational, opposed to the law
of their Deity or of Christ, in all the collection of councils, bulls
and canonical legislation? And can any man quote to us the charge of
an archbishop or bishop in the Anglican Communion or the Greek
Communion wherein he has raised his voice against the barbaric survival
of war and condemned it in the name of his Saviour Jesus, who spoke of
the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the hungerers
and thirsters after righteousness, or, as we say, the ethical
enthusiasts, as his followers?
Why, religion, in the hands of bishops and priests, has allowed a trail
of blood to be drawn across the path of the ages. I say nothing of
religious persecution and the millions who have gone to torture and to
doom for erroneous beliefs. I confine myself entirely, to field
warfare. During a period of 674 years, from 1141-1815, it is an
historical fact that this country and France were at war for no less
than 266 years, or considerably more than one-third, and we must
remember that up to the Reformation both countries were under the
direct guidance, one might almost say the exclusive inspiration, of the
Catholic Christianity of the day. But where does history record the
act of any religious leaders of those times denouncing war as contrary
to the gospel of Christ and of reason alike? We are able to quote
numbers of despised heretics who had grasped the truth and emphatically
condemned the brutal institution. Thus Erasmus: "They who defend war
must defend the dispositions which lead to war, and these dispositions
are absolutely forbidden by the gospel". Wickliffe, "the morning star
of the Reformation in England," thought it "utterly unlawful,"
according to Priestley; and as Southey writes in his _History of
Brazil_: "There is but one community of Christians in the world, and
that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened
enough to understand the prohibition of war by the Divine Master in its
plain literal and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it,
subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience".
These facts are noteworthy because they show that had the official
churches--the Roman, Greek and Anglican--been true to their charge and
commission from their founder; had they been unworldly enough to defy
the world and denounce its barbarous practices, we might have been far
nearer Kant's "sweet dream" of universal peace. But the churches, _as
churches_, have done very little for the cause of the "Prince of
peace," and now the world itself has outgrown their moral standard and
looks to them for guidance and inspiration no more. By the light of
reason alone, by the inspiration we gather from the _grands esprits_ of
the race, above all by the teaching of Immanuel Kant in his beautiful
treatise on "Perpetual Peace," we intend to do what in us lies to put
down this surviving, crowning infamy of war, the very thought of which
brutalises the mind, outrages its humanitarian instincts, and degrades
the ideals whereby we desire to live.
But, surely, it will be urged, we cannot refuse to acknowledge
undoubted benefits, both public and individual, which war has conferred
in the past. It has welded nomad peoples into nations, bred courage,
devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, self-sacrifice even to death in the
hearts of those who have nobly borne their part therein. Is not the
soldier hero, the military chieftain, the idol of all mankind?
Doubtless he is, and unquestionably through the instrumentality of war
great services have been rendered to the communities of peoples in the
past and noble individual traits of character created. It is an axiom
with us that the universe is so wondrously ordered that out of the
worst things a soul of good may and does emerge, and so goodly is
creation that its very evils become a source wherefrom good may arise.
What was good shall be good with for evil so much good more.
Thus, for example, the young lieutenant ordered to sink a hulk across
the bay of Santiago, and his handful of companions have, by exposing
themselves to imminent risk of an awful death, deeply stirred the
feelings of their fellow-countrymen and filled us all with a sense of
admiration at the heroism which can contemn danger and death in the
execution of duty or the quest of glory. But we must ask whether
humanity is in need of such exhibitions of bravery, whether there are
not other fields of danger which offer tasks equally arduous and
difficult of accomplishment? We are not insensible to the claims of
military or naval heroism, but I confess I see much more to admire in
Father Damien voluntarily surrendering himself to the slow and
loathsome martyrdom of Molokai, more in the self-devotion of our "white
slaves," as they must, alas! be called, who toil all the day and a deal
of the night in a heavy, noisome, almost disease-laden atmosphere in
the disgracefully crowded slums of our great cities, and all to earn a
few pence wherewith to buy just enough bread to keep body and soul
together in themselves and their children. Think of the
matchbox-makers, who turn out a gross for a few halfpence, out of which
they must supply some of their own materials. Think of the
seamstresses, the shirt-makers and tailors' assistants in the veritable
dens of East London, who by slaving for fifteen hours out of
twenty-four can earn eighteenpence a day, out of which four or five
shillings must be paid weekly for rent. Think of these mean, squalid
surroundings in which a life of positively ceaseless toil must be
lived, the patience and long-suffering with which it is endured, the
silent martyrdom of monotonous, unrelieved existence prolonged over
long years. Think of it, I say, and compare it with the intoxication
of the battle-field, the cavalry charge, the roar of cannon and
musketry, the rapid movements and counter-movements, the exultation
which the sight of numberless men produces, grim, deadly determination
on their faces, the thought of glory, the hope of renown, the dash of a
few minutes, the stroke perhaps of a few seconds, the wild burst of
untamed, savage human nature temporarily released from the restraint of
reason! What cannot, what shall not man under such circumstances
accomplish? Yes, we are not insensible to deeds of immortal daring, of
courage, that must live for ever; nor to the memory of Leonidas and his
Spartans, of the deathless glories of Thermopylae, of the unbroken
chain of chivalric deeds from the days of ancient Greece to "the thin
red line" that broke the fiercest charge, and the handful of Englishmen
that shot away their last cartridge and then stood to die with their
country's anthem on their lips--we are not insensible to all this, but
we say the day for it is past and gone, and the heroism of the
battle-field must be consecrated anew to the service of peace and the
poor. The millions on millions we are spending on those majestic
engines of destruction, those ships of ours that bastion the brine for
England, what could they not do for the moralisation of the poor and
outcast at our very doors in this city! Why, in three years that
inferno of the East End, that foul, reeking, pestilential nest of
tenements, unfit for even animal habitation, could be swept clean away
and human homes erected which, to put it on the lowest grounds, would
positively pay a dividend on the capital outlay, as has been
convincingly proved over and over again.
"How long, O Lord, how long," we exclaim with the prophet of old, shall
men be consumed with this ignoble fever, this war-madness which
degrades the combatants far more than it exalts them, which senselessly
destroys valuable property, scatters ruin broadcast, paralyses
industry, robs the poor of all the bread of life, fills the land with
mourning and desolation, with widows and orphans?--war, which we learnt
from wild beasts, our ancestors, which cannot therefore determine a
question of justice, which makes the wrong triumph as often as the
right, which degrades all that touch it by isolating them for months,
for years perhaps, from civilised life, which demoralises the victors,
embitters the vanquished, and, by creating strife, perpetuates the
possibilities of renewed strife--war, which at this moment keeps Europe
in the condition of an armed camp, millions of men leading
comparatively idle lives, with long hours on their hands which they
cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of
filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think
about--war, which is the curse of the poor and unfortunate, consuming
the energies of men and the material means whereby their unhappy lot
might be alleviated--war, the hard, cruel, relentless, inexorable
monster of unregenerate man's creation--we, since no pope, bishop or
priest will do it--we execrate it in the name of all we hold holiest,
in the name of reason, morality and religion, and we pledge ourselves
so to act, privately and politically, as to promote such measures--a
federation of all English-speaking nations of the earth, if that will
serve the purpose, or any other method equally or more serviceable--as
will finally exorcise this last of the besetting demons of humanity,
and fulfil thereby the "sweet dream" of our master and inspirer,
Immanuel Kant.
Ring out the old, ring in the new;
* * * * *
Ring out the false, ring in the true;
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old;
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
[1] Since these words were written the _Daily Chronicle_ of 10th
September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished
living English general.
XI.
THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE.
There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of
ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns
marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which
her sex was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom
and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in
more recent times into a serious attack on the central institution of
civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity
and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating
in the giddy glory of the "hill-top novel," with its heroine "who did,"
and in America what is tautologically described as the "Free-Love
Society" was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau
euphemistically describes as _mariage après la nature_. For all that,
however, one seems to hear less of the "hill-top" species, and
possibly--with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete
a couple of years ago--it may be fading into the mist of the past. It
is with communities, we may take it, as with individuals. There are
moments when, as it has been said, "every one is an atheist, from
archbishops downwards," when a sense of the purposelessness and
futility of perpetual combat seizes the most ardent. These are the
dark hours when attacks are planned and delivered against the most
sacred institutions, when people are not at their best, but are
restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like
individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and
playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the
sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts--none
of the best--that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish
minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes
its normal sway, and sex-plays and romances fade away into oblivion.
Now, it need not be said that the contention on behalf of the rights of
woman is heartily espoused by a movement which bases itself on the
conception of reason and justice as the root facts of existence. There
was no justice in the "subjection of woman," and we hold that those
opportunities of learning which a cultured age opens up to man should
likewise be at the disposal of his sister; that that freedom, which is
the birthright of the man, to expand the energies, mental and moral, of
his being to their fullest extent and in whatever calling, should also
be acknowledged to be the right of woman. The constitutional agitation
for the recognition of her rights has met with notable success, and it
has the fullest support of the ethical Church; but we believe that that
agitation has been pushed too far by a very small and insignificant
minority, and made to cover an attack on the institution of matrimony,
which her wisest friends see could only end in the ultimate downfall of
woman herself. Such an agitation, such an attack, must encounter the
most resolute opposition from a body which derives all its idealism and
inspiration from a life motived, not by the sense, but by reason. Its
leaders in America have pronounced decisively against any tampering
with the natural sacrament of marriage, and where they detect
tendencies--as unfortunately they do in many of the States of their
Union--to further loosen its bonds, they, with all the influence at
their command, endeavour to strengthen them.
Let me now proceed to justify this attitude of the ethical communion.
We do not base our action on considerations of authority such as move
the Churches of Christendom. It is not because Jesus assisted at a
wedding breakfast and performed an alleged wonder; not because the
Apostle Paul calls marriage "a great mystery in Christ and the Church,"
but because both Jesus and Paul and the Churches express a truth of
nature itself, that the union of man and woman is not, and cannot be,
the herding of animals; that the bestowal of the body cannot but be the
outward symbol of an invisible bond which is the very soul and life of
the contract. We thus go behind all Churches and apostles and ascend
to the very roots of Nature herself, and discern in the golden glory
wherewith she surrounds the ideal marriage the significance of her
intentions in its regard--that it is her true and real Sacrament, that
her sons and daughters are themselves its ministers, for they alone are
kindled with the heavenly fire; that not the Church, not the priest nor
ritual celebrates it, but these twain made one by that same
Love which moves the earth and heavens and all the stars.
That man has so regarded marriage as a sacred and sacramental fact is
authenticated by history in an abundantly available form. No doubt,
ages must have passed before he emerged from his animalesque condition
and abandoned polygynous and polygamous manners, the marriage by
capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical
evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed
away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that
monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was
potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert
Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man
and woman. What the institution _could_ become, what it _has_ become,
shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the nobler
days of Rome, under the republic and early empire, the same lofty
conception animated her best sons. It was the decay of reverence for
the sacred bond, the era when a woman's years were told by the number
of her divorces, which called forth the solemn warnings of her moralist
poets and philosophers, and ultimately brought about the emasculation
of the nation's manhood and the downfall of the empire. We have not
the remotest doubt but that a similar contempt in modern Europe for
Nature's ordinance would involve us in the same catastrophe. A low
estimate of marriage means contempt of woman; the contempt of woman
means her degradation from her position at the side of man as his
counsellor and his friend to that of his plaything, the instrument of
his pleasure; that again means the enthronement of licence and
licentiousness; that, the softening of the brain power of the manhood
of the race, leading to degeneracy, imbecility, and ultimate
extinction. We need no ecclesiastical organisation to tell us these
things, nor threaten us with direst penalties here or hereafter. These
are the penalties of nature's own aboriginal enactment. As it was in
the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall be unto all time. No
wonder St. Paul called marriage "a great mystery"!