The battle line between a military autocracy and the free government
is now set in array. It is to the last degree important that our
people know the strength of the adversary. Prudent men never
underestimate their opponents. Brave men want to know the worst that
can be said, truthfully. Let us confess that Germany with her nine
million soldiers, ammunition accumulated through twenty-five years of
preparation, has suffered no vital hurt. Three years of battle have
lessened the wealth of the Allied nations, but vastly increased the
treasures of Germany. This war has cost Great Britain thirty billions
of dollars, it has cost France twenty billions, it has cost the United
States ten billions. For these billions expended there has been for the
Allies no financial return. In striking contrast thereto, consider that
if Germany has spent twenty billions upon this war, she has won another
twenty billions, and even claims to have won thirty billions. Thus far,
her armies, like those of ancient Rome, have looted four countries.
She has carried away their gold, silver, copper, iron, steel, stocks,
bonds, she has stolen their locomotives, passenger coaches, freight
cars, wagons, automobiles, with all the goods of merchants. In the face
of her solemn treaties she has stolen the horses, cattle, oxen, sheep;
she has spoiled the granaries of their wheat, rye and barley. She has
looted the Belgian and French factories of their machinery, and carried
away the looms from the mills for cotton, wool and silk. The total
value of the steel mills of Belgium and of France, with all lathes
and stationary engines, is almost incalculable. She looted the iron
and coal mines of Belgium and France and the wells of Rumania for the
oil; she has looted the mines of Poland, Rumania and Serbia of their
bronze, lead, zinc, copper. She has loaded thousands upon thousands of
freight trains with household furniture, agricultural implements, goods
from the merchants' stores, art treasures from public galleries, as
well as from private houses. In every city and town, in every store and
farmer's house, the Germans attack first of all the safety vaults and
the little money chest of rich and poor alike. Germany found Belgium
worth twenty billion of dollars. It is probable that she has spoiled
Belgium of at least eight billions. The national fortunes of the
invaded territories were estimated at fifty billions, and most of this,
after three years, is now in the hands of the Germans. Each attack made
by Germany has been against a rich people whose treasure she could
loot, while every attack made by the Allies has been to recover a land
already devastated, poor and helpless. In choosing Napoleon, therefore,
rather than Jesus, Germany chose the motto of aggressive warfare, and
has made war an investment too profitable to be readily abandoned.
The peril to the Allies is the greater because of the vicious methods
used by Germany. All military experts know that wars are fought
incidentally with guns at the trenches, but in reality with granaries
at the rear. Better a million well-fed men with naked fists than two
million of armed men who are starving, for the starving men will
soon be too weak to lift the guns and the well-fed men will grasp
the weapons. From the view-point of food resources, Germany has from
the beginning occupied a unique position, in that she is rimmed all
around about with little nations unprepared and unarmed, and therefore
impotent to protect their granaries and root cellars, their herds and
flocks, when Germans came in to steal them. Whenever Germany has,
therefore, been short of food, she has organized an expedition and
looted some land like Belgium, as Poland. The next winter she sends an
army out to loot Rumania. Now that the harvests have been gathered in
upon the fields of Italy, Germany is trying to despoil that land.
Whenever she has had to withdraw a million men from the fields to send
them to the front Germany has impressed another million from Belgium,
Poland or Rumania, and forced these slaves to plough her fields, reap
her harvests, and all without wage. Sometimes she has gone through
the form of buying grain from the Balkan States, but she has forced
these peoples to take in return paper currency, which she can grind
out so long as the printing presses hold out and which in the event of
defeat she can easily repudiate. On the other hand, when Turkey and
Bulgaria have turned towards Germany for guns and munitions, since they
had nowhere else to go, Berlin has forced their rulers to pay in gold
and silver. Germany's claim is probably true, that her people are as
well-fed during the fourth winter of the war as they were during the
first winter. These are not pleasant matters to consider, but these
are the facts. Wise men want to know the facts, and then they know
what plans they must make to overcome the worst and turn it into the
best. Better be a wise pessimist than an ignorant optimist. Uninformed
Micawbers always waiting for something to turn up have no place in this
world war.
The query, How goes the battle? involves the statement that Germany is
now fighting this war at the expense of her neighbours. Her great Krupp
factories are using enormous quantities of coal, but it is Belgian
coal. Every week she consumes vast stores of rich iron ore, but it is
French ore. Her motors, trucks, military cars, consume oceans of oil;
this oil comes from Rumania. Each month she burns up human muscles in
field and factory and shop, but these spent men and women are subject
peoples. In a thousand ways events are worked for her interests.
Because she is in the center it is very easy for Germany to transport
her troops from one front to another, while it is very difficult for
the United States to transport munitions and guns and food across an
ocean 3,000 miles in width. It is a conservative statement to say that
it does not cost Germany one-tenth as much to move a cannon from Essen
to Ypres as it costs the United States to move a machine gun from
Bridgeport to Cambrai and Verdun.
Nor must we forget that we are building our iron ships with $6 a day
labour, our wooden ships with $7 a day carpenters, while Germany is
impressing labourers from Belgium and forcing them to work like
slaves. Slowly she is starving them to death, while pretending to pay
them seven cents a day for their eighteen hours of toil. When one group
of men breaks down and dies, Germany simply forces at the point of the
bayonet another group to take their places. Brutality, savagery, have
an enormous advantage over civilized States. One wolf is equal to a
hundred sheep and a thousand lambs. Thus far Germany has not lost one
inch of territory, and this fact must be considered when we raise the
question as to how goes the battle.
Ignorant of the real situation, underestimating the peril that is
upon the United States, many of our citizens refuse to support the
government, discourage enlistment on the one hand, or else carry
about with them an atmosphere of ignorant optimism. They talk loudly
about America winning this war. They never tire of telling about our
one hundred millions of people, our two hundred and fifty billions
of wealth, our possible ten millions of soldiers, and upon the basis
of these considerations they count the war ended, and win battles by
waving perils into thin air. Others say that in a moral universe,
injustice and cruelty cannot be victorious, and that in the nature
of the case Germany must be beaten, quite forgetting that Belgium
has been beaten, and so have Alsace and Lorraine. It is a truism
that what has been may be. A just God permitted the first republic,
Athens, to be ruined by her military neighbour, Macedonia. The story
how the militarism of Macedonia brought about the fall of Athens, and
contributed to dark ages, makes up a black page in the history of
liberty.
The ruthless hand of militarism snuffed out all the torches in the
temples of intellect that once "looked down on Marathon, as Marathon
looks on the sea." What scholar does not thrill with pain at the
very thought of the brutal regiments that destroyed the temples, the
libraries, the statues, the galleries of Athens! Phocion believed,
as did Plato and his pupils, that society had outgrown forever brute
force, wars and savagery. Athens put her emphasis upon the intellect.
She founded schools, and made her sons to be scholars. She became
the mother of the arts, science and philosophy, and prided herself
upon her artists and statesmen. She established foreign colonies,
builded ships and extended her trade to far-off lands in Sicily, Spain,
Gaul and North Africa. Within a century Athens became the center of
eloquence, poetry, philosophy and liberty. One day Prince Philip from
Northern Macedonia visited Athens. He marvelled that the city should
be like a vineyard whose purple clusters were without a fence, whose
treasure boxes were without watchmen. In that hour of avarice and
ambition Philip remembered the soldiers in his father's army at home.
He believed that one soldier could conquer a dozen merchants, bankers,
statesmen and scholars.
Returning to Macedonia, Philip craftily began taking an interest in
Greek affairs--for he was a subtle politician--and at the same time
turned his whole people into one vast fighting machine. His unit was
the Macedonian Phalanx. First came twenty-four men, with short spears;
then came a second twenty-four, with spears of six feet; then a third
twenty-four, with spears of eight feet in length. The last tier of
men in the company had spears twenty feet long, resting upon the
shoulders of the men in the front rank. These bristling spears were
invincible. The terror of the Macedonian Phalanx went out into all
the earth. Demosthenes was the one man who had vision. He called the
people together upon the public square and assembled them in the great
theatre. He mounted the rostrum upon Mars Hill and warned Athens. He
called the attention of the people to the fact that between Athens on
the south and Macedonia on the north were three buffer states. As the
Macedonian army moved southward, these states organized their army
and went forth in defence of their homes and their firesides. But
Demosthenes insisted that these buffer states were fighting not only
their own battles, but also the battles of Athens. If they fall, if
their armies are defeated, then Athens, single-handed, must meet the
entire force of the victorious host. Nevertheless Athens delayed, and
would not be persuaded. The noblest orations of the greatest man of his
time, Demosthenes, were of no avail.
When he crossed his southern frontier, Philip made himself terrible.
The flames of the burning towns at midnight lighted up the land as a
terrible warning. Thirty-two towns that had flourished as commercial
communities vanished from the face of the earth. These border states
above Athens, answering to our modern Belgium, were made into a
desert. Terrorized into submission, the Greeks threw down their arms
and opened the gates of their cities to Philip's soldiers, who brought
with them women and children in fetters that the spirit of Athens might
be utterly broken.
Has there ever been in historic times any parallel quite so striking as
that between the organized militarism of Macedonia with the subsequent
ruin of Athens, and the present systematized militarism of Germany, now
attempting the ruin of Belgium, France and England? Listen to Professor
von Stengel, the German authority on International Law: "There will be
no conference at The Hague when this war is over. The one condition of
prosperous existence for the natives is submission to our [Germany's]
supreme direction. Under our overlordship all international law would
become superfluous, for we of ourselves, and instinctively, will give
to each nation its own rights."