LET US HAVE PEACE
It was to attend a Congress of Churches that I crossed the Atlantic,
but it is not listening to speeches that gives a realisation of any
country. It is when wandering about the streets, sitting in cafes,
listening in a smoking-car, or talking to a man in a hotel lounge that
one forms some impression of the atmosphere which Americans breathe.
It has been asserted, doubtless with truth, that human aberrations are
a misplaced worship. That happiness which men were created to find in
fellowship with the Highest, they seek in base and sensual forms.
Drunkenness, on this theory, is a species of misdirected worship. If
this be granted, then, Americans are of all nations the most devout.
They worship the vast in every form. At Pittsburg you could hear a man
rolling out statistics of millions of tons of steel a year; of harbour
dues, though the city is far from the sea, that put even London and
Glasgow in the shade; and as he speaks you feel that he has a thrill
approaching adoration. He is on his knees before the greatest he
knows. It is the same in everything. A town of 14,000 inhabitants in
1840 is now a city of a million. He rolls the figures as if they were
a mystic ritual. Everything with which he has to do must be the
greatest on the earth.
I
It was, however, in New York that one came to the inner shrine of
American idealism. I had stayed for two days in the academic calm of
Princeton, had heard Lord Bryce lecture in iced and polished and
classic phrases on the age-long problem of Church and State; had spoken
to two hundred theological students who might just be in Oxford or
Edinburgh, for their eyes were just the same--the eyes of youth, who
perennially believe that they at least were born to put this old world
right. (That is the wonderful feeling that keeps pulpits filled--the
feeling that however much the message has been spurned and others have
failed, yet I cannot fail--glorious dream of youth!) From that
atmosphere of reposeful idealism I was suddenly projected into the
midst of New York. It was a bewildering experience. A friend who knew
his way in the maze guided me to the Pennsylvania hotel, 'The biggest
hotel in the world, with 2200 baths!' I found a room on the twentieth
storey, served by an 'express' service of lifts. I could enter into
the feelings of the countryman who, descending in one of those for the
first time and seeing floor after floor flash past, murmured, 'Thank
God, I am safe so far.' Having secured our 'baths' we went forth to
see New York by night.
Straight as an arrow my friend brought me to the spots where the full
blaze of the illumined streets burst into view. On every hand the
street fronts blazed with multi-coloured lights. Rainbows of dazzling
splendour spanned the avenues. Above every sky-scraper, darkening the
stars, letters of fire proclaimed 'The Greatest Boot Emporium in the
World' or 'The Vastest Store in all the Universe.' St. John in his
dreams of apocalyptic splendour in Patmos could never have dreamed
anything weirder than this. Far as the eye could see down Fifth Avenue
the quivering lights proclaimed to the silent stars: 'We are the
people--the greatest on the earth!' But, after all, the world is but a
tenth-rate little gutta-percha ball in the immensity of infinitude, and
it was a comfort to think that the constellations were not impressed.
On our way back we rested in a 'Soda-Fountain' refreshment room where
we sucked nectar through straws. 'This,' said my friend, 'was a
notorious saloon before the war, and here are we, two douce parsons,
drinking in all the phylacteries of respectability.' That, on the
whole, was the most wonderful thing we saw that night in New York. But
as I looked from the dizzy height of my room in the sky-scraper, out on
that city of glittering light, I seemed to realise what it meant. That
building of monstrous height, these proclamations that darkened the
heavens, making the stars but a background for vaunting--what are they
but the pursuit of the ideal; the scaling of heaven by force; the soul
laying hold on immensity by both hands. It is humanity on its knees
before the wrong altar.
II
It is the same when the Great War is recalled, as it inevitably is
every hour. To the American his share looms so vast that he is
convinced he won the war. Among certain classes 'We won the war' has
become a watchword. 'My brother last year travelled through Italy and
France and part of Germany,' a typical American will confide in you,
'and he met a German officer, and this German told him that they
thought little of the English and less of the French, but that when the
Americans came in they recognised their masters and quitted at once.'
Hereupon a quiet man in a corner begins to talk. 'We air a wonderful
nation, sir, and that's a sure thing,' he nasalises; 'we had only
50,000 casualties, and you had a million, and the French a million and
a half, and the Russians perhaps two millions, and the Italians half a
million--say five millions in all among the Europeans. My friend says
we won the war with 50,000 casualties! His idea seems to be that an
American is worth a hundred of his brethren in Europe. It is the
atmosphere here, sir. We air a great nation, sir.' Upon this the
first eyes the second speaker askance. But a Canadian takes up the
tale. 'There was an Englishman down in Florida this summer and he went
bathing,' thus the Canadian. 'There was a poster forbidding bathing at
a particular beach; but there the Englishman, having donned his bathing
suit, plunged in. The watcher of the beach rushed to him on his return
to shore and reprimanded him for disobeying orders. "Oh! I am all
right, for I took precautions," was the answer. "What precautions?"
exclaimed the watcher, at once professionally interested. And the
bather turned round and showed his newly-bought bathing suit. On one
side it bore the stars and stripes and on the other the legend "We won
the war." Pointing to these he said, "I was perfectly safe, for no
shark that ever swam in the ocean would swallow that!"' ... The
Canadian can beat the Yankee at his own game. He just pricks the tube
and you hear the wind whizzing. But in a few years nobody in the
States outside the ranks of the learned will know anything about any
one's sufferings and heroisms in the Great War except their own. Just
as to-day it is a surprise to a German to learn that Wellington won
Waterloo, so in the future it will be a surprise to an American to
learn that Britain and France by rivers of their blood won the Great
War. 'We won the war' has only begun as yet to run its course.
III
It was, however, at Mount Vernon, sixteen miles south of Washington,
that I seemed to be nearest to the soul of America. It was with a
quiet thankfulness that I left the city behind and went on pilgrimage
to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. There the scenes amid
which the Father of his country moved and had his being are unchanged.
In the city, the Washington monument, a shaft of white marble rising to
a height of '555 feet 5 1/8 inches,' confronts one's eyes at the end of
every vista. But here no monument challenges the world by its height.
The plain, wooden building, painted to resemble stone, with a piazza
extending along the whole front, consisting of two storeys and an attic
with dormer windows, surmounted by a small cupola and an ancient
weathervane, is just as it was when Washington lived and died. In
these rooms with the tables and chairs and bed and pictures, and the
books (duplicates mostly), just as they were a hundred and fifty years
ago, there were dreamed dreams that have changed half the world. Out
of this farm-house came the impulse and the power wherewith 'The
embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.'
There could be found few spots on earth in which one could better muse
on the mutability of earthly affairs than in these rooms tenanted by
ghosts. Here in the main hall is the key of the Bastille, sent by
Lafayette from Paris as a gift to Washington after the capture of the
prison in 1789. 'Give me leave, my dear General,' wrote Lafayette, 'to
present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few
days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress
of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted country,
as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a missionary of liberty to its
patriarch.' No nation ever owed so great a debt for its liberty as the
United States owed to France. George Washington won the War of
Independence because half the people of Britain sympathised with him,
knowing that he was fighting their battle for liberty as well as his
own; but mainly because France espoused his cause on sea and land, and
sent him money, and men, and leaders such as Lafayette. But in the
realm of international politics gratitude has no place. When France in
1914 faced the menace of overwhelming and final destruction; when
Belgium, to whose independence the United States was a signatory at the
Hague Convention, was overrun, the Government at Washington did not
even enter a protest, and the President still addressed the Kaiser as
'great and good friend.' While France that won her liberty for America
was for three years in Gethsemane, the States were 'too proud to
fight.' As late as 1917 there was the famous speech about 'peace
without victory.' It was only when a Presidential Election was gained
by 'the Man who kept us out of the war,' and when the interests of the
States on the high seas were threatened with ruin, that the Americans
at last entered the fray. If Britain had acted as the States did,
France to-day would have been the conscript appendage of Germany. When
the American Ambassador in London declared in a candid moment that
America came into the war for 'her own interests,' the resolutions
passed and the speeches made disowning him were amazing. That key of
the Bastille there in Mount Vernon is a monument of international
ingratitude. There is no reason to narcotise ourselves into believing
that poor humanity has been changed for ever in this year of grace at
Washington.
IV
To-day Mount Vernon is a shrine, and a sky-scraping monument dominates
Washington, but George Washington learned in his own day the lesson
that in politics there is no gratitude. The founder of the great
Republic did not escape the common fate. He was accused as President
of drawing more than his salary, of aping at monarchy; there were hints
of the guillotine being needed; until at last the scurrilous attacks
drove Washington to declare at a Cabinet meeting in 1793 that he would
rather be in his grave than in his present position. It is said that
at the end he would have preferred to seek reunion with Britain. (An
American lecturer was howled down in New York two years ago for
venturing to refer to that!) This at least is sure, that Washington
was glad to end his days in the peace of Mount Vernon. If this may
seem incredible one has only to think of the fate of Clemenceau, of
Venizelos, or of Woodrow Wilson. There is to-day in Washington a
living monument of national ingratitude. Whatever may be thought of
many of the acts of President Wilson, of his leaving France to her fate
until he won his election to the second term of office by the help of
the anti-British and pacifist votes, yet posterity will undoubtedly
acclaim him as Lincoln now is acclaimed. It was he who not only, with
the dreamers of all the years, dreamed the dream of perpetual peace,
but by his unbending will-power forced the nations of Europe to place
that dream, materialised in the League of Nations, in the forefront of
the Treaty of Versailles. That was one of those epoch-making events on
which the history of the world turns. It is idle to think that the
coming generations will not place the man who did that among the
greatest of the human race. And yet to-day his own countrymen can find
no words strong enough to express their contempt and dislike. There is
no more pathetic figure in all the world. A shattered body gains him
no respite from abuse. When the broken man drove for the last time
from the White House to his own home--the burden at last laid down--a
demonstration organised by the League of Nations Union cheered him at
his gate. They would not go away until he spoke. He was taken to a
window, and after saying a few words he pointed to his throat, in token
that he could not further reply to the ovation. History can scarcely
parallel that tragedy. But Woodrow Wilson can comfort himself with the
thought that the hosannas will rise in chorus when he is dead. George
Washington has now a monument 555 feet high; a hundred years hence
Woodrow Wilson will have a monument 666 feet high. The generations of
those who garnish tombs never fail. 'I tremble for my country,' said
President Jefferson, 'when I remember that God is just.'
V
The world has raised a chorus of rejoicing over the results of the
Conference at Washington. While we rejoice at the prospect of reducing
the number of battleships, we can only rejoice with trembling. (It is
America, who had the Japanese navy on the brain, that has the greatest
cause to rejoice.) But agreements and treaties are not going to save
us. The crucial question is not the form and context of a treaty, but
rather whether there is among men sufficient truth and righteousness to
fulfil its terms. The warfare of the future will be a warfare of
chemistry. (According to a statement ascribed to Edison, the whole
population of London can in the future be wiped out in eight hours by
poison gas!) Is there a possibility of restricting laboratories and
the massing of deadly germs? The men who will release the energy in an
atom will be able to destroy a world. If we look at facts we shall not
be drugged by oratory. 'Rhetoric,' said Theodore Roosevelt, 'is a poor
substitute for the habit of looking facts resolutely in the face.' The
facts confronting us are ominous enough. Twice recently one of the
greatest of nations has thrown over the signature of its Supreme Head
and its Secretary of State. The United States repudiated its President
and refused to ratify the League of Nations; and not only that, but
refused also to ratify the Agreement made with France and Britain to
secure France against future aggression. The present misery and unrest
in Europe are largely due to the failure of one hundred and ten
millions of the English-speaking race to honour the signature of their
Chief. The best of them bewail it, and say that it is the fault of
their political system. Under the worst system of European government
such events would be impossible.
But though the failure to ratify treaties be grievous, yet the failure
to observe treaties duly ratified is still more grievous. And the
history of our relations with the States is largely the history of
broken treaties. There was the famous Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850
regarding the Panama Canal; it was repudiated in 1880, and its history
since is a history of broken agreements. There have been so many
conferences, so many agreements, so many treaties since the days of the
Holy Alliance to the days of The Hague, and the end has always been the
same. In 1916 Mr. Elihu Root made a speech in the American Senate, the
echoes of which will ring round the world in the coming years. The
burden of his sorrow was shame for his country's repudiation of their
obligation to protect Belgium. Here are some sentences:--
'Wherever there was respect for law, it revolted against the wrong done
to Belgium. Wherever there was true passion for liberty, it blazed out
for Belgium. Wherever there was humanity it mourned for Belgium....
The law protecting Belgium was our law and the law of every civilised
country.... We had played our part, in conjunction with other
civilised nations, in making that law.... Moreover, that law was
written into a solemn and formal Convention, signed and ratified by
Germany, and Belgium and France, and the United States.... When
Belgium was invaded, that Agreement was binding, not only morally, but
strictly and technically, because there was then no nation a party to
the war which was not also a party to the Convention. The invasion of
Belgium was a breach of contract with us for the maintenance of a law
of nations.... The American Government failed to rise to the demands
of a great occasion. Gone were the old love of justice, the old
passion for liberty, the old sympathy with the oppressed, the old
ideals of an America helping the world towards a better future, and
there remained in the eyes of mankind only solicitude for trade and
profit and prosperity and wealth.'
Yes, humanity might mourn for Belgium, and the States stand aloof in
spite of its plighted word, but what of that when an election had to be
won and the Irish vote conciliated! The world being what it is there
can be no hope of deliverance along the road of treaties. There can be
no salvation by parchments. You cannot make a treaty when there is no
sense of truth and honour. You cannot make a treaty with paganism.
There is no truth or honour there for a treaty to rest on. And the
world is still overwhelmingly pagan. Europe may have been baptized and
America also, but Asia still dreams that its day will return. Japan is
haunted by the dreams of Potsdam, and the hunger of empire is in her
eyes. China, India, Africa, and the Turk are not yet even baptized!
And yet people think that we have arrived at last within sight of the
millennium. The characteristic of humanity is its credulous
simplicity. Men cannot rid themselves of the fond belief that they can
reform the jungle by manicuring the tiger's claws.
VI
The march of events is the proof that the woe of humanity is too deeply
seated to be healed by any human salve. There is no balm in any Gilead
for these wounds. The first step towards the rehabilitation of the
world would be the mutual cancelling of the nations' debts to each
other. The United States alone makes this impossible. Money that we
borrowed for our allies, and which we cannot recover from our allies,
America insists that we pay. And yet that money was spent to save
America as well as ourselves. To realise that one has only to think
what would have happened if Germany had won? The greatest day in the
history of Scotland was when the German fleet, its crimes against the
laws of Neptune for ever ended, came sailing into the Forth to
surrender. Through the mist that shrouded it there never moved a
procession so humiliating and so woeful. Judgment at last overtook the
murderers who gloated over the _Lusitania_! But supposing Germany had
won, what then? The first condition would have been the surrender of
the British fleet at Kiel. And we would have no choice; for a starving
nation must sacrifice everything to feed its children. But what would
have happened then? Think of the Emperor William master of the British
and French fleets as well as his own. What would have become of the
Monroe Doctrine next morning? What would have become of the scores he
had to settle about the supplying of munitions to his foes? In face of
the might confronting her, America would have been helpless. New York
would have been given to the flames if America came not to heel. We
saved the great Republic as well as France and ourselves. And now,
having given our sons and our treasure, we are being bled white that we
may pay America for the munitions which we used in her defence. These
payments are earmarked for the payment of American war-pensions! The
world has never seen so grotesque a situation. The protected and the
delivered demand that their protectors and deliverers should pay for
the privilege of protecting and delivering them! What is at the back
of so preposterous a state of things? It is this, that there is the
shadow of a Presidential Election looming ahead, and the cancelling of
the debts guaranteed by Britain would be unpopular. One can quite
realise the use the Irish orators would make of that. We forget that
Anglophobia is still the staple of American history as taught in her
schools. The Boston Tea Party and the War of Independence were due to
British vices and the triumph of American virtues. To cancel the debts
for which such a nation is responsible would be to repudiate the makers
of America! ... What is required, of course, is the right education of
the American democracy. Schools should teach that it is impossible in
so imperfect a world that all the right can be on one side. Yet that
is how history is taught, not only there but here. Our foes also were
always wrong! There will be no peace in the world until the spirit of
spread-eagleism is replaced by that of meekness; until nations and men
realise that we are members one of another, and that we are here to
help and serve each other. Until that new spirit breathes through the
masses of humanity, there will be war. And we shall have to endure.
We who saved America must pay for the privilege of saving her; and we
must do it while every opportunity of doing so is snatched from us. A
tariff that will exclude our goods has been established; the only way
left to pay is by acting as carriers on the seas! Now we are to be
driven from that service by nationally subsidised mercantile American
fleets! And yet we must pay! ... If anything could waken humanity to
the fact that the conversion of the people can alone save the world, it
would be this. Missionaries to convert the hearts of the American
voters is the world's supreme need.
VII
One of the most impressive sights in New York is the tomb of General
Grant. Its site overlooking the deep-gorged Hudson river is most
impressive. It is a square building of white granite without and white
marble within, surmounted by a cupola with Ionic columns. Above the
door, between two figures emblematic of peace and war, are inscribed
the words, 'Let us have peace.' These are the closing words of his
letter accepting the Presidency. Grant had a right to use the words,
for he was a great peace-maker. He made peace by conquering the forces
of disruption. He kept stubbornly at it. But when he won at last he
would not humiliate Lee by taking his sword from him; and when he was
told that Lee's men owned their own horses--'Let them keep them,' said
Grant; 'they will need them for the spring ploughing.' Nor would he
allow any salvos of victory. 'We are all citizens of the same
Republic,' said he; 'let us have peace.' To-day the whole world is one
Republic woven together by the mighty shuttles of steamships, airships,
and wireless. In that world there can be no hermit nation. In that
world, 'let us have peace.' In the Governor's garden at the base of
the slope that leads to the citadel, in Quebec, there is an obelisk
that stirs the heart. It is a monument to Wolfe and Montcalm. The one
died content that he had won a dominion greater than he knew for the
nation that he loved; the other, dying, comforted himself with the
thought that he did not live to see the surrender of Quebec. There,
these two heroic souls, near the scene of their heroism, share a common
monument. The inscription is the most beautiful I know:--
Mortem, Virtus, Communem,
Famam Historia
Monumentum Posteritas
Dedit.
'Valour gave them a common death; history a common fame; posterity a
common monument.' That obelisk visualises the hope of the future. It
would indeed be a miserable world in which men went on hating for ever.
Only the spirit of Him who for the love of men stooped to a cross can
dig the grave of hate and war at last. When the world shall awake from
its nightmare and shall listen to Him, then the world will have peace.
VIII
When I shall have forgotten all else, I shall remember a morning spent
in Trinity Church, New York. The oldest grave in the graveyard
surrounding it is that of a little child, Richard Churcher, 'who died
the 5 of April 1681 of age 5 years and 5 months.' The child's name has
outlived the city; for the old city is gone. A few years ago the spire
of Trinity Church was a landmark. Now they are completely hidden by
the buildings of enormous height that surround them. By contrast the
church and spire look like toys. One building soars to 724 feet--49
storeys, with elevators rising 41 storeys in one minute, and express
elevators 30 storeys in 30 seconds! Even St. Paul's Cathedral
surrounded by buildings such as the Woolworth, rising to 800 feet,
would be dwarfed into significance, and Trinity Church is small
compared to St. Paul's. It is when one ponders such a scene that one
realises what it is that is wrong with the world. The towers and
pinnacles of Mammon soar everywhere high above the puny sanctuaries of
faith. The evangel of the Carpenter of Nazareth is jostled aside and
crowded out. What the world has to do is to make room once more for
love and self-sacrifice--for idealism. That is the only road to
salvation. Nobody knows that better than the American. He likes to
listen to oratory about world-peace; but when the oratory is done he
smiles. 'We might as well,' says he, 'try to lift ourselves by our
bootlaces.' And that is the moral of it all.
* * * * *
The United States refused the mandate for Armenia, and the mandate for
Constantinople, and dishonoured the signature of its chief magistrate
guaranteeing the security of France. To-day the blood of the slain
cries to Heaven, and Britain is left alone holding the gates of Europe
against a race whose only rule is government by massacre. And from
America the Press reports a cablegram to the Prime Minister:--'Win
civilisation's everlasting appreciation by keeping the brutes out of
Europe. Americans expect every Englishman to do his duty.' What a
strange species of humour! In very truth the regeneration of the
world's democracies is the only road to peace.