America and the World's Peace
America's Mission in the Peace Movement
America's Mission to Mankind
America's Obligation
The Arbiter of the World
Arbitration _versus_ War
The Challenge of Thor
The Conflict of War and Peace
A Congress of Nations
The Cost of Militarism
The Cost of Peace
The Crucial Parallelism
The Dawn of Peace
The Dawn of Universal Peace
Democracy and Peace
Diplomacy and Peace
Disillusionment
The Dominant Ideal
The End; and the Means
The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism
The Evolution of Justice
The Evolution of Law
The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker
The Evolution of World Peace
The Fallacy of the Economics of War
The Federation of the World
Forces of War and Peace
The Foundations
From Chaos to Harmony
From History's Pages--Peace
Fruits of War and Fruits of Peace
Government and International Peace
The Growing Sentiment
The Growth of the Peace Movement
Honor Satisfied
The Ideal of the Century
Idealism and the Peace Movement
Immigration and Peace
The Inefficiency of War
Instead of War--What?
International Arbitration
International Justice and World Peace
International Peace
International Peace and the Prince of Peace
Justice and Peace
Justice by War or Peace
The Keynote of the Twentieth Century
The Lasting Wound
The Law of Peace
The Message of the Andes
Military Selection and its Effect on National Life
Modern Battlefields
A Nation's Opportunity
The New Anglo-Saxon
The New Brotherhood
The New Corner Stone
The New Era
The New Nobility
The New Patriotism
The Next Step
The Panama Canal
The Passing of War
The Pathway to Peace
Patriotism and Peace
Peace and Armaments
Peace and the Evolution of Conscience
Peace and the Fortification of the Panama Canal
Peace and Public Opinion
Peace Inevitable
Peace is our Passion
Peace on Earth
Peace, our Great Ideal
The Philosophy of Universal Peace
Physical and Psychical Aspects of War
A Plea for International Peace
A Plea for Peace
Popular Fallacies about War
Popular Government and Peace
Popular Sentiment and Purer Citizenship: The Right Road to Peace
The Power of International Tolerance
The Prince of Peace
Progress toward Justice
The Proposed Court of Arbitral Justice
The Rationality of Peace
The Real Power
The Redemption of Patriotism
The Regaining of the World's Lost Legacy
Right or Might
The Significance of the Hague Conferences
The Rightful Ruler
A Simple Method of Forwarding Universal Peace
The Solving Principles of Federation
Sovereignty in Arbitration
Statesmanship _versus_ Battleship
Thor or Christ
Ungrateful America
The United States and Universal Peace
The United States of the World
Universal Peace and the Brotherhood of Man
The Unnecessary Evil
A Vision of a Conquest
War and Christianity
War--The Demoralizer
War and its Elimination
War and the Laboring Man
War and the Man
War for Profit
War--Universal Brotherhood--Peace
The Warrior's Protest against War
The Waste of War--The Wealth of Peace
The Way of Peace
What, from Vengeance?
World Federation
The World Organization
_Acknowledgments._ The Intercollegiate Peace Association is greatly
indebted to many state and city peace societies for coöperation and
assistance. They have materially strengthened our work and made
possible the enlargement of the field of our activities. To their
secretaries we are deeply indebted. The fullest coöperation of the
peace societies, each assisting and supplementing the work of others
wherever possible, will bring the most fruitful and the most speedy
results, and the fact that we have received such coöperation indicates
a full appreciation of the value of the work being done in these
contests. We wish also to express our gratitude to the many individual
contributors of prizes, especially to the Misses Seabury, for their
interest, encouragement, and generosity, because without their
assistance our association could not have survived. To the Misses
Seabury we are also under obligation for lending their rights over the
texts of orations for this publication. For the subvention from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace we thank the American Peace
Society, through whose agency it comes to us. For the publication of
this volume we are deeply grateful to the World Peace Foundation,
without whose coöperation the book could not have been published. To
Edwin D. Mead and Denys P. Myers the editor owes his sincere thanks
for suggestions and corrections of the manuscript. We trust that the
volume will be amply justified by the good that it will do.
STEPHEN F. WESTON
_Executive Secretary_
SUPPLEMENT
_The Contests of 1914._ This volume was projected to be published
before the Lake Mohonk Conference in May, but it was decided to
include the five orations given in the national contest of 1914, and
so make the volume complete for the year of issue. The last five
orations, then, are the winning ones in the group contests of 1914,
contesting for place in the national contest at Mohonk Lake, May 16,
1914. They are the picked orations of over four hundred and fifty
prepared in one hundred and twenty colleges and universities,
representing twenty-two states. The fifteen orations in the volume are
the winning orations out of more than sixteen hundred and fifty
written by the student body of the country in the past eight years.
In 1914 six additional states took part in the contests, making
twenty-two organized into five groups. The Pacific coast and Southern
groups were added during the year to the three groups organized in
1913. Three of the groups held their contests on May 1--the North
Atlantic at the College of the City of New York, the Central at
Western Reserve University, and the Western at Des Moines College. The
Southern Group held its contest at Vanderbilt University on May 10. On
the Pacific coast only Oregon was ready, and the winner of her state
contest was permitted to represent the group in the national contest.
Utah and California are planning to enter the contests of 1915.
Virginia, West Virginia, and South Carolina are organizing, and a
sixth group will then be formed--the South Atlantic Group.
S. F. W.
THE CONFLICT OF WAR AND PEACE
By PAUL SMITH, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana
First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at the University of
Cincinnati, May 17, 1907
THE CONFLICT OF WAR AND PEACE
The past ages have witnessed a long conflict between two opposing
principles--the principle of might and the principle of right. The
first instituted the duel between equals and condemned the impotent to
slavery; the second ordained the courts of civil justice and signed
the Emancipation Proclamation. The principle of might licensed
despotism and degraded the many in the service of the few; the
principle of right proclaimed democracy and consecrated the few to the
service of the many. Thus in the realm of the individual and of the
state the diviner conception has won its triumphs, and to-day force is
tolerated only as it serves the cause of justice. But in the larger
international sphere the advocates of might prolong the ancient cry
for war; the disciples of right protest in a gentler demand for peace.
The partisans of war urge four capital reasons in behalf of their
principle: personal glory, moral education, class interest, and
national egoism.
We have as a heritage of our military past, not a sense of the grim
tragedy of war, but traditions which award the highest meed of
personal glory to the warrior. The roster of the world's heroes
contains two classes of names--great soldiers and great altruists.
Poet and orator and populace unite to do honor to him who was not
afraid to fight and to die for his home, his king, his liberty, his
country, his convictions. Bravery has ever won its laurel crown, for
an instinct within us applauds physical courage and aggressiveness.
And the gilded uniform and clanking sword, the drumbeat and the bugle
call, the camp fire and the "far-flung battle line," stand as the most
dramatic expressions of a deep sentiment, primitive and thrilling.
Akin to this martial hero worship is the argument that success in war
gives training for the higher contests of peace. Out of the war of
1776 the nation took George Washington for President; out of the
Mexican War, Zachary Taylor; out of the Civil War, General Grant; out
of the Spanish War, Theodore Roosevelt. The badge of the Grand Army of
the Republic is a certificate of merit. The cross of the Legion of
Honor opens the door to social and political and business prosperity.
Battle is regarded as a supreme test of sturdy manhood, and the harsh
discipline of the camp as education for the finer arts of the council.
War creates a heroism which later devotes itself to spiritual ends.
Moreover, say the advocates, the interests of class require force for
their conservation. The hereditary nobility of Europe was founded by
military process for military purposes, and, with the passing of war,
loses its warrant for existence. On the other hand, it is claimed that
the under classes may come into the enjoyment of their inalienable
rights, common to all humanity, only by means of the sword. Witness
the peasantry of Russia! Even in America so great a prophet as Henry
Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be
set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who
freely predict, even for our democratic land, a desperate rebellion of
a proletariat of poverty against an aristocracy of wealth.
Finally, the demands of national egoism are urged in behalf of war.
For example, Japan needs new territory for her growing millions and
must assume the conqueror's rôle. Or France goes mad with the lust of
empire and goes forth untamed until the day of Waterloo. Or Great
Britain must have new markets; and, falsely reasoning that trade
follows the flag, and the flag follows the bayonet, she seizes a realm
upon which the sun may never set. Or the interests of white men and
yellow men, of black men or red men, clash; and then the cannon must
be the final test, might must make right, and the strongest must
survive. The greed of territorial aggrandizement, the spirit of
national adventure, the longing for commercial supremacy, the honor of
a country, the pride of racial achievement--each is urged to justify
the necessity for bloodshed and carnage. Such are the arguments of the
advocates of war.
To balance these, the advocates of peace plead four greater
considerations: against personal glory, the economic cost of
militarism; against the moral education of war, the higher heroism of
peace; against class interests, the sanctity of human life; and
against national egoism, the deeper spirit of national altruism.
A single modern battleship costs more than the combined value of the
property and endowment of all the colleges of a certain great state.
Two thirds of the money passing through the treasury of the Republic
goes to the support of the military system. Computing two hundred
dollars a year as the average loss to society occasioned by the
withdrawal of each soldier and sailor from productive toil, and adding
this sum to the war budgets of the nations for the past fifty years,
we obtain a total of billions, beyond the reach of all imagination.
The money which armies, navies, wars, and pensions have cost the world
in fifty years would have installed in China a system of education
equal to that of the United States; would have transformed the arid
deserts of India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid
railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have
dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation
of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family
on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half
century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings.
The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce
pauperism, elevate the peasantry of Europe, lighten taxation, and work
an economic revolution.
The argument for moral education mistakes national gratitude to
warriors for tribute to the training of the camp. But grant that war
develops the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral
phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war;
it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of
womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men
to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has
no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the
greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in
social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities
and powers and rulers of the world-darkness calls forth the maximum
powers of manhood. Wendell Phillips stands in the ranks of heroes as
high as Philip Sheridan. The moral loss from war transcends the moral
gain.
Yet war levies toll more tragic than any toll of dollars, more
appalling than any moral cost. A famous painting reveals the world's
conquerors, Xerxes, Cæsar, Alexander, Napoleon, and a lesser host,
mounted proudly on battle steeds, caparisoned with gorgeous trappings;
but the field through which they march is paved with naked, mutilated
corpses, the ghastly price of glory. The trenches at Port Arthur were
filled level-full with the bodies of self-sacrificed martyrs, and upon
this gruesome slope the final charges were made. Stripped of all
sentiment, war is organized and wholesale murder, a savage and awful
paradox which proclaims the shallowness of civilization. Said General
Sherman: "Only those who have never heard a shot, only those who have
never heard the shrieks of the wounded nor the groans of the dying,
can cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." God
grant the world may soon heed the Voice, sounding down from the
solemnity of Sinai, laying the divine command upon each man and each
nation: "Thou shalt not kill!"
There yet remains the ethical argument for peace. Will any one say
that the supreme duty of altruism is binding upon men as individuals,
and not binding upon the same men acting conjointly as a nation? When
the people and the statesmen of one nation are able to put themselves
in the places of the statesmen and of the people of another nation;
when there is a common will to do international justice rather than to
despise the weaker country; when not selfish interest alone, but the
greatest good of the greatest number, becomes the driving impulse of
humanity; when the thrill of fraternity crosses geographical lines and
pauses not on the shores of the seas--then war will be impossible,
the energies of the world will turn to the constructive arts, and from
the midst of contentment unshadowed by hunger, from prosperity
unmenaced by want, in the peaceful spirit of the Christ, the world
will sing:
"The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star is
brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face, a kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves, and travel downward to dust
of graves.
Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: blind creeds and kings
have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path: our hope is in the aftermath.
Our hope is in heroic men, star-led to build the world again.
To this Event the ages ran: Make way for Brotherhood--make way for
man."
All great reforms have begun with "star-led" men and have moved from
individuals to groups and from groups to the nation. In every distinct
advance of the race prophetic persons have anticipated the trend of
the ages and have adopted new codes for themselves; the higher
morality has spread by agitation to include a larger group, and
finally it has become the policy of the nation. Thus slavery went, and
political equality came.
And thus war must go and peace must come. First, we find protest
against the killing of individuals by individuals. The duel fell into
disrepute and at last was forbidden by law. The carrying of weapons
became unfashionable and at length was made a crime. With the growth
of the moral sense, mutual trust took the place of armed neutrality.
The present situation is ready for the larger application of these
principles. The argument which abolished the carrying of weapons must
frown upon excessive national armaments. As the individual duel was
superseded by personal arbitration, so the national duel must be
superseded by national arbitration. The reason that maintains the
civil court for the settlement of individuals' disputes calls for a
higher court for the settlement of national disputes. Not alone among
men, not alone within states, but among the nations, right, not might,
must rule; not force, but justice; and written as the world's supreme
mandate, as the highest human law from which there may be no appeal,
must be the unshaken law of national righteousness.
Tennyson's words were accounted a poet's fancy when he wrote:
Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Yet the present year[1] will witness the fulfillment of that prophecy.
Disarmament and arbitration will be considered this summer, not by
agitators, not by theorists, nor yet prophetically by poets; but in
June, at the invitation of our own President,[2] an actual
international conference will assemble, a Parliament of the World,
composed of official representatives of every nation of the globe.
Thus we see the foregleams of an approaching day. The time is
not far distant when war will glide into the grim shadows of a
scarce-remembered past, when battles will pass into the oblivion of
forgotten horrors. Then will society realize its dreams of a kingdom
of heaven upon earth, where the barbaric lure of fighting will be
lost; where no class lines may exist save those freely acknowledged by
a common justice; where national egoism maintains no armies for
conquest and no navies for aggrandizement; where economic resources
are devoted, not to mutual physical destruction, but to splendid
spiritual enlargement; where "every nation that shall lift again its
hand against a brother, on its forehead will wear forevermore the
curse of Cain"; and where, in the realization of a vast, racial
brotherhood, is fulfilled the prophetic angel's song, "Peace on earth,
good-will to men." Ruskin, the modern bard of peace, has sung:
Put off, put off your mail, ye kings, and beat your brands to dust--
A surer grasp your hands must know, your hearts a better trust;
Nay, bend aback the lance's point, and break the helmet bar--
A noise is in the morning winds, but not the noise of war!
Among the grassy mountain paths the glittering troops increase--
They come, they come!--how fair their feet,--they come that
publish peace.
[1] The Hague Conference of 1907 is referred to.
[2] By the courtesy of President Roosevelt the official call
for the Second Hague Conference was issued by the Emperor of
Russia. Forty-four nations were represented.--_Editor._
THE UNITED STATES AND UNIVERSAL PEACE
By GLENN PORTER WISHARD, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at DePauw University,
Greencastle, Indiana, May 15, 1908
THE UNITED STATES AND UNIVERSAL PEACE
Political and religious reforms move slowly. We change our beliefs and
at the same time hold fast to old customs. Farsighted public opinion
has declared war to be unchristian; sound statesmanship has stamped it
as unjust; the march of events has, in a majority of cases, proved it
to be unnecessary--and yet we continue to build mammoth engines of
destruction as if war were inevitable. Truly, the millennium is not at
hand, nor is war a thing of the past; but whereas war was once the
rule, now it is the exception. This is an age of peace; controversies
once decided by force are now settled by arbitration. Europe, once the
scene of continuous bloodshed, has not been plundered by conquering
armies for more than a generation, while the United States has enjoyed
a century of peace marred by only five years of foreign war. The four
notable conflicts of the last decade have been between great and small
powers, and have been confined to the outposts of civilization; while
during the same period more than one hundred disputes have been
settled by peaceful means. The willingness to arbitrate has been
manifest; the means have been provided; the Permanent International
Court, established by the Hague Conference in 1899, actually lives,
and has already adjudicated four important controversies.[1] But
arbitration, you say, will never succeed because the decisions cannot
be enforced. You forget that already some two hundred and fifty
disputes have been settled by this method, and in not one instance has
the losing power refused to abide by the decision.
[1] From October 14, 1902, the date of the first decision,
up to the end of 1913, the Permanent Court has rendered
thirteen decisions settling international
differences.--_Editor._
Yesterday the man who advocated universal peace was called a dreamer;
to-day throughout the world organized public opinion demands the
abolition of war. Yesterday we erected statues to those who died for
their country; to-day we eulogize those who live for humanity.
Yesterday we bowed our heads to the god of war; to-day we lift our
hands to the Prince of Peace.
I do not mean to say that we have entered the Utopian age, for the
present international situation is a peculiar one, since we are at the
same time blessed with peace and cursed with militarism. This is not
an age of war, yet we are burdened by great and ever-increasing
armaments; the mad race for naval supremacy continues, while the
relative strength of the powers remains practically the same; the
intense and useless rivalry of the nations goes on until, according to
the great Russian economist, Jean de Bloch, it means "slow destruction
in time of peace by swift destruction in the event of war." In Europe
to-day millions are being robbed of the necessaries of life, millions
more are suffering the pangs of abject poverty in order to support
this so-called "armed peace." Note the condition in our own country.
Last year we expended on our army, navy, and pensions sixty-seven per
cent of our total receipts. Think of it! In a time of profound peace
more than two thirds of our entire expenditures are charged to the
account of war.
We do not advocate radical, Utopian measures; we do not propose
immediate disarmament; but we do maintain that when England, Germany,
France, and the United States each appropriates from thirty to forty
per cent of their total expenditures in preparation for war in an age
of peace, the time has come for the unprejudiced consideration of the
present international situation. Why do the great powers build so many
battleships? President Roosevelt, Representative Hobson, and others
would have us believe that England, Germany, and France are actually
preparing for war, while the United States is building these engines
of destruction for the purpose of securing peace. But what right have
we to assume that our navy is for the purpose of preserving peace,
while the navies of the European powers are for the purpose of making
war? Is not such an assumption an insult to our neighbors? As a matter
of fact, England builds new battleships because Germany does, Germany
increases her navy because France does, while the United States builds
new dreadnoughts because other nations pursue that policy. Call it by
whatever honey-coated name you will, the fact, remains that it is
military rivalry of the most barbarous type, a rivalry as useless as
it is oppressive, a rivalry prompted by jealousy and distrust where
there should be friendship and mutual confidence. There is riot one of
the powers but that would welcome relief from the bondage of
militarism; the demand for the limitation of armaments is almost
universal. Believing that to decry war and praise peace without
offering some plan by which the present situation may be changed is
superficial, we hasten to propose something practicable.