on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems
visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of
progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he
might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys
of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he
pulls himself across the chasm and into the larger life. To advance at
all, man must have ideals--for himself, for his family, for his
nation. But mark the effect of war on these ideals. In place of the
ideal of peace--to serve men and uplift them--one is taught the ideal
of war--to make himself the most widely feared of professional
murderers. Instead of the ideal of peace--to make his family
comfortable, happy, and prosperous--comes in the war ideal, by whose
terms the family head deserts his own flock to kill other family heads
for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes. As for his ideal of
the nation's greatness, we have ample testimony that when bullets and
cannon balls cone crashing through the splendid structure of his
purpose, it speedily crumbles into an ignominious desire to hide
himself behind the nearest tree. No; do not say that war builds up
ideals; it tears them down and tramples them in the dust; aye more, it
sets back crime itself where they should rightly stand.
But if war so dethrones a nation's ideals, what may it not do to a
nation's morality? Imagine if you can a million men, the core of the
national power, turning themselves into machines to carry out blindly
the schemes of leaders who may be right or wrong; schooled in the
belief that manslaughter is manliness, that the rash courage of the
brute is above the moral courage of a man; forgetful of the meaning
of human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of
its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War
is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather
violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew
men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here
is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the
deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering,
makes the infliction of suffering his study and end."
No, Mr. Roosevelt, for once at least you are wrong! We cannot believe
that war builds up a nation. Rather will we believe those words of
Herbert Spencer, more sweeping but far more true, "Advance to the
highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy
and the growth of industrialism."
"But wait," you say; "all this is theory and abstraction. We want
matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have
failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last
appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy,
teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial
and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final
judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and
point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians,
Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of
them. But no, not quite all either. On a sandy stretch of seashore,
half hidden by the unwieldy empires around it, we see a timid,
peaceful little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that
mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries.
Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war
cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion
and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight;
over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over
Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay.
Finally, like the cloud no bigger than a hand, it rises from the
island of Corsica and moves toward Central Europe. All too well does
Europe know its meaning. From north and south, from east and west, she
pours into the field the finest armies that the Old World ever saw.
Then she pauses. Europe grows tense with a nameless dread. The storm
cloud blackens, hovers lower, then bursts with all its fury through
the continent. For ten long years, at the command of an imperial
butcher, the soil is drenched with blood, the sky grows lurid from
burning Paris to burning Moscow, three million homes are draped in
black. Grand, indeed, and glorious! But Europe lost more than her
gorgeous standards, more than her ruined cities; she left her manhood
on those bloody fields.
We might extend the awful picture, but the story is the same, dread
tale of death for nations as for men. Is not this enough? Is it not
clear that this traitor to labor, this despoiler of ideals, this foe
to morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And
shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley
of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a
brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of
scholarship, in spite of history, the day is
"coming yet, for a' that--
When man to man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."
NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS
By RUSSELL WEISMAN, Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio
First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1912, and Second
Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 16, 1912
NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS
The day for deprecating in general terms the evils of war and of
extolling the glories of peace is past. Such argument is little
needed. International trade requires peace. International finance
dictates peace. Even armies and navies are now justified primarily as
agents of peace. Yet so wantonly are these agents looting the world's
treasuries that they are themselves forcing their own displacement by
courts of arbitration. The two hundred and fifty disputes successfully
arbitrated in the past century challenge with trumpet-tongued
eloquence the support of all men for reason's peaceful rule. To-day no
discussion is needed to show that if war is to be abolished, if navies
are to dwindle and armies diminish, if there is to be a federation of
the world, it must come through treaties of arbitration. In this way
alone lies peace; yet in this way lies the present great barrier to
further progress--the conception which many nations, especially the
United States, hold of "national honor and vital interests." The
reservation from arbitration of so-called matters of national honor
and vital interests constitutes the weak link in every existing
arbitration treaty between the great powers of the world. This
reservation furnishes the big-navy men all the argument they need. It
destroys the binding power of the treaties by allowing either party to
any dispute to refuse arbitration. It was by this reservation that the
United States Senate so lately killed the British and the French
treaties. And I contend here to-night that the one subject which
imperatively demands discussion is national honor and vital interests.
That the next important step must be the exposure of the reactionary
influence of the United States in excepting these matters from
arbitration.
Only fifteen months ago President Taft made his memorable declaration
that this barrier ought to be removed from the pathway of peace. He
proposed that the United States negotiate new treaties to abide by the
adjudication of courts in every international issue which could not be
settled by negotiation, whether involving honor or territory or money.
The next morning the proposal was heralded by the press throughout the
world. A few days later the halls of Parliament resounded with
applause when Great Britain's secretary of state for foreign affairs
announced that his government would welcome such a treaty with the
United States. France soon followed. Then, to the surprise of all,
hesitating Germany and cautious Japan showed a like willingness to
enter into such agreements. Universal peace seemed all but realized.
The cause was at once borne up on a mighty wave of public opinion. The
peace societies were in a frenzy of activity. Mass meetings of
indorsement were held in England and America. Editorials of approval
appeared in all parts of the world. The movement was now irresistible.
Within eight months the British and the French treaties were drafted.
Three of the greatest nations of the world were at last to commit
themselves unreservedly to the cause of international peace. Even
disputes involving national honor should not halt the beneficent work
of high courts of law and of reason. The day when the treaties were
signed, August 3, 1911, was hailed as a red-letter day in the annals
of the civilized world. It was proclaimed the dawn of a new and
auspicious era in the affairs of men and of nations.
During all the months preceding the action of the Senate on these
treaties the only statesman of any prominence to raise his voice in
opposition was ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. The gist of his
successive and violent attacks on the treaties is contained in this
utterance, which I quote, "It would be not merely foolish but wicked
for us as a nation to agree to arbitrate any dispute that affects our
vital interests or our independence or our honor." In this spirit, to
the surprise and disappointment of the whole nation, the Senate
amended the treaties out of their original intent, and placed upon
them limitations that defeated their purpose. By the Senate's action
the United States is still committed to the pretense that there may be
occasion for a just and solemn war, that vital interests and national
honor may force us to fight.
What, then, are the vital interests that can be conserved only by
saber and bullet? Nothing more, nothing less, according to various
acknowledged authorities, than a state's independence and its
territorial integrity. Did the keen mind of our former president
really foresee the seizure of some of our territory by England or
France? Yet he protests it that it would be "not merely foolish but
wicked for us as a nation to agree to arbitrate any dispute that
affects our vital interests." Did Senator Lodge and his threescore
colleagues who amended the treaties actually fear an attempt to
overthrow our form of government, to destroy our political
institutions, or to take away those individual rights and sacred
privileges upon which our government was founded? Yet to save us from
such fate they refused unlimited arbitration.
For the United States to except from arbitration her vital interests
is obvious pretense. To add thereto her national honor is extreme
hypocrisy. What is national honor? No man knows. It is one thing
to-day; another, to-morrow. It may involve an indemnity claim, a
boundary line, a fisheries dispute. In fact, any controversy may be
declared by either party, at will, to be a question of national honor.
Thus in the hands of an unskilled or malicious diplomacy, any question
which was originally a judicial one may become a question of national
honor. What, then, will we arbitrate? Every case in which a favorable
award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every
case that does not rouse our anger. Let the _Maine_ blow up and we
fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham
and a delusion.
It is high time the true and humiliating significance of these
fearsome phrases should be as familiar to every taxpayer as is the
burden of bristling camps and restless navies. Read the record of
Great Britain's first offer of unlimited arbitration in the
Olney-Pauncefote treaty of 1897. There, too, you will find national
honor and vital interests clogging the machinery of universal peace.
By these same exceptions the Senate emasculated that treaty and
defeated the spirit of the agreement. Is it conceivable that the
Senate actually feared that our interests would be imperiled by that
treaty? Did it delve out some hidden dangers which escaped the careful
scrutiny of both the English and American embassies, some peril
unforeseen by the keen judicial mind of President Cleveland, who
characterized the defeat of the treaty as "the greatest grief" of his
administration.
But this is not all. The American representatives at both Hague
Conferences were the first to place these same limitations on all
arbitration proposals.
Look at it from what point of view you will, our government's conduct
must appear humiliating. Considering the fact that universal
arbitration treaties have proved practical, it is well-nigh
incredible. Behold our bellicose sister American republics. Argentina
and Chile, Brazil and Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, all have agreements
for the arbitration of all questions whatsoever. All the Central
American republics are bound by treaty to decide every difference of
whatever nature in the Central American Court of Justice. Denmark's
three treaties with Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands withhold no
cause, however vital, from reason's peaceful sway. Norway and Sweden
likewise have an agreement to abide by the decision of the Hague Court
in whatever disputes may occur. The very existence of all these
treaties is significant, yet even more significant is the fact that
they have been triumphantly tested. Norway and Sweden at one extremity
of the globe and Argentina and Chile at the other have thus quietly
settled disputes in which their honor and interests were seriously
involved.
Do you ask further evidence of the hypocrisy with which our Senate
parades our national honor and our vital interests to the undoing of a
grand work? Search our history and you will find it in abundance. In
the great case of the Alabama claims, Charles Francis Adams pronounced
the construction of Confederate ships in English ports to be a
violation of the international law of neutrality. This certainly was a
question of national honor and vital interests, yet he pleaded for
arbitration. In reply Lord John Russell said, "That is a question of
honor which we will never arbitrate, for England's honor cannot be
made the subject of arbitration." The case was debated for six years.
Then came England's "Grand Old Man," the mighty Gladstone, with a
different view. "It is to the interest," he said, "not only of England
and the United States, but of the world, peaceably to settle those
claims." He submitted them to a joint high commission. England lost
and paid. Thus the honor of both nations was successfully arbitrated.
Likewise the Newfoundland fisheries case had been a bone of contention
between Great Britain and America from the day our independence was
recognized. As late as 1887 it threatened to become the cause of war.
No question ever arose which more vitally affected the interests of
America, yet the Senate recently accepted a settlement by arbitration.
Similarly, the Alaska fur seal dispute, the Alaskan and the Venezuelan
boundary disputes, and the northeast boundary controversy all involved
both the vital interests and the national honor of England and
America, yet all were satisfactorily and permanently arbitrated. So
excited were we over our northwest boundary that the principal issue
of a political campaign was "The whole of Oregon or none! Fifty-four
forty or fight!" Yet we peaceably acquiesced in a treaty that gave us
neither.
Yes, our honor may be arbitrated. If we are ill-prepared for war, we
arbitrate. If we are sure of a favorable award, we arbitrate. But we
must have a loophole, an ever-ready escape from obligation. Posing as
the most enlightened nation on the face of the globe, we refuse
entirely to displace those medieval notions according to which
personal honor found its best protection in the dueling pistol, and
national honor its only vindication in slaughter and devastation. To
unlimited arbitration we refuse to submit.
Fifteen years ago England, the mighty England, gave us her pledge that
no cause should ever justify war. This pledge our Senate in the name
of honor refused. Unlimited arbitration agreements were suggested at
both Hague Conferences. Americans promptly placed restrictions upon
them in the name of honor. Again has England with enthusiasm just
offered us unrestricted arbitration. Again she is repulsed by our
Senate in the name of honor. France, too, bears to our doors an
unqualified pledge of arbitration. France, too, is repulsed by our
Senate in the name of honor. Germany and Japan express a desire to
settle every question at the bar of justice. Impelled by honor we pass
their desire unheeded. Our Clevelands, our Olneys, our Edward Everett
Hales, our Carl Schurzes, our John Hays, have all urged unlimited
arbitration. Our Davises and Clarks and Platts and Quays in Senate
seats have undone their work in the name of honor. Our Charles Eliots
and Nicholas Butlers, our Albert Shaws and Hamilton Holts, now plead
for universal peace through unlimited arbitration. Senators Bacon and
Lodge and Heyburn and Hitchcock, apparently impelled by constitutional
prerogative, party prejudice, or personal animosity, now cast their
votes for limitations in the name of honor. From the platform of peace
conferences, from the halls of colleges, from the pulpit and the
bench, from the offices of bankers and merchants and manufacturers,
from the press, with scarcely a column's exception, there arises a
swelling plea for treaties of arbitration that know no exceptions. In
the name of honor that plea is defied.
Honor? No, an ocean of exception large enough to float any number of
battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor?
No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a
maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death!
Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before
there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the
cloak of shrewd politics, the mask of false patriotism! National
honor? No, national dishonor!
Before the nations of the world the United States stands to-day in an
unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn
and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward
from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to
progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen
years our government has refused to touch the barrier of national
honor and vital interests. England and France have now laid this duty
squarely at our door. "It is a social obligation as imperative as the
law of Moses, as full of hope as the Great Physician's healing touch."
Let us here highly resolve that there shall be uttered a new official
interpretation of national honor and vital interests, an
interpretation synonymous with dignity and fidelity, sincerity, and
integrity, and confidence in the vows both of men and of nations. "If
we have 'faith in the right as God gives us to see the right,' we
shall catch a vision of opportunity that shall fire the soul with a
spirit of service which the darkness of night shall not arrest, which
the course of the day shall not weary."
THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM
By PAUL B. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
First Prize Oration in the Central Group Contest, 1913, and in the
National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913
THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM
Robert Southey has asked through the lips of a little child the
greatest peace question that the world has known. He pictures a summer
evening on the old battlefield of Blenheim. On a chair before his
vine-clad cottage sat old Kaspar while his grandchildren, Wilhelmine
and Peterkin, played on the lawn. Suddenly Peterkin from a nearby
brook unearthed a skull and, running, brought it to Kaspar's knee. The
old man took the gruesome thing from the boy, and told him that this
had been the head of a man killed in the great battle of Blenheim.
Then little Wilhelmine looked up into her grandfather's face and said:
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."
Here we have the central question in the problem of war. Why do men
fight? Through the answer to that question lies the path to
world-peace.
Few men fight to-day for glory. Modern militarism has no place for
Lancelots and Galahads. The glory of the regiment has absorbed the
glory of the individual. Few men fight to-day to gain great wealth.
The treasures that glittered before Pizarro do not tempt our soldiers.
Material wealth is more easily won in factory or farm or mill. Few men
fight to-day for religion. The conquest of religion has become a
conquest of peace; the very ideal of peace is an end of religion
itself. Glory, wealth, religion--these are no longer the causes of
war. Then why do men fight? The answer is obvious. Men fight to-day
for patriotism. Patriotism is the cause of war.
The next step in our reasoning is more difficult. If patriotism is the
cause of war, how shall we treat the cause to destroy the result?
Shall we attempt to abolish patriotism as Tolstoy would have us do, or
shall we try to change its nature so that war as a natural result will
be impossible? To answer these questions we must study patriotism from
its very beginnings. We must ask: What is patriotism? Where did it
come from? What place has it in our life?
Observe first the simplest cell of life, the amoeba. We can watch it
through the microscope. It is so tiny that it keeps house in a drop of
water. It has neither emotion nor consciousness, in the human sense.
It lives a while, and then splits in two to form other cells that have
no connection with each other. Yet this infinitesimal bit of life has
an instinct, the instinct to save itself. Watch an amoeba as fire is
brought near. It immediately moves away. Its every act is regulated by
this one instinct, self-preservation.
Now let us leave the microscope and go outdoors. Over there is a bird
in a tree top, feeding its young in a nest. Suppose that a fire should
suddenly consume the tree. Would the mother bird fly away in safety?
No, it would die on its nest in the effort to save its young. There is
more than self-preservation here. The scientist will tell you that the
instinct has expanded to include the preservation of the offspring.
And now turn to primitive man. The recent excavations in Sussex will
give us a picture of him. He is a wild, gorilla-like figure that
creeps beneath the trees. He can leap with lightning force on his
prey. He drapes his body with bearskins, and eats meat from fingers
that end in claws. And yet with all his savage ferocity, this is more
than an animal. This is a man. In his breast there stir the instincts
of a man. In his life we see the vital element of patriotism, love.
His little savage family is more precious to him than all the world.
He will fight and die, not only for self-preservation but for those
who to him are "brother and sister and mother." This is the stamp of
the human. This is the potentially divine.
But as the storms of war beat about these little savage families, the
sense of common danger welded them into one. Out of grim necessity
friendship came, and friendship gave birth to patriotism. Loyalty and
sacrifice were not limited to the family; men fought and died for
their tribe.
And now let us turn the microscope upon ourselves. We would fight for
our country. We say because we love our country. We call that feeling
patriotism. It is more extended than the savage love of tribe; it
gives loyalty to a great government and democratic principles. We
speak of that feeling as divine, but it is terribly human. Its
expression is the same harsh ferocity that inspired the life of the
savage.