That a kindly old man having his nature temporarily reversed by a
passion for revenge for the murder of two relatives, should have
the power to waste a large portion of the lives and treasure of the
civilized world, is so counter to everything that civilized men
ordinarily consider reasonable, that it is perhaps the sharpest
evidence yet given of the tyranny of the past over the present.
Perhaps the strangest thing about such a circumstance is that, while it
is counter to the deliberate reason of nearly all sane and civilized
men, millions of sane and civilized men are contributing to its
occurrence, not only with devoted self-sacrifice, but with enthusiasm.
The conflict between these two utterly opposing conditions is, in the
last analysis, simply the conflict between the jungle and the railroad,
between the lion and the savage, between the savage and the civilized
man.
And the same conflict is in each man’s soul. Behind the man of today,
who reasons, is his savage ancestor who merely felt; behind the
gentleman in evening dress who goes to the boxing match is his ancestor
who turned his thumb down over the arena; behind the jurist who
arbitrates at The Hague, is his ancestor who commanded a pirate ship in
the neighboring sea; behind the German who, less than a generation ago,
was leading civilization, is the barbarian who attacked Rome, and who
now has come out to attack Belgium.
Now absolute power is old fashioned, alliances are old fashioned, even
violence and revenge are old fashioned, and among civilized nations
they are “not done,” except through the madness or the imbecility of
crowds. Nobody really wants to do either of them, except the rulers and
soldiers who see a chance of gain.
Of the hosts of men sacrificing, fighting, suffering, dying, not one
in twenty wants to do it, or even knows why he is doing it, or what is
to be gained by doing it, and not one in fifty thousand was consulted
about doing it. Mr. Lowes Dickinson after expressing himself in the
_London Nation_ somewhat to the foregoing effect, adds:
We are sane people. But our acts are mad. Why? Because we are all in
the hands of some score of individuals called Governments.... These
men have willed this thing for us over our heads. No nation has had
the choice of saying no. The Russian peasants march because the Czar
and the priest tell them to. That of course. But equally the German
socialists march; equally the French socialists. These men know what
war means.... They hate it. But they march. Business men, knowing
too, hating too, watch them march. Workingmen watch them march, and
wait for starvation. All are powerless. The die has been cast for
them. The crowned gamblers cast it, and the cast was death.
But “some score of individuals” is too many. The _New York Nation_ puts
that better:
Whatever happens, Europe--humanity--will not settle back again into a
position enabling three Emperors--one of them senile, another subject
to melancholia, and the third often showing signs of disturbed mental
balance--to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for
destruction and massacre.
The German tradition of 1870, so strongly in favor of getting in
the first blow, made it impossible for a spreading of the war to be
seriously threatened without Germany striking that blow, and so turning
any possibility of a general war into the reality.
In fights between individuals, the wrong has usually been laid to the
one who struck first. There is equal reason for so laying it between
nations.
When to the tradition in favor of the first blow is added the military
habit diffused through the nation to a degree absolutely strange to
modern times; when over a nation thus accustomed to arms, there is
a ruling class whose only ambition and only hope is in War, and when
at the head of this class is a ruler with a megalomaniac ambition and
conceit, the wonder is not that such a nation has gone to war with
virtually all its neighbors, but that it has so long been at peace with
them.
This war is probably the world’s greatest illustration that a condition
of “preparation for defence” is apt to lead to war. Forty years of such
preparation has developed in the peaceful scholarly German nation an
oligarchy of swashbucklers who crowd women off the sidewalk and cherish
an ambition to conquer the world.
More specific causes of the low condition of Germany are not far to
seek. If a hundred portraits of each of the rulers of, say, the ten
leading nations were culled at random from the leading illustrated
publications, a due proportion being kept of the various functions in
which the rulers were engaged when the pictures were taken, there is
no reasonable doubt that the absolute rulers would be represented the
greatest number of times in military dress--like savages in war paint,
and that William of Germany’s proportion would be larger than that of
any other ruler. The presidents of republican France and the United
States would not appear in war paint at all, and the king of democratic
England would so appear less often than the head of any other dynasty.
Of all alleged civilized rulers, William II has alone borne the
barbarous title of “The War Lord,” yet before last August he never saw
a battle. He was “The War Lord” simply because it was his delight to
pose as such, and what a man poses, he wishes to become. Since 1870,
and to some extent before, the Kaiser’s country has been, to a degree
approached by no other in Europe, an armed camp. In Germany, gentleman
and army-officer have been almost synonymous terms: no amount of
learning, genius or eminence in any other direction has brought a man
as high social consideration as eminence in the army. The army has
been the dominant interest of the Emperor, and, despite the enormous
industries, the dominant power in the eyes of the people--a power more
recognized than the legislature and the courts. Among the aristocratic
and would-be aristocratic classes, it has been the one career, and the
one avenue to eminence. But in times of peace, promotion is slow: it is
liveliest only when war kills off or wears out superiors. Hence in the
German army the chief yearning--all the stronger for being suppressed
for nearly half a century--has been for war: the daily toast at the
officers’ messes has been for many years “Zum Tag!” Of such conditions
as these, the natural outcome has been the barbarities in Brussels,
Antwerp, and Louvain.
For these conditions of course neither the German people nor their
Kaiser has been entirely to blame: everybody knows how, at the start,
the conditions were forced upon them. But what pains have been taken to
keep at the lowest terms their barbarizing influence, not to speak of
doing away with it altogether? What has been the general attitude of
Germany, under the Kaiser’s influence, toward the proposals instituted
by the Tzar--sovereign of a far inferior people--for the development of
machinery for international peace?
This war, in its murders and destructions, is probably the worst
calamity the world has ever known. Yet it is doubtful whether the
murders and destructions are the worst things about it: for it has,
for the time being, turned a people long among the most admirable and
lovable and peaceable in the world, into a nation of destroyers, and
made some of their admirable qualities--their coolness, their patience,
their energy, their system, their ingenuity, their coöperation, their
patriotism, all of which were long among the chief agencies of the
world’s progress, into the chief agencies for its misery and debasement.
But, with all the German’s old-time merits, there is no blinking the
fact that the current of civilization which came through Mesopotamia,
Egypt, Greece and Rome does not flow through his veins. He came into
civilization late, and he shows it despite the virtues Tacitus saw him
bringing with him: he still holds the barbarities of a highly inflected
speech, a highly centralized government, and a ruthless disregard of
the finer amenities of both peace and war. But we repeat that, except
as his barbarian warlike passions have been trained since the fifties,
and now been specially aroused, the great virtues which he had evolved
even when History first knew him, made him admirable and lovable, and
when he has felt the consequences of his mistakes, will make him so
again.
The obvious conditions would suggest, even to the visitor from another
planet, that there must be two Germanys; and so there are--the Germany
of industry and peace, and the Germany of idleness and war. The higher
Germany--not the higher in the army or the state, but the higher in
intellect and morals, even less than a generation ago was among the
greatest examples of mankind. The lower Germany--baser though more
brilliant--nurtures a nest of microbes, and they have entered into the
blood of the higher, and made it mad.
One thing that has made possible this great tragedy is the survival
of old ideas of high and low, which, like many other ideas, were once
true, and in the progress of evolution have now become false--more
destructively false in Germany than anywhere else in civilization.
In all savage communities, the ruling class is apt to be the best.
Evolution approaches equilibration--the beam of the scale approaches
the level--by the arbitrary power of the upper class going down, and
the capacity of the lower class rising up, until at last, we may hope
all classes will be on a level. The scale of course oscillates until,
if ever, equilibration shall be reached: the revolutionary movements
at times place the lower classes in the ascendant, even make them for
brief moments the rulers,--often very ridiculous and even destructive
rulers, as in the French revolution, and the ascendancy of the
silverites in the American congress. But the mistakes of the temporary
rulers from the ignorant classes have been nothing beside the excesses
of a Zenghis Khan, a Tamerlane, an Alexander, a Nero, a Henry the
Eighth, a Napoleon, and a William II of Germany.
The claim that Germany is waging a war of defence is too thin to
justify attention. The Kaiser’s responsibility for spreading the
conflict is of course disputed by him and his supporters; but the thing
has been brewing from the day the young Emperor, imitating the pirates
and stage villains, pasted up his moustache farther than any other
man’s to make himself look fierce. No man of peace or modesty ever hung
out such a sign.
He has hardly ever made a speech without showing his megalomania, and
placing his army first among his many interests; in agreements proposed
for the promotion of peace, from the first meeting at The Hague, he has
been the one to hang back; and he refused the arbitration suggested by
Sir Edward Grey, which the other nations seemed ready to accept.
But his responsibility for spreading the war is of little consequence
beside his conduct since it began. His first step was to trample under
foot his own nation’s contract with Civilization itself; to violate
the rules that, with infinite labor and through infinite suffering,
had been slowly built up in aid of international peace and justice;
to begin murdering an unoffending people whose peace his own country
had solemnly pledged itself to maintain--devastating their country and
robbing them of millions on millions, all because they had defended
rights which, as already said, were pledged by his own country.
He had prepared for this by debauching his own peaceful, industrious,
scholarly and harmony-loving people into such familiarity with the
apparatus and drill and idea of war, that they have been taking on the
army ways, ideas, ambitions and megalomania at a progressive rate that
has saddened the former admirers who have visited them at sufficient
intervals to notice the change. Even among the scholars, not only has
the army influence spread, but the old allegiance to the simple life is
gone. Our exchange professors report the deterioration. Says one: “They
have been bought by court favors.”
And they, like us, have been corrupted by their prosperity; their
patriotism has become perverted into greed; and the vast industry, the
vast wealth, even the vast population that this once exemplary people
had built up in spite of the Emperor’s colossal military waste, he is
destroying to feed his own lust of power, and he has impregnated them
with that lust, and the trade which his people have made worldwide by
their industry, he is, for most fallacious and insignificant reasons,
seeking to extend by their blood.
He is widely believed to be insane. However that may be, I do not see
how any candid and unbiased judgment can find him other than a man
forsworn, a robber, a murderer of the innocent--of his own people no
less than of other peoples, a destroyer of civilization, an enemy of
mankind.
* * * * *
Perhaps the worst tragedy in the whole awful drama is this man’s
militarism rotting out the morality of the people of Luther, Kant and
Fichte. His ministers now talk of the highest moral stand a nation ever
took, in England’s defence of Belgium’s neutrality, as the absurdity
of going to war over a little piece of paper. It is also a large part
of the present German philosophy that force and cunning are essential
agents in evolution. The pity and tragedy of it!--that the German race,
long the moral leaders of the world, should have sunk to a Machiavelism
below Machiavelli--one not even, like his, superficially intelligent
and refined, but throughout stupid and brutal.
This German military philosophy that reckons only with itself, carries
the elements of its own destruction. It is already actually at war
with most of civilized Europe. It may not be destroyed this year
or even next, but destroyed it will be; and until it is destroyed,
civilization stops and stands at bay.
If necessary, its every resource must be called into play. Even those
of remote Japan are already in action. If the need becomes greater,
inaction on the part of nearer nations will become disgraceful. The
wisdom that ignored the comparatively petty issues in Mexico, will
become folly if it ignores anything so colossal as the present issues
may become, especially as they already deeply concern our own blood.
* * * * *
If the outcome of the battles shall be the Kaiser’s victory, it will
be for us only to reflect that the end is not yet, and that the Power
which works out our good, often does it by ways that appear to our
limited vision strangely devious. But if the battles shall destroy his
dynasty, and dismember the artificial and cruel Austrian empire which
ostensibly initiated all these horrors, and lead to a concord of the
nations against such disasters in future, the justice of the Power
above all empires will, despite all the misery, again be made plain.
* * * * *
It must no longer be possible for any madman who happens to sit upon
a throne to wreak worldwide destruction. Whatever the cost, the peace
of the world demands that Germany shall not hereafter be left in a
condition to strike the first blow--that she shall not be permitted to
keep an army large enough to give the military class the control of the
nation, and that for her crimes against International Law she shall be
made to bear proper penalties.
The next step to the limitation of her armies will be the limitation of
all, and the uniting of them ostensibly, as they are now in reality, as
the police force of the world.
* * * * *
It may be a relief to turn from the barbarity of the war to its
absurdity. All its conditions are of course heritages from the
barbarous past, and the only process of doing away with them is the
slow complexity of human progress. Not the least element of that
progress is the development of a sense of humor. If everybody felt the
supreme ridiculousness of these conditions, they could not stand a year.
Another ridiculous element in the situation is the shortsightedness of
capital. The force of the fighting world is in its wealth--directed
by its brains. An army is proverbially a monster that crawls upon its
belly. Now how long are the brains of the world going to permit its
wealth to feed this monster, and leave industry and exchange paralyzed?
Yet though those in control of the world’s wealth have not prevented
the war, they must have learned that it will pay to devote a good
percentage of the wealth to perfecting the machinery for peace which
centers at The Hague. That the capitalists have not already taken hold
of those agencies, is as little creditable to their sense of their own
interests as to their sense of the interests of mankind--and of the
ridiculous.
* * * * *
The nations are still in the stage of civilization that individuals
were when every man carried a sword, and impromptu fights were matters
of course. The first step out of that stage was the organization of the
premeditated duel, with its “code of honor.” The next stage was the
leaving of quarrels to arbitration and the courts, and the prohibition
of individual fights and of carrying weapons to facilitate them.
The nations have lately made rapid progress toward the second stage.
Yet International Law, though rapidly growing before Germany’s attack
on it, is, so far, nothing but a “code of honor.” It prescribes rules
for the conduct of international duels, both for the principals and
for neutrals, but, like the code of the duello, it has no sanctions to
enforce the rules but public opinion.
Among the most important of these rules is respect of combatants for
the peace and independence of neutral states, especially when the
neutrality has been specifically guaranteed by the warring states.
Another very important rule is that unfortified towns shall not be
bombarded, and that to fortified towns twenty-four hours’ notice
shall be given, to permit the removal of non-combatants. The military
oligarchy who have corrupted and misrepresented the German people, have
not attained to, or have fallen from, the stage of civilization needed
for the observance of these rules. They invaded Belgium and Luxemburg,
and dropped bombs into Antwerp without notice.
In these acts, the Germans have done what they could to destroy the
International Law which has been one of the most laborious and most
hopeful products of civilization.
* * * * *
All law, local and international, has been made by the most advanced
people, and must be guarded by them against the less advanced. Each
civilized nation has a police force to guard its national law, but
International Law has not yet progressed so far. Yet whatever may have
been the origins of the present war, the Germans’ conduct of it has
made them international outlaws, and constituted the nations fighting
them a police to maintain the law.
Whatever the time and sacrifice involved, whatever other nations may be
needed to strengthen the police force, the law must be vindicated, or
civilization must go backward generations, and build the law up again.
That a union to develop and enforce International Law may result from
the present war, seems among the possible compensations of the waste
and misery. The world will have had enough of war, and more than
enough, to a degree never before concentrated in as brief a period. In
the early and long wars, men had not outgrown the stolid conviction
that war was the inevitable and normal condition of the race; and at
that stage of the race’s evolution, so it was. But evolution has
progressed, men’s--many men’s--ideas are different, and during this
unparalleled tragic absurdity, they are going to become still more
different, and at an unprecedented rate. Never before did a nation go
to war as England now has done, to vindicate, enforce, and preserve
what had been evolved of International Law. The German barbarities have
made all England’s allies warriors in the same cause, and have opened
the eyes of the world, as never before, to its value, its dignity,
and, the blood flowing for it is going to add, its sacredness. To the
seed planted at The Hague, this blood will be a fertilizing stream,
and a growth may be expected that will be a shade and a defence to the
nations.