now I can see some of the things which will never come to pass. The French
and the English are repeating some of the blunders I made fifty years ago.
They are counting on conditions which will never exist, like a bird
sitting on a nest of mixed eggs from which the cuckoo will eventually oust
all the other birds.
French people are under the illusion that Russia will meet the obligations
undertaken by the late Czar. To expect such a thing shows the child-like
illusions under which French fanatics are living. They are still wrapped
in the swaddling clothes of politics.
We committed crimes that have brought civilization to the brink of chaos,
but we are not capable of such naivete.
The logic of a Frenchman is no better than the mysticism of a Russian or
the sentimentality of an Englishman. French people learned nothing from
the blunders of Napoleon III and the debacle of Sedan. And the reason?
They have remained provincial while the Germans imitated the commercial
cosmopolitanism of the English.
Advice is the cheapest of all things. Nevertheless, I advise your
statesmen to place no reliance on sentimental contracts written on paper
foredoomed to become "scraps."
I do not hesitate to declare that no agreement signed since 1913 is worth
more than the seals. In Europe, leaders and rulers have passed from an
international game of chess to a national gamble with marked cards.
You have now to deal with an element which did not exist in my time. This
element embraces all factions of the new radicalism, no matter in what
country or under what leader. Some of these elements may unite, but they
are not going to change. How, then, can you undertake to insure the future
by contracts signed and sealed by elderly gentlemen with good intentions
and poor judgment?
The war gave the new factions the long wished-for opportunity. They seized
it in Russia, in Germany, in Poland, in Britain, and other countries. But
the opportunities created by the war are one thing, the opportunities of
tomorrow will be different, and it is this contingency for which your
leaders are not prepared. You will have to select men of vision who will
judge events as they arrive, without regard to the distant future, which
belongs to no man.
One of my greatest mistakes was in separating Protestant Prussia from the
interests of the Catholics of South Germany.
The new radicalism is opposed to some things which are irrevocably linked
with religious doctrine.
Without the Catholic Church all Europe would be in the throes of the
Commune. The principal cause of our disintegration was that we sanctioned
Protestant flirtation with modern materialism.
France is beginning to see that even a weak monarchy is better than a
radical government without a God.
You may expect a return of the monarchy in more than one country.
Agnostics and Protestants, moved by fear on one side, and disgust on the
other, will unite for a restoration as their last hope. There will be a
repetition of historic events.
Bonaparte was ushered in by the French Revolution, and his advent was
followed by three kings and one emperor.
The majority treat their rulers as children treat their toys: when the
novelty wears off a change is demanded.
Political psychology and religious sentiment are not the same thing.
Nevertheless, they must be considered together. The Germans are now
awaiting the hour when the inevitable change will be demanded. Events take
crowns from some heads and place them on others. If the ex-Kaiser ever
occupies the throne again a modern Nero will fiddle amidst the ruins of
German imperialism, for you know he meddled with fiddle strings as well as
with political wires.
You think it strange? The impossible is always happening. Never lose sight
of the fact that an organized minority is more formidable than a
disorganized majority. Three men brought about the coup d'etat that placed
the outcast Louis Napoleon on the throne, one man started the Russian
Revolution, I planned the overthrow of the Second Empire with the aid of
Count von Moltke. The majority put their trust in numbers, but the bigger
a thing grows the nearer it is to disintegration. An autocratic minority
ruled in Germany, an automatic majority rules in France and England. Two
men started the present rule in Moscow, both of them from the outside.
"God has been merciful to us," said Cavour, in the Italian Senate, "He has
made Spain one degree lower than Italy." God has been merciful to Germany,
He has made Russian communism more abhorrent than German socialism.
Nothing will be left undone by the French government to secure permanent
occupation of the coal district of the Rhine.
Conditions will not remain long as they are. They are preparing decisive
coups in Bavaria, Hanover, Austria and Hungary. New combinations will
amaze your statesmen and diplomats, who are ignorant of the fact that
changes and upheavals operate in cycles of three and seven. What they call
chance is the working of law. Spiritual forces operate through the
physical, and nature will take a hand in the reactions in Petrograd and
Moscow. Cold, hunger and starvation will dissipate the hopes of the ruling
minority. Untold numbers will be sacrificed.
During the French Revolution philosophers and thinkers were decapitated.
In Russia such men are killed by hunger, the difference being one of
method.
Such conditions will be repeated in different countries until people learn
that the spiritual cannot be separated from the material without pain and
slaughter.
After all the long-winded conferences and shorthand reports nothing is
left but a confusion of blots on the tissue paper of time.
I may say more on another occasion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
The happy-go-lucky humor of the day is no match for the cool calculation
of European communists. English and American humorists do for the public
what the court jester once did for blase kings.
In the sardonic temper of the Russian revolutionist, I see a return of the
French temper of 1793.
Most of the sermons and speeches of the time are chameleon in character
and tepid in feeling. English humorists developed a flagrant cynicism,
spotted with a varioloid paradox, while French writers have halted between
the isolation of the hospital and the insularity of the home.
The war brought Anatole France to his senses, the last of the Gallic wits,
who possessed a greater charm than Voltaire without attaining his
universal prestige. Prince Bismarck declares that the French have learned
nothing since their defeat at Sedan. Yet French writers have learned more
from the great war than the writers of any other country.
English humor is meant to entertain a public lost in the cynical
buffooneries of materialism; American humor is meant to amuse a public
lost in the mazes of extravagant pleasures and provincial inanities.
English humor has a certain seal; American humor a certain mark--the
difference between sealing wax and a postage stamp. Both aim to fill the
ghastly gap left by the doctrine of evolution since it caught the fancy of
agnostic freebooters in 1870--forerunners of something grimmer than the
Soviet symbols of a return of puritanism even now creeping into view as
ivy creeps up the water spouts.
Laughter will vanish, since there will be nothing left to laugh at.
Dancing will cease, for curfew will ring at nine and people will begin
work at five.
Remember that all the great modern movements had an obscure origin.
Spiritualism began in a country farm-house, Christian Science developed
out of mediumship, prohibition was started in a village, woman's suffrage
was started by a Quakeress, Theosophy began at a farm-house in Vermont,
the Salvation Army was started by a group of obscure persons.
The new puritanism will start by a committee of persons unknown to the
public, chosen from the ranks of the Methodists, Baptists and
Presbyterians. Grim determinists, they will ignore satire, sarcasm and
irony, ignore party politics, ignore the opposition of luke-warm
Christians, form committees, in which they will be aided by drastic
reactions during the period of readjustment.
Centers will soon be formed in Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston,
Hartford, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C.
What is causing so much crime? Not one, but many elements of decadence,
all operating together, among which I can name rag, jazz, high balls,
cabarets, free verse, neurotic art, sentimental optimism, cheap notions of
progress, neutral sermons, automobilism, lack of child discipline, absence
of fear among people under the age of forty--evils which you may apply to
all English-speaking countries.
The licence of the cities dominates country life and country thought. The
city minority rules the majority in the country, and it is in the country
that the reaction will begin.
JOHN MARSHALL
(Second Message)
Many of the smaller nations, instead of being content with their liberty,
have thrown it away for the licence that always goes with land grabbing.
For a nation is nothing more than an individual with a certain amount of
collective ambition.
Much of the work of the League of Nations will have to be undone. But it
will not be undone by any League. The nations will settle differences in
accordance with the law that permits the more powerful to wield control
commensurate with their geographical and intellectual importance.
All people have rights which ought to be respected, but some have
privileges as well as rights, and the privileged will hold the upper hand
as long as intelligence takes precedence of illiteracy, energy dominates
over lethargy, and the power of organized numbers rules over minorities.
Your statesmen and your mediators will have to learn the distinction
between rights and privileges. All are supposed to possess common rights
under the common law, but it is wisdom, supported by poise and power, that
constitutes privilege. David and Solomon were privleged. So were Alfred
the Great, Washington and Lincoln.
A nation is temperamental like an individual. The temperament may be
vascillating or it may be stolid; it may be logical or it may be
commercial; or a combination of the Saxon and the Celt.
The nations that will hold the balance of power in the future will be the
ones with the most will and poise, backed by number. Riches, alone, will
not save. Wealth did not save Germany from disaster, nor did it help
Nopoleon III to ward off the Prussian invasion in 1870. Wealth invites
invasion and conquest. This is why England and America will now be the
principal target for the ambitious and the discontented. This is why Japan
seeks a firm foothold in China, and the Russians an entrance to India
through Persia.
Without the prospects of loot there would be no war. When ambition and
glory lure a nation on, the desire for loot supplies the motor force. When
hunger forces a people to invade a nation, loot becomes a necessity.
What the wealthy of every nation refuse to understand, or even to
consider, is that material force engenders vanity, individualism, rivalry
and envy. All manifestations of force contain an element of
disintegration. The type of a nation will always represent the policy and
the trend of the nation.
The supreme blunder of the Peace Conference was made when the delegates,
with Mr. Wilson at their head, refused to face the fact that no nation can
rise above the ideals and idiosyncrasies of the national temperament, and
that sudden liberation from restraint is as dangerous for a country as it
is for an individual.
There is but one step between liberty and licence, and that step meant
pandemonium for all classes in Russia. For other peoples it may mean
political bondage and the total loss of a national spirit. For the Hindoos
it will mean civil wars between the different native rulers, for China it
has meant a series of revolutions and counter revolutions which may have
to be suppressed by the drastic hand of a Japanese Bonaparte.
The League Conference at Versailles took no account of the working of
natural law. Sentimentality was the key-note of Mr. Wilson's idealism, and
commercial expansion the dominant idea of his opponents.
As for religion exerting any fundamental influence for peace and right
thinking, it caused Protestants to fight Protestants and Catholics to
fight Catholics, while German and Austrian cardinals did all in their
power to aid in the invasion and conquest of Belgium and France, on one
hand, and Italy, the stronghold of the Papal See, on the other; and all
this in the face of the statement of the Kaiser that Catholicism must be
destroyed. Nothing like it has been known since the dawn of Christianity.
The only apparent reason for the quiescent attitude of some of the smaller
nations is that they are without the material means of waging war on their
neighbors.
Just as long as politicians are impelled by self-interest there will be
found nations that will have to use force for the suppression of licence
and the curtailment of liberty. In every country the people are getting
what their thoughts and deeds create for them.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Events come and go in cycles--there is a beginning, a middle and an end.
The League of Nations had a beginning and it will have an end. But what
kind of an end? Will it be one of victory or one of ignominy?
The two fatal blunders of the Kaiser and his cohorts consisted in the
delusion that England could not raise, equip and transport a body of
troops sufficient to offer adequate resistance to the invaders of France
in conjunction with the French and Belgian armies, and that America could
not or would not join the European Allies.
At the present juncture the inimical forces, both in continental Europe
and in America, are repeating the old blunders under fresh conditions.
History is a repetition of the old tunes with new variations. Just now the
fireworks of sophistry and rhetoric drown out the familiar tune and what
is heard is the buzz-saw of political machinery.
Hyenas are gnawing the bones left by the lion rampant of Czardom; and
Siberia, the remnant, is being consumed by jackals from Japan. It remains
to be seen how long voters with American pedigrees will be influenced by
demagogues who would induce them to part with their birthright for a mess
of pottage burnt on the bottom.
The longer you wink at anarchy in Europe the greater will be the menace of
social chaos at home. The worship of shibboleths cannot be kept up beyond
a point where the majority grow tired of hocus-pocus politics and
academical agnosticism.
There should be harmony of interests in dealing with the people of Mexico,
from whom you have much to learn in many ways.
The Obregon Government should be recognized at Washington and immediate
steps taken to insure cordial relations between the two countries.
The City of Mexico is a capital with a great future.
You are about to pass through a period of great confusion. Warnings have
been given but not heeded. Unless you cease to theorize, and propagate a
spirit of justice and judgment, the near future will develop something
more than storms in the blue china teapots of diplomacy.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
Washington needs a breaker of images.
The pedestrian sauntering down Pennsylvania Avenue cannot but note the
hefty Hancock on horseback, looking as if he had just left a meeting of
ward politicians, and, in another part of the city, McClellan, the Beau
Brummel of the Civil War, on a charger, sniffing the smoke of battle from
a safe distance, and others whose names are writ in water but whose
effigies remain in bronze.
To the scrap heap with these, and in their places erect memorials for the
women, who did as much for America as Joan of Arc did for France, the
intrepid pioneers of their race, the prophetic patriots of the nineteenth
century--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony.
It would take a Lincoln Memorial to depict their serenity, a National
Capitol to symbolize their nobility, a Washington Monument to typify the
towering height of their achievement and the scope and clarity of their
vision.
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
A war between America and England would fill your homes with desolation
and bring ruin to the whole country. Do your sins of omission merit such a
punishment? I am here to tell you what to expect if such a hurricane of
disaster ever sweeps the two countries.
Millions of people are under the impression that the United States can act
independently of the conditions prevailing in the other great nations.
This suggestion, coming, as it did, from a professional joker in England,
has met with eager response from revolutionary emissaries now in your
midst, supported by political fillibusters who are masking the truth.
If England ever starts such a war she will lose India. Her direction of
the reins of civilization in many quarters of the world would cease on the
day hostilities began. But I am speaking for America.
A war with England would Russianize the United States within three months.
Even if the navy could keep the enemy at a safe distance the destructive
forces at home would loot the principal cities and spread terror from
ocean to ocean.
The first to lose in such an upheaval would be the wealthy propagandists
of disorder and violence, who, living in security now, would be hurled
with destructive force against the weapons of their own creation.
GENERAL BENJAMIN H. GRIERSON
Late Commander of the Military Department of Southern California, Arizona
and New Mexico
In 1914 western civilization was threatened by a military autocracy
centralized at Berlin. Europe is now threatened by a communistic tyranny
centralized at Moscow and by an autocratic aristocracy centered in Japan,
anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American. You may call it fate or
destiny, it matters not so long as you know what the signs and portents
are.
We can see what is going on in the navy yards of the Nipponese Empire. We
have noted the strenuous efforts put forth in naval preparations there.
A Japanese Bonaparte will soon dominate China and prevent Christian
propaganda throughout Asia. I could give you the dates fixed for certain
maneuvers and events in connection with Japanese ambitions relating to
America, but they could change the dates. Suffice it to say they are
making ready as fast as possible, much faster than many in this country
could be made to believe. When the decisive moment arrives for action it
will come suddenly, like the invasion of Belgium by the Germans.
Here are some of their expectations:--
The invasion of the coast of Mexico and a coalition of Japanese forces
with some military faction in Mexico likely to be of practical aid, the
bombing of American cities on the Pacific Coast from the air, virtual
cessation of communication between certain sections east of the Rocky
Mountains and California, brought about not so much by physical means as
by revolutionary influences. They are counting on a Soviet revolution east
of the Rockies while they are gaining a foothold in California.
One of their first attempts would be to bomb the railway passes in the
Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas.
General Grant has warned you in regard to the Panama Canal and other
points that need immediate attention. Millions would be alarmed if they
could realize how much the Government at Washington resembles the British
Government just before the German descent into Belgium. Are they waiting
until they can spy the enemy through field glasses?
I could give a map of the plans of approach of the Japanese navy, intended
to operate in separate units, but it would do no good. They are ready to
change their tactics at any time, and have done so more than once.
Let me add that the bellicose attitude of the war party in Japan is such
that a war between England and America would be hailed as a symbol of
their divine destiny.
Do not be surprised when I say that they proclaim the end of Christian
civilization was reached when the Anglo-Saxons took possession of the
Pacific Coast.
In the Far East, British domination attained its zenith in India; in
America, Anglo-Saxon influence attained its limit in California. The
possession of the Pacific Coast of North America is, therefore, the limit
for the dominant white race. The tocsin has sounded for a Japanese avatar
who will unify the political, commercial and religious forces of Japan and
China, give the coup de grace to a tottering civilization and dominate the
world. So do they reason and preach.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
What do the clouds on the social horizon predict? Is Nature a book of
fate? If so, is it sealed or open? Whoever understands the political
actions of the past can foresee the reactions of the future.
Human nature is always the same.
The two things brought to the surface by great upheavals are extreme
virtues and extreme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on the one hand,
the vice of self interest on the other. Vice is flexible, cunning,
adaptable.
You are living at a time when profiteers amaze by their cynical audacity,
but profiteers have always existed. Before the war the nobles of Russia
and Germany were profiteers in landed privileges and governmental
perquisites. The tillers of the soil were free in name, serfs in practice.
In England two or three hundred lords and peers possess the land. In
America food profiteering began during the Civil War. This national vice
has never been attacked at the roots.
Your age is characterized by a high level of predatory ability and a low
level of prophetic visibility.
The old hackneyed phrase, "This is a free country," has been applied in
varying degrees according to the caprice of the individual with the most
aggressive will.
New words, definitions, excuses, have been invented to meet the new
conditions, but of all the words yet brought into use, "camouflage" is the
only one that covers the cynical effrontery of predatory hypocrisy. It is
a vocable of universal utility. It applies to the cock-pits of commerce as
well as to the arena of bull and bear politics.
It depicts a Hindoo patience in the pulpit and a Hoodoo palsy in the pews.
The word "democracy" itself is the stripes painted on the sides of the old
Ship of State in her zig-zag course to elude the torpedoes of the
proletarian submarines.
A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow optimist who lives by the sweat of
the low brow pessimist. The stretching process will cease suddenly like
the snapping of a rubber string stretched beyond the limit.
The masses without a voice always find articulation in the unlooked-for
man, the unlooked-for group.
The people without a mouthpiece are a mob, and no mob can run itself for
more than a few days. It is the initiated who lead, and leadership
requires time, patience, judgment.
In the world of genius there are no upstarts.
The great leader never rises suddenly. Bonaparte was a military graduate,
Grant was a product of West Point, Lincoln was thirty years preparing for
the Presidency, Lenine spent twenty years in the study of economics. All
countries have the same experience.
Voltaire endowed the middle classes of France with a voice, united the
disaffected of all classes, and peppered their indignation with pungent
epigrams. He created an intellectual garden for lovers of liberty, and
from the realm of the mind flung the thorns of ridicule in the face of
titled imbeciles and crowned the heads of scholars with laurel.
The people of France were washed by Louis XIV, wrung by Louis XV, and
dried in the back yard of tyrannical economics by Louis XVI.
But it was the orators and pamphleteers who ironed out the frills and
furbelows of the old order.
Statistical facts may convince but they do not compel. Who knows how the
French Revolution would have ended had Mirabeau, orator of the great and
solemn days, survived to put into action the idealism of Rousseau?
Intellect alone never passes the halfway house. When intellect, reason and
emotion are fused in one, the summit of achievement is attained.
PHILLIPS BROOKS
The time for discipline is approaching. Happy are those who, under Divine
direction, consent to be led, for, in the words of Quintilian:--Nulla
poena est nisi invito, or as Seneca expressed it, Fata volentum ducunt,
involentem trahunt,--those who refuse will be dragged.