The pacifist "mollycoddle," as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him in his
San Francisco Exposition speech, finds expression in these words of
Bertrand Russell in the August number of the Atlantic Monthly:
All these three motives for armaments--cowardice, love of
dominion, and lust for blood--are no longer ineradicable in
civilized human nature. All are diminishing under the
influence of modern social organization. All might be
reduced to a degree which would make them almost innocuous,
if early education and current moral standards were directed
to that end. Passive resistance, if it were adopted
deliberately by the will of a whole nation, with the same
measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in
war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is
good in national life than armies and navies can ever
achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter
of brutality involved in modern war.
But it is hardly to be expected, Mr. Russell reluctantly concludes,
that progress will come in this way, because "the imaginative effort
required is too great." He adds:
It is much more likely that it will come, like the reign of
law within the state, by the establishment of a central
government of the world, able and willing to secure
obedience by force, because the great majority of men will
recognize that obedience is better than the present
international anarchy.
A central government of this kind would command assent not
as a partisan, but as the representative of the interests of
the whole. Very soon resistance to it would be seen to be
hopeless and wars would cease. Force directed by a neutral
authority is not open to the same abuse or likely to cause
the same long-drawn conflicts as force exercised by
quarreling nations, each of which is the judge in its own
cause. Although I firmly believe that the adoption of
passive instead of active resistance would be good if a
nation could be convinced of its goodness, yet it is rather
to the ultimate creation of a strong central authority that
I should look for the ending of war. But war will end only
after a great labor has been performed in altering men's
moral ideals, directing them to the good of all mankind, and
not only of the separate nations into which men happen to
have been born.
"Good Natured Germany"
The leading article in the June issue of the Sueddeutsche Monatshefte
(Munich) is by Dr. George Grupp, one of Germany's most able scholars,
and is entitled, "Never Can Germany be Overcome if She be United." Dr.
Grupp finds evidences for this assertion all through history, and
quotes some of the earliest commentators and historians to this
effect:
As early as 1487 Felix Fabri, a Dominican of Ulm wrote: "Si
Germani essent ubique concordes, totum orbem domarent." (If
the Germans were united they would conquer the whole world.)
The sentence is an echo of the fiery address which one
Aeneas Silvius, later to become pope, delivered to the
German princes after the fall of Constantinople, and from
which Felix Fabri himself gives a quotation....
To Germany alone the Greeks looked for any considerable
help. An evidence of this is the beautiful and often quoted
remark of the Athenian Laonikos Chalkokondylas: "If the
Germans were united and the princes would obey, they would
be unconquerable and the strongest of all mortals."
We encounter similar statements very frequently, both
earlier and later, from the Roman courtier Dietrich von
Nieheim and from the humanists, from the Alsatian Wimpheling
and Sebastian Brant, from the Swabian Nauclerus and the
Frank Pirckheimer. "What could Germany be," they cry, "if
she would only make use of her own strength, exploit her own
resources for herself! No people on earth could offer her
resistance!"
Dr. Grupp claims that Germany's lack of unity has resulted only from
her rule of goodwill toward all, within her borders as well as
without.
It never occurred to the Germans as to other peoples to
disturb the peaceful development of their neighbors. They
allowed mighty powers to build themselves up unmolested and
to rise above Germany's head. In their internal affairs they
observed the same principle of justice; no line, no class,
no province, no grant succeeded in obtaining so oppressive
an ascendancy, that other lines and classes, other provinces
and grants were simply annihilated. The unfortunate
consequence was lack of unity.
Nowhere were or are there so many cultural centres, so many
different movements, tendencies, parties. This great
multifariousness of the German life was recognized and
admired by others. But this very multifariousness had its
darker side, the fatal, much deplored lack of unity.
Through the centuries, Dr. Grupp claims, Germany has been altogether
too good-natured, allowing other nations to all but bleed her to
death.
In her peaceable disharmony Germany has dreamed along
carelessly and good-naturedly for centuries until the abrupt
awakening when she saw a yawning abyss opened up at her
feet. Good-naturedly she has allowed herself to be plundered
and faithfully she has fought other nations' battles. As
early as the 15th century the humanists remarked the fact
that alien states gladly took German soldiers into their
service, and later on it was worse than that. Foreign
countries gladly waged their wars on German territory. Here
was decided for the most part the fate of the Spanish
world-empire, here France and England battled for supremacy.
The Seven Years' War was not only a question of Schleswig;
it was a question of whether North America and even far-away
India should be French or English.
Now the condition is suddenly reversed; the Germans are
fighting for themselves, and the fact arouses the limitless
rage of their opponents. Let us console ourselves with the
fact that even in the Middle Ages it was said: "Teutonici
nullius amici," in spite of their peaceableness.