The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping
party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their
place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the
glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the
ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is
something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask
all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were
such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from
history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time
substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a
handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts,
those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own
together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood
poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in
cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar
possession, and not one man or women would vote for the proposition.
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged
solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one,
only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now
thought permissible.
It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men,
and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and
possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most
exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected,
and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to
mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.
Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to
plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the
love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror
is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is
the _strong_ life; it is life _in extremis_; war-taxes are the only
ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.
History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how
Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector _killed_. No detail of the
wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story.
Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism--war for war's
sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, because
of the irrationality of it all--save for the purpose of making
"history"--and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization
in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.
Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves,
excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war for
example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where
the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their
lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in
full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied
Matthew Arnold. "The powerful exact what they can," said the
Athenians, "and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say
that sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians
reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of
their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made
by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but
inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong
as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you
why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you." Well,
the Meleans still refused, and their town was taken. "The Athenians,"
Thucydides quietly says, "thereupon put to death all who were of
military age and made slaves of the women and children. They then
colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their
own."
Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of
power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There
was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his generals
and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times is
incredible. When Rome finally conquered Greece, Paulus Aemilius, was
told by the Roman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by
"giving" them the old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy cities
and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves.
How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the
senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was "the noblest
Roman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of
Philippi he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and
Thessalonica to ravage, if they win the fight.
Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. We
inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism
that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.
Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than
this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity
into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed
it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of
wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no
ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with
bluff but could n't stay there, the military tension was too much for
them. In 1898 our people had read the word "war" in letters three
inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politician
McKinley was swept away by their eagerness, and our squalid war with
Spain became a necessity.
At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The
military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but are confronted
by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom.
Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military
service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable
motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the
enemy. England and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without
ceasing, arm solely for "peace," Germany and Japan it is who are bent
on loot and glory. "Peace" in military mouths to-day is a synonym for
"war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no
government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed
in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace"
and "war" mean the same thing, now _in posse_, now _in actu_. It may
even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive
_preparation_ for war by the nations _is the real war_, permanent,
unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification
of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval.
It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a sort of
double personality. If we take European nations, no legitimate
interest of any one of them would seem to justify the tremendous
destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It
would seem as though common sense and reason ought to find a way to
reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think
it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as
possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to
bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that
the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of
pacificism which set the militarist imagination strongly, and to a
certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both
sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia
against another, and everything one says must be abstract and
hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to
characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and
point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best Utopian
hypothesis, the most promising line of conciliation.
In my remarks, pacificist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the
bestial side of the war-_régime_ (already done justice to by many
writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic
sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one
deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are
the soul of every patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the
soul of all romance. The militarily patriotic and romantic-minded
everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to
admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social
evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they
say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life?
If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view,
to redeem life from flat degeneration.
Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it
religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the
vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question
of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature
at its highest dynamic. Its "horrors" are a cheap price to pay for
rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and
teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of "consumer's leagues" and
"associated charities," of industrialism unlimited, and feminism
unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a
cattleyard of a planet!
So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded
person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it.
Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human
life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or
prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
type of military character which every one feels that the race should
never cease to breed, for every one is sensitive to its superiority.
The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military characters in
stock--of keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and
as pure pieces of perfection,--so that Roosevelt's weaklings and
mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the
face of nature.
This natural sort of feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of
army-writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors
take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a
biological or sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary
psychological checks and motives. When the time of development is ripe
the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded
are invariably fictitious. War is, in short, a permanent human
_obligation_. General Homer Lea, in his recent book "The Valor of
Ignorance," plants himself squarely on this ground. Readiness for war
is for him the essence of nationality, and ability in it the supreme
measure of the health of nations.
Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary--they must necessarily
expand or shrink, according to their vitality or decrepitude. Japan
now is culminating; and by the fatal law in question it is impossible
that her statesmen should not long since have entered, with
extraordinary foresight, upon a vast policy of conquest--the game in
which the first moves were her wars with China and Russia and her
treaty with England, and of which the final objective is the capture of
the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, and the whole of our
Coast west of the Sierra Passes. This will give Japan what her
ineluctable vocation as a state absolutely forces her to claim, the
possession of the entire Pacific Ocean; and to oppose these deep
designs we Americans have, according to our author, nothing but our
conceit, our ignorance, our commercialism, our corruption, and our
feminism. General Lea makes a minute technical comparison of the
military strength which we at present could oppose to the strength of
Japan, and concludes that the islands, Alaska, Oregon, and Southern
California, would fall almost without resistance, that San Francisco
must surrender in a fortnight to a Japanese investment, that in three
or four months the war would be over, and our republic, unable to
regain what it had heedlessly neglected to protect sufficiently, would
then "disintegrate," until perhaps some Caesar should arise to weld us
again into a nation.
A dismal forecast indeed! Yet not implausible, if the mentality of
Japan's statesmen be of the Caesarian type of which history shows so
many examples, and which is all that General Lea seems able to imagine.
But there is no reason to think that women can no longer be the mothers
of Napoleonic or Alexandrian characters; and if these come in Japan and
find their opportunity, just such surprises as "The Valor of Ignorance"
paints may lurk in ambush for us. Ignorant as we still are of the
innermost recesses of Japanese mentality, we may be foolhardy to
disregard such possibilities.
Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their
considerations. The "Philosophie des Krieges," by S. R. Steinmetz is a
good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted
by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential
form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ
all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save
as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some
vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity,
heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth,
physical health and vigor--there is n't a moral or intellectual point
of superiority that does n't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls
the peoples upon one another. _Die Weltgeschichte ist das
Weltgericht_; and Dr. Steinmetz does not believe that in the long run
chance and luck play any part in apportioning the issues.
The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow,
superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military
competition; but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the
latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal
is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men
into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature
adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is
"degeneration."
Dr. Steinmetz is a conscientious thinker, and his book, short as it is,
takes much into account. Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed up
in Simon Patten's word, that mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and
that the transition to a "pleasure-economy" may be fatal to a being
wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences.
If we speak of the _fear of emancipation from the fear-régime_, we put
the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now
taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.
Turn the fear over as I will in my mind, it all seems to lead back to
two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one aesthetic, and the other
moral; unwillingness, first to envisage a future in which army-life,
with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in
which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided, quickly,
thrillingly, and tragically, by force, but only gradually and insipidly
by "evolution"; and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme theatre
of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of
men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never show
themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than
other aesthetic and ethical insistencies, have, it seems to me, to be
listened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by mere
counter-insistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The horror makes
the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremest and
supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. The
weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident--pacificism
makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies
neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says
that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is
_worth_ them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its
best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that
mankind cannot _afford_ to adopt a peace-economy.
Pacificists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical
point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy,
says J. J. Chapman, then _move the point_, and your opponent will
follow. So long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's
disciplinary function, no _moral equivalent_ of war, analogous, as one
might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to
realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do
fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the Utopias
they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.
Tolstoi's pacificism is the only exception to this rule, for it is
profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world's values, and makes
the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the
fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe
absolutely in this world's values; and instead of the fear of the Lord
and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear
of poverty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic
literature with which I am acquainted. Even in Lowes Dickinson's
exquisite dialogue,[2] high wages and short hours are the only forces
invoked for overcoming man's distaste for repulsive kinds of labor.
Meanwhile men at large still live as they always have lived, under a
pain-and-fear economy--for those of us who live in an ease-economy are
but an island in the stormy ocean--and the whole atmosphere of
present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people
who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors. It suggests, in
truth, ubiquitous inferiority. Inferiority is always with us, and
merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper. "Dogs,
would you live forever?" shouted Frederick the Great. "Yes," say our
Utopians, "let us live forever, and raise our level gradually." The
best thing about our "inferiors" to-day is that they are as tough as
nails, and physically and morally almost as insensitive. Utopianism
would see them soft and squeamish, while militarism would keep their
callousness, but transfigure it into a meritorious characteristic,
needed by "the service," and redeemed by that from the suspicion of
inferiority. All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows
that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If
proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No
collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride; but it has to
be confessed that the only sentiment which the image of pacific
cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of arousing in countless worthy
breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to _such_ a collectivity. It
is obvious that the United States of America as they exist to-day
impress a mind like General Lea's as so much human blubber. Where is
the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one's
own, or another's? Where is the savage "yes" and "no," the
unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the
blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?
Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own Utopia.
I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of
some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the
war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to
definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable
criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole
nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in
intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war
becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant
ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations
must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this
should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look
forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as
between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist
party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be
permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized
preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently
successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the
more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we
must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which
answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We
must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which
the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the
enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of
private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon
which states are built--unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions
against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite
attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded
enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the
martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war,
are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition
in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more
general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no
reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men now are proud of
belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down
their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off
subjection. But who can be sure that _other aspects of one's country_
may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be
regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why
should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to
a collectivity superior in _any_ ideal respect? Why should they not
blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in
any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this
civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark till the
whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals
of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds
itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the
individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but
constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose
on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make
one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil
and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and
we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and
opportunity, should have a life of _nothing else_ but toil and pain and
hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation,
while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this
campaigning life at all,--_this_ is capable of arousing indignation in
reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that
some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly
ease. If now--and this is my idea--there were, instead of military
conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form
for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against
_Nature_, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other
goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of
hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the
people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are
blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the
permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and
iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to
dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and
tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of
skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their
choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back
into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would
have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human
warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the
women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and
teachers of the following generation.
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the
military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should
get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal
cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is
temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of
one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has
been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its
way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames
of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of
organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other
just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a
question of time, of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men
seizing historic opportunities.
The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor
and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in
a fashion educated to it and we should all feel some degree of it
imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to
the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our
pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without
humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed
henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has
inflamed the military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the centre
of the situation. "In many ways," he says, "military organization is
the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from
the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration,
underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he
steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and
cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least
men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no
immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained
for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion
by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble
and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little
short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy,
see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and
appliances in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking
than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left
almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus
during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for
example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of
to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful
fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a
couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence,
so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of
fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess;
in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now for
such superannuated things." [3]
Wells adds[4] that he thinks that the conceptions of order and
discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness,
unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal
military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent
acquisition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks
that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be
simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor
and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be
the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed
is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to
make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher
ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public
opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference
between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's
party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of "Meat! Meat!" and
that of the "general-staff" of any civilized nation. History has seen
the latter interval bridged over: the former one can be bridged over
much more easily.
[1] Written for and first published by the Association for
International Conciliation (Leaflet No. 27) and also published in
_McClure's Magazine_, August, 1910, and _The Popular Science Monthly_,
October, 1910.
[2] "Justice and Liberty," N. Y., 1909.
[3] "First and Last Things," 1908, p. 215.
[4] "First and Last Things," 1908, p. 226.