The war is generating prophets as the Nile generated frogs under the
mandate of Moses, and there is a similarity in the speech of both
products. The prophets are too cautious to risk their reputation in
predicting the events of the war; their forecasts relate to the sort of
a world we shall find ourselves in after peace returns. But even this
measure of prediction is a by-product of the soothsayers who, whether
their lips have been touched with a coal from off the altar, or not,
certainly wield the pen of the ready writer. The main industry of the
busy prophets is to expound to us the meaning of the war, and to
disclose to us those causes of the war which we should never have
discovered for ourselves.
The ordinary uninspired man feels when he has read the diplomatic
correspondence of a couple of weeks at the end of July and the beginning
of August, 1914, that he knows fairly well what were the immediate
causes of the war, and where the responsibility lies. If he carries his
reading back as far as the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he is satisfied
that he has a pretty comprehensive view of the forces that precipitated
the war. And if he has read pretty abundant selections from the
Pan-German literature and the panegyrics on war--such a literature as no
branch of the human race, Christian or pagan, ever produced before--he
thinks he understands how it was possible to plunge the German nation
into this attack on the world.
But all this is merely a matter of reading and reflection. Any one can
reach such conclusions. The prophet must reach some different conclusion
in order to sustain his claim to inspiration:
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.
The prophet has got to attribute the war to causes that would not have
occurred to the common mortal, and see in it meanings that ordinary eyes
cannot trace, or abdicate his tripod.
It is equally unreasonable and equally immoral to say that the war
proves that Christianity is a failure, and to say that it proves
Christianity has never been tried. Because if either of these hypotheses
be correct, one set of belligerents is as deep in the mud as the other
is in the mire, and there is no personal culpability for this war, and
no national culpability either. We are all guilty of not being
Christians, or all unfortunate in having grown up in ignorance of
revelation, and beyond that there is no blame for the war.
If this war is not the result of certain perfectly well known
individuals using their own nations for an attack on others, but is the
result of impersonal enmity between Teuton and Slav, then no person or
persons are responsible for the war, there is no more blame on one side
than there is on the other, and the moral element is as lacking as it is
in an encounter between the inhabitants of the jungle. It is a curious
thing that the prophet assumes the role of a moral censor, and devotes
much the greater part of his energies to confusing the moral issues, to
obliterating moral distinctions, and to blunting the ethical sense.
To condemn all war, which is a congenial theme for a moralist, is rank
immorality; for it puts the nation that attacks, and the nation that
repels the invader, in the same category, and refuses to make any
distinction between the burglar, the householder who resists him, and
the policeman who overpowers him and drags him away to jail.
The prophet readily drops his eye on armies, and at once announces that
it is their existence that accounts for the war. If there were no armies
there would possibly be no wars, but we have shown more than once that
armies can be pretty rapidly extemporized. Besides, this, too, confuses
the moral issues. All nations have armies, and if America and England
had relatively small armies before this war, they had the largest navy
in the world and the navy which ranked second or third. The highwayman
carries a pistol, and so does the paymaster who is obliged to transport
a treasure chest. If the possession of a revolver was the cause of the
homicide that occurred, the guilt lies equally on the souls of both.
We are told that no truth is more certain than that "if you create a
vast fighting machine it will sooner or later compel you to fight,
whether you want to fight or not"--which is about as dubious a truth as
was ever paraded as an axiom--that "these vast machines, whether armies
or engines of war, are made to be used," and that "the military machine
will overpower the minds which have called it into being." Then their
responsibility is not for the ensuing war, but for carelessness in
leaving a war weapon around. But if these vast military machines were
made to be used, then why complicate the question of responsibility by
representing the machine as overpowering its careless but really
peaceful creator, and compelling him to fight whether he wants to fight
or not?
If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince and the General Staff and the
military caste and the Pan-German element created the army to use
against other nations, in accordance with Bernhardi's alternative of
"world domination or decline," and if all the professors and preachers
and pamphleteers had taught the people that war was a high, holy, and
beautiful thing, and--more particularly--that Germany could beat any
other nation in a few weeks, and the armies would return loaded down
with spoils and indemnities and title deeds to new provinces, and that
"our good old German God" had specially deputized the German nation to
overpower all the rest of the world, make German the universal tongue,
and the primitive moral code of Germany the ethical law of the world,
then we know precisely who is guilty of this war. But if the German army
compelled the German Government to back Austria in an attack on Servia,
and on its own account to invade Russia, Belgium and France, we are very
much at sea about the place where the moral burden is to be laid.
* * * * *
The prophet is particularly prone to find the causes of the war in a
material civilization, in our existing industrial system, and especially
in greed. The prophet and the political orator are equally stern in
their denunciation of greed. At a time when prophets were so accustomed
to physical exercise that they could run ahead of Ahab's chariot, and in
the absence of normal sources of supply, were fed by the ravens, their
indignation at greed, their contempt for commerce, and their superiority
to a material civilization, was free from incongruity. The modern
prophet does not live on locusts and wild honey, nor is his wardrobe
limited to a belt of camel's hair. His uncompromising denunciation of
his age is somewhat impaired by the obvious fact that he has "some of
the pork."
The deliverances of the prophet on this class of themes are rather
tiresome in their iteration, and distinctly irritating in their oblivion
to history. There is no civilization that does not rest upon the
possession and acquisition of property; there is no clime or time in
which men have not worked for their living, and sought the means of
buying the things which their tastes, coarse or refined, craved, in
which there have not been rich and poor, and in which it has not been
much pleasanter to be the former than the latter. The earliest social
satirist, like the latest, berated the accursed greed for gold, and
castigated his contemporaries for their love of luxury and their eager
pursuit of money. It would seem as if the prophet might recognize that
it is a very old sermon he is preaching, and familiarize himself with
the extraordinary age of those evils of his own day which he feels it
his mission to chastise.
What distinguishes this age from others, and our own country from others
is that here and now wealth is acquired more easily and more rapidly
than at other times and places. This being the very obvious fact, it
shakes our confidence in the whole fraternity of prophets that they
should, one and all, attribute the larger fortunes made here and now to
the greater love of money, or its more assiduous pursuit. The rich man
is more successful in amassing wealth than the poor man, but he is not
more mercenary. Two men try equally hard to get rich; one succeeds, and
the other fails; the man who failed is quite likely to be more eager for
money than the man who succeeded.
The industrial system never meets the approval of the prophet. An
occasional prediction is that the war will destroy our deplorable
economic life, in which every man is trying to get as high wages or as
large a salary or as ample profits as possible, and will usher in the
golden age, in which such base considerations as pecuniary compensation
will have a very secondary place in every man's mind. Before this war
came, the most eminent educator in America assured the workingman that
he ought to work for the pleasure of it, and not for the contents of his
Saturday night envelope. Such admonitions have occurred, in one form or
another, in the literature of the sages, for centuries and millenniums.
But it was never evolved by a man who was digging postholes, and a noble
ambition to mine the very best coal cannot carry a miner far when he is
obliged to cut such coal as there is in front of him.
It is barely possible that by devoting some weeks to the task, a man
could produce a pair of shoes notably superior to the ordinary run of
shoes, and his professional pride as a devout follower of St. Crispin
might take keen delight in the work of his hands; in the fact that he
had made the very finest pair of shoes in the world. But, after all, he
needs food, and possibly he is obliged to pay rent, and he ought to have
a wife to make comfortable, and children to send to school in
presentable form: so something besides pride in his work is necessary.
If he is to be adequately compensated for his labor on that pair of
shoes, their price will be such that only the rich--if the rich are to
be permitted to survive--can buy them; and if such shoemakers prevail,
the greater part of mankind will go barefoot. For does not the prophet
who has poured out the phials of his wrath upon an economic system that
makes quantity and cheapness, instead of real excellence, its ideals,
recognize that the purpose of quantity is to supply the wants of a
greater number of human beings, and the purpose of cheapness is to
enable human beings to supply more of their needs? For certainly if the
shoes which are the very best shoes in the whole world, and whose
excellence affords the keenest satisfaction to the soul of the
shoemaker, cost $50, then it is quite certain that the customer who
carries them home will go without many other things that he ought to
have. If the shoes are made by machinery and sold for $3, they may not
be quite so beautiful or durable as the artistic product of hand labor,
regardless of time, and yet be in the interest of the customer and the
community.
After the prophet has got through with his ravings at the present
industrial system, the fact will remain that there are a good many
millions of us on this earth, and that we have got to earn our livings,
and that the agriculture and industries of the Middle Ages would not
keep all of us alive. In addition to which, we may also venture to
suggest that the people of the Middle Ages were not quite as honest as
we are, and were not less particular about getting a financial return
for their exertions. The modern industrial system was not created by
capital for capitalists; it is the result of the efforts of the
community as a whole to supply the needs of all of its members, and to
afford employment to all of them. Hunting and fishing are pleasanter
than most of the industries, but 100,000,000 of civilized people are
living and are equipped with intellectual and moral accessories, where a
quarter of a million Indians once roamed. And although they toiled not
(systematically), neither did they spin (much), they were not happier or
better than we are.
One prophet of more discrimination than most of his clan admits that the
industry and thrift which produce capital are valuable qualities
morally, but he is still confident that the great wealth of the modern
world is thoroughly demoralizing. Whence it appears that the safe course
for the world to pursue is to work hard and save carefully and burn up
its accumulations every year in order to keep itself poor but pious,
like the parents of the subjects of a style of religious biography now
quite out of date. Of course this prophet would prefer the wiser course
of not earning enough to afford wealth to accumulate. If we would only
adopt his system and work for the pleasure of working, and for the
satisfaction of producing absolutely perfect products of our own skill,
there would be no danger of our sinking our souls into perdition with a
load of gold. Noah and his sons appear to have built the Ark by the
processes of domestic industry, in distinction from the accursed factory
or capitalist system. How their support was provided for during the 120
years has not been recorded, but if one man undertook to build a
locomotive, instead of merely making repetitions of a single part, it
would be necessary to make arrangement for this. And when we are trying
to replace the vessels destroyed by German submarines, it seems
necessary to use more rapid methods of construction than sufficed before
the Deluge.
Will some prophet please tell us how poor we must be in order to be
virtuous and pacific, and how virtuous and pacific the world was before
it became prosperous? Were there no wars before the Twentieth Century?
The extent of this war is scarcely a result of the world's opulence,
when Sir Edward, now Viscount, Grey, offered to keep England out of it
if Germany would limit the war to the Balkans or to Russia. The war has
involved most of the world because Germany began it by attacking France
and Belgium, and followed that up by attacking Americans on the high
seas, where they had as much right to be as at home.
This argument that the war is the result of wealth is immoral, because
it makes the guilt of America and England even greater than that of
Germany (for they are richer); and because it is the argument of the
communist--that theft is not wrong, because it is the inevitable
consequence of private property: if no one has any right to anything,
then no one will steal anything.
* * * * *
Nothing holds the attention of the prophet better than the idea that the
war is the result of commercial competition. This also is an invention
of the devil to exculpate Germany. All of us are in business for gain;
we are actuated by greed; we are making cotton cloth to cover Africans
for the profit that we can get out of it; we ought to think only of
clothing the naked, and if we would only give the cotton cloth to the
Hottentots without material return, we should have the proud
satisfaction of seeing them draped in chintzes, and we should be safe
from that wealth which is so certain to make us wicked. On those terms
there would be very little competition in supplying the Hottentots, and
no danger whatever that any nation would fight us to gain that portion
of the export trade.
But the "peaceful penetration" of all other countries by German industry
and commerce had been going on for thirty years before the war. England
had stamped "Made in Germany" upon the imports from that country under
the delusion that people would not buy them if they knew they were not
made by domestic industry, but the only result was to advertise German
business. Shipping interests at Antwerp, factories in France, hotels in
Switzerland, iron works in Italy, commercial establishments in China and
South America, the trade and transportation of Turkey, passed into
German hands, and no nation offered armed resistance. No less a witness
than Prince von Buelow testifies that England could easily have stopped
German naval expansion, but did not do so. German commercial expansion
did not cause the war, unless Great Britain, the principal sufferer from
German business success, attacked Germany in 1914. And this is the
German official explanation of the war supplied for domestic
consumption. And yet it is repudiated by the highest witness who could
be put upon the stand. No less a person than Prince Lichnowsky, who was
German Ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war, traces the war
to Austrian projects in the Balkans, with the "blank check" of Germany,
together with irritation in Russia caused by Germany's own efforts to
establish a dominating influence in Constantinople. This leaves nothing
of the story invented for the German people, and propagated by the
university professors, that England attacked Germany because the latter
was getting its trade away from it. And this falsehood, invented to
shield the guilty nation, has a special fascination for the prophets. It
looks so much like taking a broad and general and impartial view of the
world. Satan is very liberal; it pains him to have guilt attached to any
individual. It is more in accord with his philosophic and humane ideas
to regard crime as a product of social conditions, and war as the result
of trade competition.
* * * * *
But the guilt of Germany is betrayed by the selection by Germans of Sir
Edward Grey as the especial subject of hatred among all the hated
British race. Nothing but the consciousness of guilt can explain the
extraordinary vituperation of the British Minister who did in 1914
precisely what he was highly praised for doing in 1913 in a speech in
the Reichstag by Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg. That was the speech
calling on the Reichstag for an increase of about 136,000 men in the
German army, an addition of $50,000,000 a year to the military budget,
and a non-recurring capital tax for military purposes of $250,000,000.
The difference between 1913 and 1914 was not in anything that Sir Edward
did, but in the fact that before the army increase of 1913 Germany was
not prepared for war and supported Sir Edward's efforts for peace. After
that increase Germany was prepared for war, and would do nothing to
support Sir Edward's efforts to avert war, and the coarse abuse of Sir
Edward is a "smoke box" designed to conceal the changed position of
Germany.
Dr. von Jagow, Foreign Minister from 1913 to 1916, has been put forward
to reply to Prince Lichnowsky, but agrees with the Prince that England
did not desire war, and that Sir Edward Grey, who is described by a
German divine as having "a cancerous tumor in place of a heart," acted
in good faith in his efforts to find a peaceful solution for the
difficulty. One American writer finds the origin of the war in the rival
interests of Germany and England in the Bagdad Railway, but Dr. Paul
Rohrbach, now or recently of the German Colonial Office, has admitted
that just before the war opened the interests of the two nations were
settled by a treaty, in which England made surprisingly large
concessions. This is also stated by Prince Lichnowsky. So that the
testimony of three particularly eminent Germans destroys the fiction
that England attacked Germany because it was jealous of German
commercial expansion.
The fundamental trouble with the whole race of war prophets is that they
think the war is a new thing, and they feel called upon to tell the rest
of us what to make of it. War is about the oldest human industry. This
is the greatest of all wars, but that does not alter the meaning of war.
Nor does it necessarily alter the results of war. While it is the
greatest of all wars, it is not yet a long war, and in proportion to the
population it is not certain that it is greater than other wars. It is
not even certain that in proportion to the men involved, it is more
bloody than other wars. We have no means of getting at the figures
except in the loosest way, because the several Governments do not tell
how many men they have at any given time or place, or the casualties in
any individual engagements. But some approximations have been made, and
they do not indicate that the great war is decidedly more bloody, in
proportion to the armies, than other wars have been. Our Civil War
lasted full four years; the War of Independence occupied seven. Before
that was the seven years of the French and Indian war, and one war is
known as the Thirty Years War. From the beginning of the French
Revolution to Waterloo was more than quarter of a century, and at the
end of that period another Bourbon was on the throne of France. Our
Civil War made nearly, if not quite, as heavy a draft upon the
population as the present war has made upon the population of England or
France.
The moral and religious questions involved in war are not notably
different in the greatest of all wars and in wars which are not quite so
great. Most of them are involved in the ordinary administration of the
criminal law by which an orderly community protects itself from its
predatory members. Doubtless there will be social and political results
from this war, but if other wars have not created a new heaven and a new
earth, why should this one? The prediction that this war will produce
great changes in the direction of democracy and of applied religion are
probably well founded. But the war will act only as an accelerator.
These changes have been going on for a long time; the movements for
fifteen or twenty years before the war opened were very evident. Woman
suffrage and prohibition seem impending, but they are not the products
of this war: they had made great progress between 1900 and 1914.
None of the prophets betray any knowledge of history, or see things in
any perspective. The great war is the first great cataclysm that they
seem to be aware of, and they are rushing to and fro, like the
Chaldeans, to find explanations of it, and to impress the public by
their ability to forecast its consequences.
But when peace comes it will leave us face to face with greed and
materialism, and an industrial system in which some men prosper and
others do not, and an obligation to labor from which no important
fraction of mankind can escape, and wants will multiply as fast as the
means of satisfying them increase, and for the greater part of us the
weekly pay envelope and the possibilities of a competence, and the
demand from the other side of the world for the grain we produce, will
continue to be our principal incentives to work.
Progress, intellectual and moral as well as material, has been made in
the past, but the world has not taken great leaps ahead as the result of
great wars, and still less has it changed the direction of its movement
as the result of wars. The one thing of which the vastness of this war
gives us a fairly good assurance, is that no nation will again be
trained from infancy to old age to regard war as a high, holy and
beautiful process of attaining its manifest destiny to rule the rest of
mankind. For generations no statesman will purpose a war, and no monarch
will again have the power of hurling his people at neighboring nations.
If Germany fails in its present effort, neither Germany nor any other
nation will repeat the experiment of 1914.
But the prophets will have no chance to point with pride to the great
religious, moral and economic revolutions whose advent they pointed out
amid the clash of arms. We have found our soul, the prophets love to
tell us. They disagree on some things, and those who have no revelation
upbraid the others for not giving us a spiritual interpretation and
getting a vision of the future from the carnage of the war, as the
augurs pretended to see the future when they were only looking at the
viscera of their victims. But all of them agree that we have found our
soul. When did we lose our soul? When Mr. Roosevelt was President he was
very apprehensive that we had lost our "fighting edge." Is any one
worried now about our lack of a "fighting edge?" Possibly our soul was
never lost. We betrayed some evidences of possessing a soul very early
in the war.
The charge that we had lost our soul, or, at least, had mislaid it,
rests on two facts. One is that we are prosperous. That fatal
alliteration of poverty and piety has a fearful hold upon the soul of
the prophet. The other is that we did not go to the rescue of Belgium
when it was invaded. But Mr. Roosevelt himself did not realize that we
ought to have gone to the rescue of Belgium, till March, 1916. He is on
record in September, 1914, as satisfied with the course of the
Administration, and convinced that we should not have entered the war
when our own interests were not touched. And it ought to be forgiven a
statesman, if he is very reluctant to plunge his country into war, and
declines to put his Government in the position of a knight errant,
wandering around the world in search of maidens to be delivered from
donjons. And furthermore, as the Monroe Doctrine is the corner stone of
our foreign policy, we were properly slow about intruding into a
European quarrel, until it became unmistakable that it was much more
than a European quarrel--that it was an attack upon civilization and
popular Government. We were also justified in assuming that Great
Britain, France and Russia, three of the five guarantors of Belgian
neutrality, were capable of punishing the two guarantors who violated
their pledge, several times renewed by Germany, even up to the day
before Germany invaded the country it had pledged its honor to protect.
But our soul, whether it was lost or not, is now in our possession. Let
us be thankful that the prophets recognize that encouraging fact. And if
our mind is also in our possession, we may look forward to a world not
entirely different from the one we have known, but unquestionably less
likely to play with firearms, and quite certainly one in which the
common people will have much greater control of their political
destinies, and one in which no War Lord, with chatter about shining
swords and shining armor and mailed fists, will be able to hurl his
nation against the others in a desperate effort to establish for himself
an overlordship of the world. Nor will any nation ever be likely to
rhapsodize over carnage, and feed its sordid soul with thoughts of the
territories and indemnities to be got by war, or intoxicate itself with
the delusion that it is a race of supermen charged by the Almighty with
the duty of forcing its harsh language and its brutal habits upon all
other nations.