sillier type of newspaper. I know how frightened some people are
when some “military expert,” as he calls himself, has the nightmare.
“Men who spend the best years of their lives looking at the world
through the bore of a gun get their vision distorted.” They cannot
see straight; they become sorry and unreliable leaders, as Europe,
staggering under her grievous burden, knows to her sorrow. Sir Edward
Grey, foreign secretary in the present Cabinet, said recently in the
British Parliament, “The vastness of the expenditure on armament is
a satire on modern civilization and if continued it must lead Europe
into bankruptcy.” The real security of any nation depends upon its
schools and its churches, its useful industries and its happy homes a
thousand times more than upon its army and navy. And the conceit of
these militarists who are throwing dust in the eyes of the people would
be funny, if it were not so costly and so perilous to our national
well-being.
It is the duty of the church and of the university, where men do
not live in that state of chronic hysteria which possesses many a
newspaper office, to arraign this evil of militarism as the most
cruel and inexcusable burden, as the most gigantic crime against
the toiling people, as the nearest approach to the unpardonable sin
known to our twentieth century. The men who watch the world from that
narrow station “behind the gun” are not competent leaders of public
sentiment. The merchant and the mechanic, the wise lawyer and the
skilled physician, the farmer, the miner, and the trained teacher,
engaged in peaceful, useful industry, are vastly more competent to see
things as they are and to aid in shaping a wholesome public sentiment.
International relationships are being formed today as never before in
the history of the race through community of interest in trade and by
those associations which come through labor organizations and through
literature, through the work of education and by religious affiliation.
It is for these men and women whose main interest lies in those
productive vocations to insist upon being heard.
What are the reasons urged for this cruel and costly outlay? “In time
of peace prepare for war!” This stupid sentiment is trotted out as if
it were a fragment from the wisdom of the ages. History as well as
common sense laughs it to scorn. In time of peace prepare for peace!
We did just that with England along our northern border where for
four thousand miles only an imaginary line divides us from one of the
mightiest nations on earth. We agreed with her that not a solitary
fort should mar that border, that not a single war-ship should trouble
the friendly waters of the Great Lakes. If these two nations can make
that treaty of disarmament for a frontier of four thousand miles and
observe it faithfully for a century, what is there in the nature of the
case to prevent the extension of that noble line of friendly agreement
indefinitely?
We prepared for peace and we have had peace. The whole history of
our country has been, in the main, a history of peace. Since 1789,
a hundred and twenty-one years ago, only three foreign wars have
interrupted our progress, and they lasted, all told, less than eight
years. For the other one hundred and thirteen years our swords have
been plowshares, our spears have been pruning-hooks, the fine steel of
our young manhood has been devoted to those useful activities which
do not destroy, but feed and save. If we can thus live and grow to
be one of the mightiest nations on earth by the policy of peace, why
this sudden spasm of military preparation now retarding our genuine
development!
But we have become “a world power” men say, and some of the nations
might attack us! Why should they? Never since we became a republic
have we been attacked, though for decades and decades our navy was
a negligible quantity. “But suppose Germany should land a hundred
thousand soldiers on our Atlantic coast,” some man shrieked out
recently. Why should she? Sane people deal with probabilities, not
with wild and imaginary possibilities. If Germany wanted to attack us,
why did she not do it in those years when we had no navy at all worth
mentioning? We buy millions and millions of dollars worth of goods
every year “made in Germany.” Does Germany wish to fight one of her
best customers? If some man who keeps a meat-market has a customer
who comes in every day to order chops or a steak for his lunch and a
roast of beef or a leg of lamb for his dinner, does the butcher want
to beat that customer over the head with a musket? Any one can see
the absurdity of it! Is folly any the less folly when raised to the
_nth_ power by being made international?
So much for Germany! As for England, she ruled the sea for all those
decades when we had no navy worth considering and she never thought
of attacking us. Why should she fight the people of her own race and
language whose commercial interests are so closely interwoven with
her own economic life? France is our traditional and hereditary
friend. No other nation on that side of the globe need be taken into
our calculation. What a nightmare it is which sets us to building ten
million dollar warships for fear some respectable neighbor might attack
us!
But there is Japan! At the very hour when ten thousand Japanese boys
and girls were singing songs of welcome along the streets to the
officers and men of the American fleet, when the whole empire from the
officials of high rank down to the jinrikisha men in the street was
showing its cordial good-will to the representatives of our country,
an excitable young man, who owes his fame to the fact that he did one
brave deed at Santiago and was thenceforth miscellaneously kissed by a
lot of impressionable women--this excitable young man was rushing about
saying, “War with Japan is inevitable!” And here on the Pacific coast
recently a tired, sick, disappointed old man, an admiral in the navy,
said to a bunch of newspaper reporters who wanted something yellow to
fill up the front page, “Japan could tear this coast to ribbons in
sixty days!” He made this thoughtless deliverance at the very time when
the ink on the notable agreement entered into by President Roosevelt
and the emperor of Japan was scarcely dry! The thoughtful people of
both nations smiled and then mourned over his foolish word. Germany,
England, France, Japan, these four are the only nations on the globe
that we need take into such a consideration! How absurd to be imposing
upon the toiling people the useless burden of expensive armament
against these neighbors.
But “we have colonies now and we must defend them--there are the
Philippines!” Who wants the Philippines? Nobody! They have been, as all
the world knows, an expensive and troublesome burden. We have already
spent several hundreds of millions of dollars upon that undertaking,
and the end is not yet. We could well afford to pay any country fifty
millions of dollars to take them off our hands. But this is not the
way national business is transacted. We found ourselves with the
Philippines in our possession, contrary to the wish and judgment of
many of us at the time, and now by an expenditure of these hundreds of
millions of dollars upon schools and churches, upon better government,
public improvements, and economic development, we have been trying
to do our duty by that backward people. But nobody wants to fight us
to get the Philippines. “They can be left out over night,” as Dr.
Jefferson said in New York, “without the slightest anxiety on our
part.” We certainly do not need to increase our military expenditures
three hundred per cent to prevent some nation from robbing us of that
precious colony.
There are enemies against which we do need to arm ourselves! Not
England and Germany, not France and Japan--no, the common enemies
of hunger and cold, pain and disease, ignorance and vice, greed and
graft, unemployment and inequitable distribution! Against these enemies
we do need to arm. These alien elements are the dangerous foes of
the republic, and they have landed their devastating forces upon our
shores. Against them we must enlist; against them we must build the
best armaments which statesmanship can devise and generous treasuries
provide. And in that great and honorable warfare against the real
enemies of human well-being the exalted Leader of our race, the One
whose name written above every name is called the Prince of Peace, will
march at the head of the advancing host.
Not only the costliness, but the futility of this burdensome armament
smites us in the face when we begin to think. Some years ago in
Russia, a man named Jean Bloch began to write about war. He was not
a dreamy sentimentalist; he was a banker and the administrator of a
great railroad system. He had been studying war upon its scientific
and economic side. He advanced the argument that the introduction
of long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder made decisive
engagements between large bodies of troops impossible; and thus made
useless the appeal to arms as a mode of settling international disputes.
A small force of men securely entrenched can now hold at bay
indefinitely a mighty army. When men could safely march up within
two or three hundred yards of earthworks, fortified positions were
sometimes carried by the assault of a superior force. All this is now
changed. The zone of fire today extends for more than a mile. Across
that space the man behind the earthworks can shoot with marvelous
accuracy fifteen to twenty-five bullets per minute. Smokeless powder
keeps the zone of deadly fire clear, so that he can see how to shoot.
The field is not obscured by smoke as it was when Longstreet made his
advance at Gettysburg. Smokeless powder and the recently invented
noiseless rifle make it impossible to locate the foe either by sight or
by sound--men simply drop dead as they undertake to advance across that
zone of fire which extends for a mile. The effect of all this upon the
morale of an army undertaking to carry a fortified position by assault
is instantly apparent. Such attempts are now things of the past.
Jean Bloch had scarcely published his argument when the South
African war came on to demonstrate the essential soundness of his
main conclusions. The British empire was making war upon two little
republics numbering all told, men, women, and children, about eighty
thousand people--less than enough to provide inhabitants for some
third-rate city. Imagine some unimportant city of eighty thousand
people undertaking to wage war with England! Yet with all the resources
of her army and navy, with the treasury drawn upon at the rate of a
million dollars a day, with Lord Roberts in the field, and with the
splendid courage of her best troops matched against the scanty numbers
of the opposing forces, the Boers held out against Great Britain for
nearly three years.
It was a bitter experience for England. It burdened her with an
increase of debt under which she staggers in her present industrial
depression. It hastened the death of the good Queen Victoria. It brings
an apologetic note into the voice of almost every Englishman one meets
today when he refers to it, and yet it was the British empire against
eighty thousand people. Imagine what it would have been in costliness
and in futility had she been trying to overcome an equal! Picture the
folly of England trying to overcome Germany, or of France trying to
conquer the United States. Jean Bloch was right, and many of Europe’s
wisest statesmen are openly endorsing his claim. They are using the
sensible argument of this business man to stem this tide of militarism
now sweeping across the face of Christendom.
Artillery has become all but useless against modern fortifications.
Plevna told us that, thirty years ago. The Russian general, Todleben,
said of that campaign, “We would bombard Plevna for a whole day and
kill perhaps a single Turk.” The South African war repeated the same
sentiment with a loud “amen.” The correspondents on the English side
reported, “We bombarded Cronje for a solid week and after the struggle
was over we found he had lost in all that time less than a hundred men.”
The costly operations of modern warfare, when a fleet can fire away
fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ammunition in a few minutes and when
armies in the field run up bills correspondingly great, impose burdens
which lift the luxury of such performances out of the reach of all but
the well-to-do nations. When the old-time fighters used battle-axes and
broadswords, they could go out and hew Agag in pieces before the Lord
as long as the strength of their right arms and the supply of Agags
held out--they could do this indefinitely without entailing any serious
expense upon their countries. But the costly weapons now in vogue, with
their voracious appetites for expensive ammunition, make war another
matter.
Even these terrible outlays might be borne by the powerful nations for
a brief period, but the inability of any large army to win a speedy and
decisive victory over another would cause the campaigns to drag along
until the economic resources of both parties to the struggle would be
taxed beyond limit and thus the futility of the appeal to arms would
again be demonstrated. All this has become so apparent that some of the
wisest statesmen in Europe are insisting that war between great nations
of approximately equal strength has become, on the face of it, such an
absurdity as to make such an event in the highest degree improbable.
In the city of Lucerne, on the shore of that lovely lake with the
Rigi and Pilatus rising up in front, Jean Bloch caused to be erected
a “Museum of Peace and War.” He knew that abstract arguments are
sometimes weak where visible, tangible facts are strong in their power
of appeal. He provided for exhibits of the various forms of armament
from arrow-heads and primitive tomahawks down to Mauser rifles and
Krupp cannon. He has shown how complete defenses may be made where
barbed wire obstacles are stretched across that deadly zone which
extends for more than a mile in front of the fortified spot--obstacles
which men can neither cut nor pass under fire. He has shown the
penetrative power of modern bullets. Napoleon used to say bluntly, “A
boy will serve to stop a bullet as well as a man.” But neither boy nor
man stops the bullet from one of these modern rifles, it goes right on
in its bloody career. Experts had calculated that a rifle bullet from
a Mauser gun would pierce fifteen thicknesses of cowhide, a hardwood
plank three inches thick, and then go through a dozen more inch boards
placed at intervals. I saw there in that museum the results of the
test--the bullet pierced the cowhide, the three-inch plank, and went
through sixteen inch boards, lodging in the seventeenth. Army men say
that a bullet with force enough to pierce an inch board will kill a
man. With such penetrative force any one can see the deadly effect of
these long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder. It takes away
some of the glamour and romance from the terrible business of war to
have its appliances thus scientifically exhibited.
In that same museum at Lucerne, where the exhibits of deadly weapons
are educating thousands of tourists from all the nations of earth
as they come and go, year by year, other exhibits show the increase
of international arbitration as a means of determining differences.
Within the last ten years eighty of these arbitration treaties have
been signed, our own country being a party to more than a third of them
all. There is a growing and an insistent demand in all the enlightened
nations of the earth for an international judiciary. Men have come
to see that this costly international dueling does not really settle
anything. A few men have to sit down finally around a table somewhere
and determine what shall stand. And as statesmen get their eyes open
they will more and more insist that this shall be done before the
costly and futile experiments in killing men take place rather than
afterward.
The great arbitrations of history might certainly be made as
conspicuous in our schools, in the press, and in literature as the
great battles. Beside that volume bound in red, “Fifteen Decisive
Battles of the World,” there ought to stand another more significant
volume bound in white and gold, “Fifty Decisive Arbitrations of the
World.” Let the church and the university join hands in helping the
people of our country to realize that when the final estimates are made
up, it will not be “Blessed are the warmakers,” but “Blessed are the
peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” How mighty
would be the influence of the thirty millions of professing Christians
in our own land in shaping public opinion, in determining our national
policy, could their hearts be really fired with the magnificent
principles and the passion for human well-being which possessed the
heart of the Prince of Peace!
There is a growing unwillingness among the nations to discount
their futures by killing off large numbers of their bravest and
most patriotic young men in war. David Starr Jordan’s two familiar
principles are absolutely sound: “The blood of a nation determines
its history,” and “The history of a nation determines its blood.” The
truth of the first statement we see at a glance, for the blood, the
inner life-quality, of any nation shapes its history. And the second
statement is equally true; if the history of a nation is stained by
incessant warfare, if generation after generation consents to the
destruction of those courageous, virile young men whose hearts respond
readily to the call for heroic sacrifice, such a history eliminates
from the blood of that nation those very elements which it sorely needs.
It cost us the lives of half a million men to abolish slavery and to
keep our country whole. If that result was to be secured in no other
way, men who love liberty and love the Union may say that the price
was not too great for such unspeakable benefits. But we know that the
nation today is less able to grapple with its present problems, with
the greed and the graft, with the fraud and the lust which confront us,
because of the loss of those brave men and of the children they might
have reared, bequeathing to them their own heroic spirit, had their
lives been lived out in peaceful industry. They went down cheerily to
die at Shiloh and Chancellorsville, at Antietam and Gettysburg, but
the nation to this hour feels the loss of such a priceless heritage of
public spirit and uncalculating heroism. The serious-minded nations are
becoming ever more reluctant to make such costly sacrifices for the
sake of the doubtful advantage of a great war.
In the growth of international agreements, in the gradual advance
of what might be called international litigation before courts of
arbitration replacing the barbarous methods of slaughter and conquest,
in the steady increase of that good understanding and mutual good-will
promoted by travel and the interchange of products, by fellowship in
the work of science and education and through the joys of sharing
responsibility in the cause of philanthropy and religion--in these
vast movements of thought and feeling lies the hope of that better
day when peace shall hold an undisputed sway. The nineteenth century,
by steam and telegraph, by increased travel and the ready exchange
of commodities, made the whole world a neighborhood. It is for the
twentieth century, by the permeation of international intercourse
with finer principles and a nobler spirit, to make the whole world a
brotherhood.
It is the duty of right-minded, honest-hearted people everywhere to
use their utmost endeavors to maintain and increase that body of good
feeling out of which shall issue this higher type of international
life. To such proportions has this sentiment already grown, that if
these four nations, England, Germany, France, and the United States,
were to make arbitration before a properly constituted international
court the method of their dealing with one another, the other Latin,
Slavic, and Oriental countries would find themselves powerless against
this mighty tide setting ever in the direction of the determination of
all differences by the more rational method.
The outlook for arbitration as a means of settlement is altogether
hopeful. The convention creating a joint high commission to determine
finally our Canadian boundary; the self-restraint shown by the nations
at large in not using force against the late Castro government
in Venezuela; the three great conventions among European powers
neutralizing Norway and agreeing to respect each other’s territory on
the Baltic; the exchange of notes between Japan and the United States
relating to the Far East; the fact that the Central American states
have thus far kept their agreement of 1907 to refer all differences
to a court of their own creation; the fact that the Balkan crisis in
1908, at one time fraught with possibilities frightful to contemplate,
occasioned no European war as would have been the result of such a
tangle twenty years ago--all these signs of the times are full of
promise.
We must confess that the churches of him whose name should be called
the Prince of Peace have oftentimes been inefficient in their
performance of an essential duty. The feeling between England and
Germany, for example, at the present time is almost insanely acute.
Germany has been jealous of the growing friendship between England and
France, now happily replacing the ugly antagonism which harks back to
the time of Napoleon. England is jealous of Germany’s growing supremacy
in the world of manufacture. Technical schools, improved machinery,
and the rapid increase of skilled labor has enabled the German to carry
his wares into the markets of the world and to undersell the Briton.
All this with certain other causes which make for ill feeling has
aroused a measure of hostility on both sides of the North Sea.
I spent four months in England a year ago. I attended church twice
or three times each Sunday and never once in all that time from a
Christian pulpit did I hear a minister of Christ speak in deprecation
of that feeling of hostility or seek to allay that sentiment of
international jealousy. Aside from the “International Peace Congress,”
which met in England that summer, the only public effort of that
kind I witnessed or heard of was made at a socialist meeting in St.
James Hall, London. The International Socialist Party brought over
from Berlin two well-known men, Kautsky, the editor of a socialist
organ there, and Ledebour, the leader of the socialist party in the
Reichstag, to address this meeting side by side with Hyndman, a
long-time leader of the English socialists, and Keir Hardie, labor
member of the British Parliament. These men, German and Briton, stood
together and uttered their ringing words that night against the further
increase of armament, and in the interests of brotherhood. Has it come
to this, that titled bishop and archbishop of the Church of Christ,
that learned scholars and teachers in Oxford and Cambridge shall
hold their peace in the presence of threatened war, while out of the
workshops of the poor and the weary ranks of organized labor shall come
the prophets of better things, calling upon Christendom in the name of
the Carpenter of Nazareth to put up its sword!
Our own nation has been guilty of its full share of this gigantic
folly. Our Congress faced a deficit last year of something like one
hundred and thirty five millions of dollars, mainly because of the
enormous outlays upon the navy in building those ten million dollar
warships. If the present rate of expenditure is maintained for the next
ten years, with no increase whatever, it means that we shall spend
upon our navy the vast sum of one billion, three hundred and fifty
millions of dollars. The reports show that for the fiscal year ending
June 30, 1909, seventy-one per cent of our national revenue was spent
upon the result of war and the preparation for war, upon pensions and
upon the army and navy. What would you think of the housekeeping of a
family where seventy-one per cent of their income was spent on guns!
And because the government, with these huge outlays upon armament,
cannot live upon its income, Congress insists upon increased taxation
through these ingeniously devised tariffs, which fall most heavily upon
the great consuming public. The cost of living has increased until it
has become cruel to all people in modest circumstances and actually
destructive to the struggling poor.