Chapter XII: The War Against War 201 (5)

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.

Has not the time come for the plain people to call a halt! Has not the time come for the indignant toilers in peaceful occupations to restrain the unwise leaders who are responsible for this craze of militarism! Has not the solemn farce of seeing Christian nations build ten million dollar bulldogs in the remote possibility of being called upon to match them against the costly bulldogs of their neighbors, unless, perchance, these expensive creations should, before that, have been relegated to the scrap-heap by some new device--has not that solemn, ugly farce played itself out! “The welfare of the people is the supreme law of the land.” It is the supreme law of all lands and any one who has visited Europe, where every third peasant carries a useless and burdensome soldier on his back as he goes forth to his toil, knows that this modern evil of militarism is a mighty menace to the welfare of any people.

The Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations in our Congress last winter called the attention of the House to the fact that, in pensions and in preparations for possible war, the United States was spending more money than any other nation in the world. He called attention to the fact that the appropriations for military and naval affairs for the coming year would exceed, by twenty-nine millions of dollars, all the money which the United States government has spent from the beginning of the republic up to the present hour upon public buildings. He spoke also of the fact that this nation, which we like to think of as a non-military nation, is spending at the present time more than two-thirds of the total national revenue on pensions and on preparations for war. What an abnormal condition for a republic whose splendid history has been almost entirely a history of peace!

Would that our country might take higher ground in this whole matter! Would that there might go out from us a splendid endorsement of the principle of arbitration, a strong insistence upon the method of international litigation before such tribunals as have been outlined at the Hague conferences and a stinging rebuke to the policy of increasing these deadly and burdensome armaments! Would that our land might show itself a leader and a messiah among the nations in achieving that magnificent fulfilment when the promised Messiah, the Prince of Peace, shall reign in the affairs of men.

The claim is made that risk is involved in refusing to maintain these costly armaments which are sapping the life-blood of the leading nations of Europe. Risk is involved, undoubtedly, but if we want peace, why not take that risk in showing the nations that such is our desire? It would be a magnificent form of moral venture. Risk is involved--so be it! A far greater risk to the general welfare and to the perpetuity of our institutions is involved in the opposite course. Why should not we, as a land of high principles and shining ideals, make the moral venture of staking our future upon a splendid obedience to the appeal of the great Messiah? Beat the swords into plowshares! Beat the spears into pruning-hooks! In peaceful, joyous industry let not this nation learn war any more! Let it place its reliance upon courts of arbitration for the settlement of international disputes, and the blessing of Almighty God, which maketh rich and bringeth no sorrow therewith, shall be ours!

“If drunk with sight of power we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law,
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

“The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget.”

O thou land whose Declaration of Independence was made in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love! O thou land of Washington, who prayed in his farewell address that we might be kept from the scourge of war! O thou land of General Grant, who declared, “Though I have been trained as a soldier and have participated in many battles, there never was a time, in my opinion, when some way could not have been found to prevent the drawing of the sword.” O thou land of Lincoln, who pleaded in his second inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us bind up the nation’s wounds and strive to achieve and cherish among ourselves and with all nations a just and lasting peace.” O thou land that we love, enter thou afresh into a nobler rivalry with all the nations of earth in the cultivation of good-will, in the reduction of burdensome armament and in the maintenance of those policies which make for the enduring welfare of the race!

Transcriber’s Notes

Page 5: “go to college and tay” changed to “go to college and stay”

Page 14: “your own impress on” changed to “your own impression”

Page 33: A missing period was added at the end of a sentence.

Page 88: “the ewards are rich” changed to “the rewards are rich”

Page 101: “stirring times of war on in the slower” changed to “stirring times of war or in the slower”

Page 112: “to stand up befor” changed to “to stand up before”

Page 130: “simply gets wet and muddy, and rowned” changed to “simply gets wet and muddy, and drowned”

Page 176: “by intemperance and some fly” changed to “by intemperance and some by”

Page 202: “his name shall be” changed to “His name shall be”

Page 218: “conquer the united States” changed to “conquer the United States”

Page 225: “England Germany, France,” changed to “England, Germany, France,”

Page 231: “deadly and burdensone armaments!” changed to “deadly and burdensome armaments!”