Part 23

What the submarine and aircraft make manifest and convincing is this point, which argument alone has never been able to hammer into the mass of inattentive minds, that if the human intelligence is applied continuously to the mechanism of war it will steadily develop destructive powers, but that it will fail to develop any corresponding power of decision and settlement, because the development of the former is easy and obvious in comparison with the development of the latter; it will therefore progressively make war more catastrophic and less definitive. It will not make war impossible in the ordinary meaning of the word, the bigger the gun and the viler the lethal implement the more possible does war become, but it will make war "impossible" in the slang use of five or six years ago, in the sense, that is, of its being utterly useless and mischievous, the sense in which Norman Angell employed it and so brought upon himself an avalanche of quite unfair derision. No nation ever embarked upon so fair a prospect of conquest and dominion as the victorious Germans when, after 1871, they decided to continue to give themselves to the development of overwhelming military power. And after exertions unparalleled in the whole history of mankind their net conquests are nothing; they have destroyed enormously and achieved no other single thing, and today they repeat on a colossal scale the adventures of Fort Chabrol and Sidney Street, and are no better than a nation of murderous outcasts besieged by an outraged world.

Now, among many delusions that this war has usefully dispelled is the delusion that there can be a sort of legality about war, that you can make war a little, but not make war altogether, that the civilized world can look forward to a sort of tame war in the future, a war crossed with peace, a lap-dog war that will bark but not bite. War is war; it is the cessation of law and argument, it is outrage, and Germany has demonstrated on the large scale what our British suffragettes learned on a small one, that with every failure to accomplish your end by violent means you are forced to further outrages. Violence has no reserves but further violence. Each failure of the violent is met by the desperate cry, the heroical scream: "We will not be beaten. If you will not give in to us for this much, then see! We will go further." Wars always do go further. Wars always end more savagely than they begin. Even our war in South Africa, certainly the most decently conducted war in all history, got to farm burning and concentration camps. A side that hopes for victory fights with conciliation in its mind. Victory and conciliation recede together. When the German--who is really, one must remember, a human being like the rest of us, at the worst just merely a little worse in his upbringing--when he finds he cannot march gloriously into Paris or Warsaw, then, and only then, does he begin to try to damage Paris and Warsaw with bombs, when he finds he cannot beat the French Army and the British fleet, then, and not till then, does he attack and murder the slumbering civilians of Scarborough and Dunkirk, and lies in wait for and sinks the Lusitania. If war by the rules will not bring success, then harsher measures must be taken; let us suddenly torture and murder our hated enemies with poison gas, let us poison the South African wells, let us ill-treat prisoners and assassinate civilians. Let us abolish the noncombatant and the neutral. These are no peculiar German iniquities, though the Germans have brought them to an unparalleled perfection; they are the natural psychological consequences of aggressive war heroically conceived and bitterly thwarted; they are "fierceness"; they are the logical necessary outcome of going to war and being disappointed and getting hit hard and repeatedly. Any military nation in a corner will play the savage, the wildcat at bay, in this fashion, rather than confess itself done. And since the prophetic Bloch has been justified and the long inconclusiveness of modern war, with its intrenchments and entanglements, has been more than completely demonstrated, this is the way that every war in the future is likely to go. Fair and open conquest becoming more and more out of the question, each side will seek to cow, dismay, and subjugate the spirit of the other, and particularly the spirit of the noncombatant masses, by more and more horrible proceedings. "What do you think of that?" said the German officer, with a grin, as he was led prisoner past one of our soldiers, dying in agonies of asphyxiation. To that point war brings men. Probably at the beginning of the war he was quite a decent man. But once he was committed to war the fatal logic of our new resources in science laid hold of him. And war is war.

Now there does not appear the slightest hope of any invention that will make war more conclusive or less destructive; there are, however, the clearest prospects in many directions that it may be more destructive and less conclusive. It will be dreadfuller and bitterer; its horrors will be less and less forgivable; it will leave vast sundering floods of hate. The submarine and the aircraft are quite typical of the new order of things. You can sweep a visible fleet off the seas, you can drive an invading army into its own country, but while your enemy has a score of miles of coast line or a thousand square miles of territory left him, you cannot, it seems, keep his aircraft out of your borders, and still less can you keep his submarines out of the sea. You can, of course, make reprisals, but you can not hold him powerless as it was once possible to do. He can work his bloody mischief on your civil life to the very end of the war, and you must set your teeth and stick to your main attack. To that pitch this war has come, and to that pitch every subsequent war will come. The civil life will be treated as a hostage, and as it becomes more and more accessible, as it will do, to the antagonist it will be more and more destroyed. The sinking of the Lusitania is just a sign and a sample of what war now becomes, its rich and ever richer opportunities of unforgettable exasperation. Germany is resolved to hurt and destroy to the utmost, every exasperated militarism will come naturally to such resolves, and only by pain and destruction, by hurting, shaming and damaging Germany to the point of breaking the German spirit can this inflamed and war-mad people be made to relinquish their gigantic aggression upon the world. Germany, that great camp of warriors, must be broken as the Red Indians and the Zulus were broken, if civilization is to have another chance, and its breaking cannot be done without unparalleled resentments. War is war, and it is not the Allies who have forced its logic to this bitter end.

Unless this war does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world, it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a monstrous experience of evil. If at the end of it we cannot bring about some worldwide political synthesis, unanimous enough and powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon enough good-will and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance and a world congress to control the clash of "legitimate national aspirations" and "conflicting interests" and to abolish all the forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face a harsh and terrible future, to harden their spirits against continuing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burden of history. That is the price men will pay for clinging to their little separatist cults and monarchies and complete independencies, now. The traffic and wealth of our great and liberal age will diminish, the arts will dwindle and learning fade, science will cease to advance, and the rude and hard will inherit the earth. The Warpath or the World State; that is the choice for mankind.

This lesson of the submarine which destroys much and achieves nothing has ample support in history. There never was so blind a superstition as the belief that progress is inevitable. The world has seen the great civilization of the Western empire give place to the warring chaos of the baronial castles of the ninth and tenth centuries; it has seen the Eastern empire for 500 years decay and retrogress under the militarism of the Turk; it has watched the Red Indians, with rifles in their hands, grimly engage in mutual extermination. Is it still a blind world, doomed to blunder down again from such light and order and hope as we were born to, toward such another millennium of barbaric hates and aimless wars? That is no mere possibility; it is the present probability unless men exert themselves to make it impossible. It is quite conceivable that ours is the last generation for many generations that will go freely about the world, that will have abundance of leisure, and science and free speech and abundant art and much beauty and many varied occupations. We stand about in our old haunts and try to keep on with our old ways of living and speculate when the war will be "over," and when we shall be able to go back to everything just as it was before the war. This war and its consequences will never be "over," and we have not even begun to realize what it has cost us.

The course of human history is downward and very dark, indeed, unless our race can give mind and will now unreservedly in unprecedented abundance to the stern necessities that follow logically from the aircraft bomb and the poison gas and that silent, invisible, unattainable murderer, the submarine.

"Human Beings and Germans"

By Rudyard Kipling.

Addressing 10,000 persons at a recruiting rally in Southport, England, on June 21, 1915, Mr. Kipling spoke as reported in the subjoined cable dispatch to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The German went into this war with a mind which had been carefully trained out of the idea of every moral sense or obligation, private, public, or international. He does not recognize the existence of any law, least of all those he has subscribed to himself, in making war against com-[Transcriber's Note: Text missing from original.] and children.

All mankind bears witness today that there is no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of man can conceive which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.

These horrors and perversions were not invented by him on the spur of the moment. They were arranged beforehand. Their outlines are laid down in the German war book. They are part of the system in which Germany has been scientifically trained. It is the essence of that system to make such a hell of countries where their armies set foot that any terms she may offer will seem like heaven to the people whose bodies she has defiled and whose minds she has broken of set purpose and intention.

So long as an unbroken Germany exists, so long will life on this planet be intolerable, not only for us and for our allies, but for all humanity.

There are only two divisions in the world today, human beings and Germans, and the German knows it. Human beings have long ago sickened of him and everything connected with him, of all he does, says, thinks, or believes.

From the ends of earth to the ends of the earth they desire nothing more greatly than that this unclean thing should be thrust out from membership and memory of the nations.

We have no reason to believe that Germany will break up suddenly and dramatically. She took two generations to prepare herself in every detail and through every fibre of her national being for this war. She is playing for the highest stakes in the world--the dominion of the world. It seems to me that she must either win or bleed to death almost where her lines run today.

Therefore, we and our allies must continue to pass our children through fire to Moloch until Moloch perish.

In Belgium at this hour several million Belgians are making war material or fortifications for their conquerors. They receive enough food to support life, as the German thinks it should be supported, (by the way, I believe the United States of America supplies a large part of that food.) In return they are compelled to work at the point of the bayonet. If they object, they are shot. They have no more property and no more rights than cattle, and they cannot lift a hand to protect the honor of their women.

There has been nothing like the horror of their fate in all history.

If Germany is victorious, every refinement of outrage which is within the compass of the German imagination will be inflicted on us in every aspect of our lives. Realize, too, that if the Allies are beaten there will be no spot on the globe where a soul can escape from the domination of this enemy of mankind.

There has been childish talk that the Western Hemisphere would offer a refuge from oppression. Put that thought from your mind. If the Allies were defeated Germany would not need to send a single battleship over the Atlantic. She would issue an order, and it would be obeyed.

Civilization would be bankrupt, and the Western world would be taken over with the rest of the wreckage by Germany, the receiver.

So you see that there is no retreat possible. There are no terms and no retreat in this war. It must go forward, and with those men of England, who are eligible for service but who have not yet offered themselves, the decision of war rests.

This is, for us, in truth a war to death against the power of darkness with whom any peace except on our own terms would be more terrible than any war.

Garibaldi's Promise.

By KATHERINE DRAYTON MAYRANT SIMONS, JR.

_O Loveland of the Poets, In the hour of your pain, Does Garibaldi's promise To your heroes hold again?_

There were fisher lads among them, In the shirt of peasant red, And mountaineers from Tyrol, When Garibaldi said:

"I have no prayer to make you, For to God alone I kneel! I have no price to pay you, For your wage is Austrian steel!

"There is naught of knightly emblem For the honor of the brave, And the only land I grant you Will be length to mark your grave!

"I promise cold and hunger In the stead of drink and meat! I promise death, my brothers, Shall be yours before defeat!"

_O Sweetheart of the Nations, In the hour of your pain, Does Garibaldi's promise To Italia hold again?_

The Uncivilizable Nation

By Emile Verhaeren.

The Belgian poet whom Maurice Maeterlinck preferred should rank among the Immortals of the French Academy when that honor was bestowed upon himself, has contributed to Les Annales the following account of Germany and the German people. The translation is that appearing on June 11 in The Suffragette of England.

Life is not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their thoughts or by their deeds.

Germany behaves as though it were the most backward among nations. And indeed it is in spite of appearances essentially feudal. There is perhaps a German culture, but there is no German _civilization_.

One may be well informed and yet be hardly civilized. A sense of duty to humanity, a sense of pride, a sense of liberty are independent, certainly not of intelligence, but are independent of mere knowledge of accumulated facts.

The German professor is a walking library. He collects, he arranges, he comments. Arrangement and discipline with him take the place of everything else, and they inculcate in him the spirit of dependence and of servility. It is perhaps because he classifies so much that he is so dully submissive. Everything according to his view is an ascending or descending scale. Everything is in its compartment.

How, then, can we be surprised if everything becomes materialized and the mind of each Teuton can lay claim to be nothing more than a sort of stiff and dingy compartment, in a sort of social chessboard.

It has already been said: The German invents almost nothing. He works upon the inventions of other people. In order to invent he would have to possess the spirit of rebellion against that which is. He is incapable of that spirit. He is a being who always accepts.

But as soon as a new discovery has been made by others the German gets hold of it. He examines it patiently. He turns and returns it this way, that way, and every way. He, as it were, criticises it. He thus succeeds in augmenting its power. Moreover, he wishes that it shall serve a practical purpose and be classified accordingly, just as he himself serves and is classified in life.

Never have the Germans opened up a great road in science. They open up only bypaths. Leibnitz and Kant joined their paths to the royal high road of Descartes. Haeckel would hardly have existed if Darwin had not existed. Koch and Behring are dependent upon the labors of Pasteur.

This second-hand science is excellent as a means of attracting mediocre minds. To work, each in his little corner, at solving some secondary question, and to believe one's self a somebody when one is hardly anybody, flatters the universal vanity. All the little provincial universities of Germany can live in the illusion that they are full of learned men--thanks to the German conception of what is learned and serious!

It is a system of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest and revolt.

If the German people had been truly civilized they would never have maintained silence before the assassination of Belgium. Even among those whose ideas are contrary to the existing political order in Germany, none has risen up against this crime admitted and proclaimed at the beginning of the war in full Parliament by the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg himself. The universal astonishment at such a silence was so great that even today the world has not recovered from it. Apart from Liebknecht the whole of German Social Democracy is dishonored: it is desired to expel the German Socialists from the International Socialist Movement. They excuse themselves; they aggravate their fault. They say:

"We should have been arrested and imprisoned." The world replies:

"Are they then afraid of dying?"

In the German Socialist Party everything has been reduced to method and organized as in the German universities and the German Army.

There were I know not how many Socialist electors; German Socialism was thought to be already triumphant and invincible. People said: "They _are_ Germany!"

The German Socialists were held up as an example to all the democracies of the earth.

Those who swore by the German Socialists affirmed that they would devour Kaiserism when it should become necessary. But last August in one hour in the Reichstag it was the German Socialist Party that was devoured!

When recently certain German Socialists visited the _Maison du Peuple_ of Brussels they expressed astonishment that the Socialists of Belgium should attach so much importance to the invasion of their country.

"When then binds you to your country?" they asked.

"Honor," was the reply.

"Honor! Honor! that is a very bourgeois ideal," interrupted the Germans.

Yet a true civilization has as its framework precisely honor. Honor is not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly created by the flower of humanity throughout the centuries. When force becomes educated, force opposes itself. It limits and incloses itself. It becomes intelligent and tempered by reserve and by tact. Brutal force thus changes into moral force, power becomes justice.

The more a nation lends itself to such a change, the more it rises from the material plane toward the spiritual plane. The more it enshrines in its institution respect for humanity as a whole, the greater and more civilized it becomes. Such a nation remains faithful to its pledged word; neither interest nor even necessity moves it to commit felony. It loves to protect and not to oppress those who are weaker than itself. It has at heart the work of propagating throughout the world certain principles of social life which certainly are utopian, but are yet beautiful to have before the eyes and in the heart, in order to live not only for the present, but also for the future.

These admirable principles which may never be put wholly into practice, but toward which we must try to grow always nearer, are the expression of the deepest human generosity. They are the radical negation of brutal and primitive force; they incline the world toward a unanimous and serene peace. They have based on faith the infinite perfectibility of conscience. Only a nation of a high degree of civilization can conceive of relations so perfect between human beings and cherish dreams so great.

Germany was never capable of this. The individual German is the least subtle and the least susceptible to education of any in the world.

It has been my lot to take part in certain European capitals in a number of reunions where English, French, Italians, and Germans came together and conversed. They were all, I was assured, distinguished people, of whom their respective nations might be proud. Now, the German was rarely to be seen in an excellent attitude. He was at once embarrassed and arrogant. He lacked refinement. His politeness was clumsy. He was as though afraid of seeming not to know everything. The most eccentric taste seemed to him the best taste. To him to be up to date was to be up to the minute. He would have been wretched if any one in his presence had claimed to be up to the second.

As soon as he had the chance to speak and got a hearing, he inaugurated, as it were, a course of lectures. Clearness was not at all necessary to him. One rarely understood precisely what he meant. The fastidiousness and subtlety which led others to seek perfection in phrase and thought had little attraction for him. With what heaviness the German diplomat discusses matters at the council table! With what clumsiness the German conqueror plants himself in a conquered country! While France, at the end of half a century, makes herself beloved in Savoy, at Mentone, and at Nice, while in the space of two centuries she assimilates Lille and Dunkirk and Strasburg and Alsace; while England in a few decades unites to her Egypt and the Cape, Germany remains detested in Poland, Schleswig, and in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany is essentially the persona ingrata everywhere it presents itself. It knows only the methods that divide, and not those which unite. Germany makes proclamations that act upon the mind as the frost acts upon plants. Germany knows neither how to attract nor how to charm nor how to civilize, because she has no personal and profound moral force.

Europe under the successive spiritual hegemonies of Athens, Rome, and Paris remained the most admirable centre of human development that has ever been.

Under German hegemony Europe would move toward a sort of gloomy and hard organization under which everything would be impeccable, arranged only because everything would be tyrannized over from above.