Chapter 7

Few men fight to-day for glory. Modern militarism has no place for Lancelots and Galahads. The glory of the regiment has absorbed the glory of the individual. Few men fight to-day to gain great wealth. The treasures that glittered before Pizarro do not tempt our soldiers. Material wealth is more easily won in factory or farm or mill. Few men fight to-day for religion. The conquest of religion has become a conquest of peace; the very ideal of peace is an end of religion itself. Glory, wealth, religion--these are no longer the causes of war. Then why do men fight? The answer is obvious. Men fight to-day for patriotism. Patriotism is the cause of war.

The next step in our reasoning is more difficult. If patriotism is the cause of war, how shall we treat the cause to destroy the result? Shall we attempt to abolish patriotism as Tolstoy would have us do, or shall we try to change its nature so that war as a natural result will be impossible? To answer these questions we must study patriotism from its very beginnings. We must ask: What is patriotism? Where did it come from? What place has it in our life?

Observe first the simplest cell of life, the amoeba. We can watch it through the microscope. It is so tiny that it keeps house in a drop of water. It has neither emotion nor consciousness, in the human sense. It lives a while, and then splits in two to form other cells that have no connection with each other. Yet this infinitesimal bit of life has an instinct, the instinct to save itself. Watch an amoeba as fire is brought near. It immediately moves away. Its every act is regulated by this one instinct, self-preservation.

Now let us leave the microscope and go outdoors. Over there is a bird in a tree top, feeding its young in a nest. Suppose that a fire should suddenly consume the tree. Would the mother bird fly away in safety? No, it would die on its nest in the effort to save its young. There is more than self-preservation here. The scientist will tell you that the instinct has expanded to include the preservation of the offspring.

And now turn to primitive man. The recent excavations in Sussex will give us a picture of him. He is a wild, gorilla-like figure that creeps beneath the trees. He can leap with lightning force on his prey. He drapes his body with bearskins, and eats meat from fingers that end in claws. And yet with all his savage ferocity, this is more than an animal. This is a man. In his breast there stir the instincts of a man. In his life we see the vital element of patriotism, love. His little savage family is more precious to him than all the world. He will fight and die, not only for self-preservation but for those who to him are "brother and sister and mother." This is the stamp of the human. This is the potentially divine.

But as the storms of war beat about these little savage families, the sense of common danger welded them into one. Out of grim necessity friendship came, and friendship gave birth to patriotism. Loyalty and sacrifice were not limited to the family; men fought and died for their tribe.

And now let us turn the microscope upon ourselves. We would fight for our country. We say because we love our country. We call that feeling patriotism. It is more extended than the savage love of tribe; it gives loyalty to a great government and democratic principles. We speak of that feeling as divine, but it is terribly human. Its expression is the same harsh ferocity that inspired the life of the savage.

To-morrow America goes to war. In great black type we read the call for men, and a sense of common danger thrills us. In the evening by a street lamp's glare we watch a passionate agitator who points to a flag that we have learned to love. The tramp, tramp of passing regiments and the sound of martial music thrill us. We lay down our tool or pen and march to the front. And then comes the first engagement. The air is blackened with rifle smoke; the roar of cannonry deafens us. Dazed, we crouch behind an earthwork while the enemy creeps through the smoke. Suddenly they charge. We fire, but they surge on through the smoke. They mount the earthwork. We leap together! Men scream hoarsely! Musket butts crash! Daggers plunge into quivering flesh! Divine feeling! Glorious patriotism!

The passing of this savage patriotism is inevitable. The whole course of nature is against it. The very history of development will tell you that. Loyalty has never been an immutable thing. It has been a ceaseless and irresistible growth from the individual to the family, to the tribe, to the nation. The time for a world-patriotism has come. Why should men limit their loyalty by a row of stones and trees that we call a boundary? Why are men patriots, anyway, except to save their privileges and their government? The primitive patriot had no choice but to fight. He was put down in a little plot of cleared ground hemmed in by mighty forests, and made to hew out a home in a vast world of enemies. But how far we have come from him! The twentieth-century world is a little world. Our earth is like an open book. We have cut through the jungle wastes of Africa; we have photographed the poles. We sell and buy things from Greenland and Java. In such a civilization war-patriotism has no place. It is no longer the only guide to self-preservation; it has become the most terrible instrument of self-destruction. And for just this reason war-patriotism must go. It runs counter to the whole trend of nature itself. It is diametrically opposed to the mission of patriotism in the world. Just as those little savage families joined hands in tribal loyalty, just as the scattered clans and tribes united under national government, so nations must clasp hands around the globe in a new spirit of "worldism" that shall make war impossible.

But we cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?" you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem of the world-spirit of to-morrow. But the blossom will not burst forth in a night. It must come by an unfolding and a growth. We cannot climb to universal peace upon a golden ladder and cut the rungs beneath us. Evolution builds on the past. The final spirit of "worldism" will be a broadening and a deepening and a humanizing of the spirit of sacrifice which is the noblest element in our patriotism.

"But," you ask, "if the evolution of patriotism is inevitable, what have we to do with it? Why should we meddle with the course of nature?" We reply that the evolution must come through you. We are not "puppets jerked by unseen wires." "Consciousness," says Bergson, "is essentially free." Man the savage or man the philosopher--he alone can decide. Let him purify patriotism with Christianity and he has brotherhood; adulterate it with avarice and he has war. The evolution of patriotism is not a physical thing. Listen to Huxley, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of the ethical process." The evolution of patriotism, then, is a moral thing, and morality is man-made. We are men, but we can be supermen. We are patriots of a nation. We can be patriots of the world.

The evolution of patriotism is no theorist's dream. It is a palpable fact. The patriot of one age may be the scoundrel of the next. A turn of the kaleidoscope and Paul the convict trades places with Nero the Emperor. Who was the ideal ancient patriot? The statesman, Pericles? The thinker, Plato? No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy. "I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains. What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over prostrate lives and dead hopes and shattered empires, the blind age cries out, "O godlike Alexander!"

"Godlike!" Oh, but there's new meaning in that word to-day. How much nobler a picture our modern patriot presents! Not waving the brand of destruction, not a king of murder will you find the great patriot of to-day. His thunderbolt of conquest was a host of righteousness. His empire was built in the hearts of men. In the teeming slums of the world's greatest city he lifted the standard of the Christ. Haggard children stretched out hands for bread. He fed them with his last crust. Thousands were dying in the city's filth. He pointed them to a more Beautiful City where pain should be no more. And when the body of William Booth was borne through the silent throngs of London streets, a million heads were bowed in reverence to this patriot of a purer day. In every hamlet of civilization some heart called him godlike.

Is not the trend of patriotism clear? Are not the seeds of a new world-loyalty already in our soil? The trumpet call to war can never rouse this newer patriotism. The summons "peace on earth and good will to men"--that is the future bugle call. And for us the task is clear. To take our destiny into our own hands, to throw off the prejudices of nationalism, to turn our faces resolutely to the future and strive for that summit of brotherhood and universal peace, that

"One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

CERTAIN PHASES OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT

By CALVERT MAGRUDER, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland

First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1913, and Second Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913

CERTAIN PHASES OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We are gathered here this evening in the confident expectation that a rule of reason will soon be established among the nations. It has been a hard, at times almost a discouraging, fight--for it is difficult to convince the world of its own insanity, and lovers of peace have often been tempted to cry in their despair, "How long, O Lord, how long?"

But there have always been men, with vision unaffected by martial glamour, who have foreseen in the logic of the world's history the inevitable end of war, and we have progressed now to a point where peace is the normal condition in international relationships. But it is an armed peace, founded on the false principle of suspicion and distrust, and we come now to consider the practical question of what the third Hague Conference can do to establish peace upon a firm and enduring foundation.

You will remember that the First Hague Conference established a so-called Permanent Court of Arbitration. It is not a definite, tangible tribunal, but merely a panel of a hundred or more men from whom the arbiters in each specific case may be selected; and therefore, though it is a great step in the right direction and though it has accomplished some good work, it has not commanded full confidence and recognition. To supplement this court the Conference of 1907 proposed a new organization--a Judicial Court of Arbitration, to be composed of seventeen judges of recognized legal authority, to sit for terms of twelve years, and to be competent to decide all cases. Here, then, is the nucleus of an easily accessible supreme court of the world, whose decisions would soon build up a new system of international law. Its composition, jurisdiction, and procedure are agreed upon. The vital problem, a mode of selecting the judges, remains unsettled. Evidently, then, the first great duty of the next Hague Conference is to put into operation this court, of which all the nations recognize the need and desirability.

Following logically the establishment of competent machinery for arbitration comes the second great duty of that conference--the passage of a convention binding the nations to resort to this court in all cases that fail of ordinary diplomatic settlement. The Judicial Court of Arbitration, if the nations are not bound to use it, would certainly fail of its purpose. A general treaty making arbitration obligatory is not too much to demand, for the Conference of 1907 declared itself unanimous "in recognizing the principle of compulsory arbitration." Separate arbitration treaties mounting into the hundreds have been negotiated between individual nations, but almost all contain that fatal reservation of questions of "honor and vital interests." Honor and vital interests--could any words be more vague and indefinite? Are these not the very cases which interested nations are least competent to decide? A complete answer to that silly reservation is found in our hundred years' peace with Great Britain. As John W. Foster, that keen student of our diplomatic history, has said, "The United States can have no future dispute with England more seriously involving the territorial integrity, the honor of the nation, its vital interests, or its independence, than those questions which have already been submitted to arbitration." Denmark has agreed with Italy and the Netherlands to arbitrate all questions that fail of diplomatic settlement, thus insuring perpetual peace between those nations. Here indeed is the pathway of true national honor.

Coincident with the establishment of the legal machinery for arbitration and the growth thereof, we would naturally have expected a cessation in the mad race for armament-supremacy. But the very reverse has happened, and to deal firmly with this contradictory situation is the third great duty of the next Hague Conference. Of what avail are our Courts of Arbitral Justice when this intolerable economic waste is permitted! To limit armaments was the avowed purpose of the First Hague Conference, but nothing was accomplished save the adoption of a neatly worded resolution that the limitation aforesaid is "highly desirable for the enlargement of the material and moral well-being of humanity." In 1907 the subject was again under discussion, the nations exhorted to a serious examination of the question--and there the matter rested. We have reached now an insufferable stage where effective action must be taken. Let us hear no more that deceptive catch phrase, "If you want peace prepare for war." When bad blood is likely to arise between individuals the very worst policy to pursue is to furnish them with weapons. And so it is with nations. Consider, if you will, the neck-and-neck race between Great Britain and the German Empire in the construction of battleships. What fool will call that preparation for war a guaranty of peace? We might be disposed to admit the sincerity of those who say we must arm and ever arm to maintain peace, except that they are too often men with professional and business interests at stake. In England there have been amazing revelations of this sinister condition--armament companies with peers, members of Parliament, newspaper owners, officers of the army and navy, as stockholders; enormous appropriations forced through Parliament by interested parties; periodic war scares in newspapers inspired by armament syndicates. Only recently we read how the great Krupp firm of Germany had been exposed in its practice of bribing officials to obtain valuable military information and furnishing French newspapers with war-scare articles calculated to induce Germany to increase her armament orders. In Russia and France they face a similar state of affairs. Here in the United States we are undoubtedly not free therefrom. And then there are the navy leagues in every country, playing upon the fears of the nations by startling tales of what the others are doing, and so on through an endless chain, manufacturing a demand for battleships in the name and under the guise of patriotism. We shrink from the contemplation of such greed and selfishness, and appeal for relief to the third Hague Conference.

We come now to a consideration of the fourth prime duty devolving upon that conference. Ocean commerce in war should be rendered inviolable. In effecting this we not only abolish a barbarous custom, but at the same time remove one of the chief causes of great navies. As long as the safety of the merchant marine is not guaranteed by international agreement, just so long will nations with commercial aspirations build enormous navies for their protection. It is true England has hitherto opposed this reform,--confident in her naval supremacy,--but she cannot again fly in the face of a general demand without too great a sacrifice of prestige.

Here, then, are four important problems of the peace movement, all difficult, but not impossible of solution when we remember that the Conference of 1907, in good faith, I believe, adopted the following declaration, "That, by working together during the past four months, the collected powers not only have learnt to understand one another and to draw close together, but have succeeded ... in evolving a very lofty conception of the common welfare of humanity." Whether these fine words breathe sincerity or hypocrisy the next Hague Conference has ample opportunity to prove.

And now, what shall we say of the position of America in this war against war? Her boundless resources; her amalgamation of men from all parts of the world into one people; her impregnable geographical situation; her embodiment of the three cardinal principles of world-union (federation, interstate free trade, interstate courts); the genius and ideals of our government--all give America a logical leadership. She can boast of the first peace society in the world, of a glorious record of arbitration, of a long list of the wisest international statesmen, of a most advanced position at The Hague upon the questions of ocean commerce, courts of justice, arbitration, limitation of armaments. But there is the darker view. The treaties negotiated by Secretary Knox with France and with England, agreeing to arbitrate every question that fails of diplomatic settlement--those treaties were rejected by the United States Senate. There was a transcendent opportunity to lay the foundation for a speedy realization of peace universal, with France and England willing, yes, even anxious to coöperate--and America failed! Mr. Taft has shown that if the position of the Senate is accepted as international law, then we may as well bid farewell to any hopes of leadership in the peace movement, for our nation could then enter upon no general arbitration agreements because of the prerogative of the Senate in each specific case to accept or refuse arbitration.

It is at this point, Ladies and Gentlemen, that there is work for the humblest of us to do. In the intellectual field we can aid in the creation of an intelligent, forceful public opinion that will induce the Senate to recede from its fatal attitude, and that will resist a false, cheap patriotism which is relentlessly endeavoring to crush America 'neath the burden of militarism. Then in the moral field we can stimulate and foster a peaceful attitude, a sentiment for peace, in the hearts of our countrymen; and until this is accomplished there can be no peace universal, for, as Senator Root has said, "The questions at issue between disputing nations are nothing, the spirit that deals with them is everything." And finally, in the educational field, let us take heed that the men and women of our rising generation are taught the glorious pages of our arbitration history as well as they know the battles of our country. Let us take care that it is grounded into their minds and habits of thought from earliest years, that "peace hath her victories no less renowned than war."

In conclusion, let us not be deceived by that vain apology for war, that it is necessary to keep alive the heroic spirit and to stimulate manly courage. Despite the noble side in war, its bestial side predominates; its larger effect upon men is demoralizing. And if it be glorious to die for a cause, how much nobler to live and strive for an ideal, utilizing the talents that God gave us for its realization! The movement for peace is not one of weaklings and mollycoddles. It is championed by red-blooded men, daring to bear the ridicule of the thoughtless and to fight for the preconceptions of humanity. Peace has her heroes in daily life--miners, mariners, policemen, firemen, men of every station, displaying the nobility of their souls often unheralded and unsung. The venerable William T. Stead, bearing across the ocean his message of international good will, sacrificed his life on the _Titanic_ that others might live. He was a hero, yes, but a hero of peace.

It would be an insult to your intelligence to prove the self-evident proposition that war is uneconomic, unscientific, unchristian. The movement for its elimination, above all, is logical and practical, and should appeal to every man. Is it nothing to you? Yes, it is a great deal to you. Merely let your imaginations picture the day when the seventy per cent of our national revenue now sacrificed on the altar of folly is diverted to the arts of peace, to the amelioration of social conditions, to advancing the happiness of our people--at peace with all other peoples in the assurance of international law and love. Ladies and Gentlemen, if we but do our duty, the dawn of that great day will come in our generation!

THE ASSURANCE OF PEACE

By VERNON M. WELSH, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois

First Prize Oration in the Western Group Contest, 1913, and Third Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913

THE ASSURANCE OF PEACE

The birth and rapid rise of the present movement for international peace are events of recent years. The nineteenth century found its welcome in the smoking cannon and crimsoned fields of Hohenlinden. At its close the first great peace conference of The Hague was in session. One hundred years ago Napoleon was sweeping across Europe in his terrible attempt to create an empire. To-day France, England, and America have agreed on treaties that declare for unbroken peace. Touched by the wand of progress, the Utopian ideal of yesterday has become the dominant political issue of to-day. It is pertinent, then, that we seek the true nature of this revolution. Is it borne on the crest of a popular impulse that will recede as rapidly as it has risen, or is it a permanent movement, the product of natural forces working through ordinary channels?