Part 9
It is a splendid picture of that righteous and enduring conquest to be accomplished not by force but by principle; not by compulsion through slaughter but by moral instruction, persuasion, and reasonable agreement. It is a picture which will furnish any man a worthy ideal to hang in his sky and it will help him, as he takes part in shaping the public opinion of his country, to place the crown of his ultimate allegiance where it rightly belongs.
His name shall be called the Prince of Peace! But what terrible mockery has been offered to that name by his avowed followers! It is one of the ironies of history that the most costly and deadly armaments for the killing of men in war are being wrought out in cold steel, not by the nations which owe their allegiance to Mahomet, the prophet of the sword, but by those nations which profess allegiance to the Prince of Peace. “Put up thy sword,” he said twenty centuries ago! The command has never been withdrawn nor revoked. Yet look out across the face of what we call Christendom and see the wicked and costly refusal!
Christian Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was ushered in by the preaching of Martin Luther, has increased her national debt in a single generation from eighteen millions of dollars to over one thousand millions, chiefly by expenditures upon her army and navy. Christian England, known to the ends of the earth as a center of missionary impulse, is almost beside herself in her mad desire to increase the number of _Dreadnoughts_. She is spending three hundred millions of dollars a year on her army and navy as against eighty-two millions all told on education, science and art. Christian Russia, professing in her orthodox Greek Church to have the only true faith to be found upon the globe, is planning a billion dollar navy and is actually spending two hundred millions a year upon armament as against twenty-two millions a year upon education. And our own Christian country has been making a strange departure from that policy which has made us prosperous and happy, honored and useful, among the nations of the earth for more than one hundred years. The United States in the last ten years has increased in population ten per cent, and it has increased its military expenditures during that period by three hundred per cent. And this is Christendom! These are the nations which look up to the One whose name is called “The Prince of Peace” and crown him Lord of all! Alas, for the bitter irony of such a course!
And all this at a time when the bare problem of bread is becoming more and more serious! England, spending her three hundred millions of dollars a year on military outlay, has little children in the streets of London and Glasgow eating refuse out of the garbage barrels because they are hungry. The problem of poverty and unemployment there is so grave that the British Parliament sets aside whole days for its consideration. In Germany a government expert said recently that, according to carefully prepared estimates based upon detailed investigation, there were two men applying for almost every job which promised a living wage; one-half of the skilled labor of the empire was out of employment. In Russia, people by the thousand die, like flies, from malnutrition at the very hour when her military experts are talking about that billion dollar navy. It is criminal to take thus the children’s bread and fling it to the dogs of war! How terrible all this is for nations which profess to honor and follow the One who came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them!
In our own country, while the situation is less serious, there are men enough out of work and unable to find bread to put into the mouths of their families. Never a week passes when men do not come asking me to use my influence with the employers in my congregation to find them work. Our national leaders are looking in every direction to discover how the revenue may be increased. The present revenue is sadly inadequate for the things which ought to be done. There are millions of acres of arid land to be irrigated by national enterprise and offered for settlement to industrious families. There are great areas of swamp land to be drained which would support a busy, happy population. There are forests to be conserved and renewed in a way that would change the whole face of the situation for the farmer and the fruit-grower in great sections of our country. There are inland waterways to be improved and developed, bringing producer and consumer nearer together by better means of transportation, thus reducing the cost of living. There is a merchant marine sadly needing assistance, for our flag should fly on all seas and in every port, in what could be a useful and profitable trade. All these things ought to be done, if only there was money available to do them. All these interests suffer for lack of money in the very period when within ten years we are increasing our military expenditure by three hundred per cent. His name shall be called “The Prince of Peace,” and it is under his banner that we profess to march!
What is it all for? I know the scare-heads which sometimes fill the 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.