Part 16

The success of the _Triple Entente_, may, as it is directed, take us far towards permanent peace, or once more establish a military tension that in its turn must produce new wars. What is all important is that the police character of this war should not be lost sight of. It is always easy for the most generous causes to sink to a level of immediate small interests--the Crusaders forgetting the Holy Sepulchre while Constantinople is being looted. Such temptations will beset the _Triple Entente_ in the event of a triumph. Meanwhile, it may be the part of France and England to restrain the bitterness of Russia, who is engaged in a war essentially racial. It is necessary that the lesson administered to Germany and Austria be complete and convincing. Their best wishers can only desire for them a prompt and sharp chastisement. The peace of the world requires either the reduction of Germany to military impotence or a change in the arrogant temper of her ruling class.

Since the war has been occasioned by the stubborn folly of a military and diplomatic caste, the minimum of reform, is that that caste should be deposed in Austria and Germany. France set an example over forty years ago. Such deposition to be effective would apparently involve such constitutional changes that it is difficult to see how either the Hapsburg or Hohenzollern dynasty could logically survive the revolution. In the light of history neither would be missed.

Historically, the notion of a central European Empire has meant nothing but harm. Through the Middle Ages the cheap parodists of the Cæsars trafficked when they might, and fought when they must, claiming territory at large, setting race against race, and pontiff against king, raiding and looting rich neighboring lands rather than waging war, fomenting religious persecution, opposing by trickery and force the development of the new races and nationalities. Such was for centuries the record of the Holy Roman Empire. For Europe its legend has ever been baleful. Everybody knows that the House of Hapsburg inherits by direct descent this tradition, and Austria with its loose hold over many races is today a simulacrum of the Mediæval Empire, owing her new lease of life, after the Imperial idea had discredited itself, to the suppression of Hungary with the aid of Imperial Russia. In the Emperor Franz Josef we have an individual superior to his origins, but he inevitably inherited the diplomatic and military caste of advisors and administrators who have brought Austria to the present pass. The mentality of this hierarchy was fixed after the Napoleonic wars, at the moment when reaction was exaggerated, and has not changed with changing times.

At least the Austrian Empire and its ruling caste had the warrant of tradition. In Germany the tradition was recently made to order by the genius of Bismarck. The mediæval caste which Austria inherited, Germany deliberately created for herself. The Empire rose out of no instinctive need of the race, from no demand of the numerous small states and free cities, but as the clever utilization of a brilliant military triumph. What war gave, war could take away. The Empire that was proclaimed at Versailles might be terminated at Potsdam. The offence of the Empire is not its title and form but in the changing for the worse of the German character. Governments are worth just what they produce in national character. The German temper is naturally genial, thrifty, deliberate, patient, scholarly and musical. Official Germany has developed an intolerable arrogance that threatens the whole world. The Kaiser has mediævalized Germany’s ruling caste, and is the symbol of that process.

Personally I do not believe that the _Triple Entente_ will be called upon to dispose of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties, any more than in 1871, Germany was burdened with the disposition of Napoleon III. Like causes produce like effects, and when Austria and Germany shall have awakened from red dreams of conquest, to the gray reality of defeat, they may be trusted to call to account these responsible for their humiliation.

With an Imperial Austria and Germany, the _Triple Entente_ could only deal most sternly, always along those modern lines of penology which do not avenge the offence, but see to it that the offender be not allowed to repeat it. On the theory that the present administration of Germany and Austria is to be perpetuated, nothing less than the crippling of those powers could guarantee even a few years of peace. With a reorganized Germany and Austria, the allies could and should deal far more generously than Germany did with the bantling French Republic. Belgium, for violated neutrality should obviously be made Germany’s preferred creditor.

Into more speculative matters I will only briefly inquire. There will naturally be some readjustment of the central European map to make political and racial lines more nearly coincident. Many of the historic states which have been whipped or cajoled into the two Empires may reëmerge. A number of small neutralized states in central Europe is among the possibilities. How much of such a process the loosely articulated Austrian Empire can stand is problematical. Some kind of a coherent Germany should emerge from the disaster, and all that is most certainly and valuably German will be preserved. German victory would overwhelm it under militarism. The intellectual primacy of Germany has never depended on the legend of the Empire. It was acknowledged before the Empire was dreamed of, and would survive if the Empire were only an unblest memory. The real Germany has today only friends in the world. To many of us she is an intellectual foster mother and very dear. We hope to see her relieved of disguising mediæval frippery, and once more her radiant and edifying self. In the Kaiser’s proclamation he protests against world wide jealousy and hatred of Germany. Without mincing words, it may be admitted that the world is justly hostile to him and what he represents. He identifies himself and what he represents with Germany. When she shall have set that misunderstanding straight, she will find in the world only friends and sympathizers.

Looking to the future, and especially to the cause of peace, the war suggests certain reflections. If the war results only in a consciously suppressed Germany and Austria kept in order by the armies of the _Triple Entente_, nothing much will have been done. If the ruffian temper of German officialdom persists, Europe will merely have lavished once more her treasure, tears and blood in the old inconclusive way. The hope lies in a solution so just that the defeated nations may accept it, so wise that it may safely include a general reduction of armaments. The cause of peace is already the gainer by a sensational demonstration of the fallacy of the stock sophism that the only guarantee of peace is competitive arming. The way in which the little spark struck on the Danube overran Europe proves that competitive arming is not merely the ready occasion of war, but of war on the most costly and disastrous terms.

But pacificists should not press their momentary advantage beyond the bounds of common sense. There is already a fanatical tendency to denounce war as such, instead of seeking out and denouncing those who have made war without just cause. Of course war abstractly is just as much and just as little moral or immoral as a cyclone. It would be quite as logical to meet and pass resolutions against the earthquake that filled peaceful Messina with human carrion, as to denounce wholesale this or any war. The case of Belgium suggests that it is not the moment for any sensible person to waste his time in working for complete disarmament. Had she trusted solely to the treaties that protected her, how complete would have been her humiliation! Belgium also shows most instructively that the maintenance of an effective military _morale_ does not imply militarism. None of the Belgian officers who held the cordon of Liege had been taught that his honor as a soldier might at any moment require him to sabre an unarmed civilian. Yet the Belgian officers gave a sufficiently good account of themselves against those who had been trained in the bullying tradition. With Belgium still in view, and recalling what would have been her fate had she trusted solely in the treaties that protected her, no sensible person could now advise any nation to disarm below the reasonable requirements of defense. It is possible however that these limits may be greatly reduced by right thinking among nations. Already the individual is measurably free to criticise his own country when engaged in a war that he deems unjust. How great a liberty that is few of us realize. The next step is freedom for large bodies of individuals to refuse to serve their country in a war waged without popular consent and palpably unjust. A people thus minded would be the greatest check on that interested bureaucracy that any military establishment, however, moderate, involves. How far we still are from that, the rallying of the socialists to all the colors shows plainly.

Perhaps the most fertile notion arising from the situation is that of an international police function to be exercised by the most enlightened nations. Something of this there was, though motives were badly mixed, in the Spanish-American war; the notion has plainly governed President Wilson’s Mexican policy. Indeed this police right has at all times been pretty freely claimed by strong powers against weak. It is a tremendous moral gain to see the principle asserted against strong powers who are imperilling the good order of the world,--and this irrespective of the outcome of the war.

A most valuable demonstration has been made of the validity of the principle of neutralization. Since small neutralized states are not for the future to be abandoned to any strong aggressor, they may safely be multiplied. Here may be a solution of the problem of racially varied central Europe. Everything depends upon England and France holding their representative function loyally to the end, and avoiding the national egotism that war in the past has usually aroused. If they are faithful to the charge they have explicitly undertaken, a new era may open for humanity.

The part of pacificists is to avoid phrases, and deal with facts. In the long run there can be no peace so long as individuals put their lives at the disposal of any kind of leader who waves the flag in any kind of cause. So long as nations are unreasoning mobs the moment the trumpet sounds, it will be idle to depose military castes; others will promptly form, and in their turn prevail. Accordingly the educational campaign of the pacificists must continue,--continue, however, with the frank admission that the sword has often in the past been drawn for ulterior righteousness and peace, and that if the time ever comes when from mere horror of war men decline to draw the sword in a clearly righteous cause, so exanimate a world will enjoy precisely the peace it deserves. We must beware of considering peace and war as respectively _bonum_ and _malum in se_. In the present case, to have yielded to Germany would, in the lowering of the moral tone of Europe, have been more disastrous than the unhappy war that has resulted from a single outrageous move: for submission would have meant that the world was content to continue in the twentieth century the ethics of Metternich and Bismarck, while the fact of the war means that the twentieth century world is prepared, at whatever cost, to repudiate the neo-mediævalism that paradoxically imposed itself upon the international politics of the nineteenth century--prepared to work out a better ethics and politics, looking to a more peaceful future. Meanwhile the present task of civilization is to avert an imminent Prussian Peril, and to humble the new Tamerlane who has thrust a continent into war. Should he win, no nation is safe.

THE WAR BY AN ECONOMIST

It is early to hold inquest upon European civilization. But to attempt to forecast the findings of the historian-crowners of the next period of peace, is neither presumptuous nor premature. Experience has taught us much of the evolution of the written record of a war. After our Civil War we had two distinct historical traditions, Northern and Southern. Nearest the event, personalities, deified and damned, loomed portentously. “If Lincoln’s character had been different--if Jeff Davis had been more forceful”--why, perhaps there might have been no war, or its issue might have been other than it was. In a later stage, Civil War history, though still sectional, accepted the obligation to set forth and make plausible the motives animating either side. Finally, sectionalism is fading from Civil War history, at least in so far as the work of the trained writer is concerned. Whether we are Northerners or Southerners, we see in the great war the natural outcome of the irreconcilable conflict between two economic and social systems, each seeking expansion to the detriment of the other. A particular personality may have worked to bring some of the contending forces to a focus; a particular political movement may have hastened, another may have retarded, the final appeal to arms. Given, however, the underlying social economic situation, given, too the existing limitations upon the political intelligence, North and South, and the appeal to arms was inevitable. Neither party, to be sure, can be absolved from the charge of wrong-doing, or even of crime. But it is not now so important to strike a balance of guilt as it is to determine the conditions that made wrong seem right in the eyes of otherwise moral men.

When the present war is over there will be a flood of nationalistic histories. The literary representatives of each party will endeavor to roll the whole blame upon the enemy. Vast significance will be attached to personalities; emperors and kings, statesmen, prelates, journalists, will stand forth in light supernal or infernal, according to the point of view. Were the Servian authorities in league with the assassins of the Archduke? Did the German emperor dictate the terms of the Austrian ultimatum? Was the Czar preparing war while pretending peace? Was Sir Edward Grey watching for an opportunity to crush the German fleet? In a later stage impersonal political forces will assert their claim to the foreground of history: the expansive tendencies of Russia; the fatal pride of armed Germany; the pretensions of England to the empire of the seas. Ancient antagonisms of race and nationality, of culture and religion, will aid in explaining what would otherwise remain inexplicable.

No one will dispute the fact that certain individuals in positions of power worked actively to bring on the present crisis, nor that acts were committed that deserve the execration of mankind. It will not be denied that ancient political and cultural antagonisms essentially conditioned the present war; but for such antagonisms the peace would have remained unbroken. Still, these forces are, in a sense, static, and hence not adequate to explain change. The Russian is not more aggressive, the German is not more arrogant, nor the Englishman more intent upon naval dominance, than they were twenty years ago. Pride of race and intolerance of religion have been with us always, and there is no evidence of their recent intensification. What chiefly needs explanation is that for a generation the consciousness of Europe has been filling up with fighting concepts. The fact has been noted by all serious students of European international relations. It is forcibly demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which the several nations, each with a reason of its own, has entered the present conflict. Desperate efforts have been making, for years, to prepare for the struggle that was regarded as inevitable.

Accordingly we can impute to the acts of particular persons little more than the choice of time and occasion for the outbreak of hostilities. The time may have been inauspicious; the occasion may have been one that will not look well in history. For the underlying forces working cumulatively toward an issue, we must, however, look elsewhere than to personal volition.

The greed of the armament industries and the incessant playing upon popular opinion by their subsidized organs have often been assigned to a chief rôle in the drama of international discord. Competitive military preparations, drawing to themselves an increasing share of the intellectual energies of a nation, have long been regarded as a menace to the peace of the world. Every organ seeks to exercise a function. The Crown Prince of Germany, in his panegyric of militarism, expresses poignant regret that all the splendid military forces of the Empire should be expended futilely, in peaceful show. Professional warriors want war, and will work to bring it about.

The future historian will doubtless give weight to the above mentioned forces, as well as to many others that can not here be touched upon. But he will assign vastly more importance than we of today, to the national antipathies engendered by the scramble for colonial possessions, and to the motives giving rise to it. It may be worth our while, even now, to fix our attention upon this aspect of the question. Not only for the light that may be thrown upon the fundamental causes of the present conflict, but also for the grounds we may discern for conjectures as to the international relations of the future.

II

Every one at all familiar with recent German literature will recall frequent references to the _Drang nach Morgenland_. The “impulse toward the Land of the Morning”--fit inspiration for a sentimental nation. It has been pointed out, again and again, that the open road to German expansion lies in the direction of Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, the expansion has been actually taking place, by a process of infiltration, as it were. Recall the Bagdad Railway, the German incursions into Ottoman finance, the German reorganization of the Turkish army. All that lay between the Germans and their dream of the Morgenland was a group of petty states, easily to be subjugated or overleaped, and the decaying Turkish political organization.

But there was an irreconcilable Russian dream of Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, and a British dream of a sub-tropic zone, all the way to India, taking laws, if from any power, from Britain.

For years, as every one knows, these dreams have played at cards with the Balkans. Not to go beyond the present century, did we not see Russian influence steadily advancing there, until rudely checked by Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Again, the insidious development of Russian influence, culminating in the humiliation of Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War, but checked by the creation of an independent Albania under a German prince. Russian influence encroaching once more, stimulated by the Albanian fiasco and the intensification of Pan-Serbism, to be checked--for no doubt so it was intended--by the utter humiliation of Servia. Probably it was not believed that Russia would trump the Austrian ace. But who could suppose that, in such a game, the trumps would not, sooner or later, be drawn out?

It would be interesting to know why the ace was led just now, and why it was trumped at this precise moment. What is of more importance, however, is to know why the game was set. What did Germany want with the Land of the Morning? What does the Eastern Mediterranean mean to Russia? And what would it signify to England if either dream were realized? Is it matter of sentiment, of “historic mission,” or is it matter of practical interest? And if matter of practical interest, whose interest weighs so heavily that it must be bought with cities in ruins and provinces devastated, with hundreds of thousands of the best and most useful lives sent down to dusty death?

Manifestly, not the interest of the mass of humanity.

III

The Morgenland, be it understood, is only one of the rotten stones in the arch of civilization. Mexico is another. India, China, Africa are of similar character. But the Morgenland may serve as type for our study, and we may profitably confine our analysis to the German yearnings for the Morgenland, not because they are in any way unique, but because they are typical.

There are political scientists who tell us that Germany is forced by her teeming population to seek this outlet to the East. This would imply that the impulse toward expansion is similar to that which carried the Anglo-Saxons to England and the Lombards to Italy. Let us consider whether this is really the case.

It is admitted, of course, that never before was the population within the present borders of the German Empire so great as it is today. Mere physical density of population is, however, a fact of no direct political significance. The important question is, whether the population is too dense to be comfortably maintained. Now, there is undoubtedly much privation in Germany, but it appears to be almost the unanimous verdict of economists and statisticians that the standard of welfare in Germany is constantly rising. Of this fact we have indirect evidence in our own immigration statistics. In the early eighties Germany sent us 200,000 immigrants a year; now she sends less than 40,000. Why have the numbers dwindled? Not because our free land is gone: for the Germans never were distinctively pioneers. In so far as they turned to agriculture, they settled in the older communities, and by superior thrift and industry, took the land away from the native born. This was never easier to do than today. Such of the Germans as remained in our cities occupied themselves with small business, the mechanical trades and the professions. The demand for such services is greater today than ever. The costs and hardships of oversea migration are less now than formerly. If the Germans stay at home, it must be because Germany, in spite of its great population, offers better opportunities for life and work than formerly.

It is not the land area of a nation that determines the magnitude of the population that can be supported in comfort. Rather, it is the organized intelligence of the people; and this, as every one knows, has been steadily advancing in Germany. There are, of course, ultimate limits beyond which organized intelligence can not provide for an increasing population under the handicap of restricted natural resources. Was it perhaps a recognition of this fact that led the statesmen to seek new territories for the Germans of the future?

The birth rate in Germany is declining, as in every other modern state. Conservative statisticians have estimated that, unless the tendency to decline is checked, the German population will come to a standstill within a generation. Germany has now no excess of population wherewith to plant colonies, and will probably never have such excess. Accordingly, it can have been no part of the _Morgenland_ dream that the mongrel population of Turks and Armenians, Syrians and Arabs, was to be supplanted by German _Biedermänner_. It can not have been imagined that Antioch and Bagdad were to become German cities, the seats of German universities; that Gothic spires were to rise among the ruins of Palmyra, and over the redeemed wastes of Bassorah. The life of the _Morgenland_ will pursue its dark and furtive ways, whether under German rule or the rule of any other Power of the light or of the darkness.

IV