CHAPTER VII
LET US HAVE PEACE
It was to attend a Congress of Churches that I crossed the Atlantic, but it is not listening to speeches that gives a realisation of any country. It is when wandering about the streets, sitting in cafés, listening in a smoking-car, or talking to a man in a hotel lounge that one forms some impression of the atmosphere which Americans breathe. It has been asserted, doubtless with truth, that human aberrations are a misplaced worship. That happiness which men were created to find in fellowship with the Highest, they seek in base and sensual forms. Drunkenness, on this theory, is a species of misdirected worship. If this be granted, then, Americans are of all nations the most devout. They worship the vast in every form. At Pittsburg you could hear a man rolling out statistics of millions of tons of steel a year; of harbour dues, though the city is far from the sea, that put even London and Glasgow in the shade; and as he speaks you feel that he has a thrill approaching adoration. He is on his knees before the greatest he knows. It is the same in everything. A town of 14,000 inhabitants in 1840 is now a city of a million. He rolls the figures as if they were a mystic ritual. Everything with which he has to do must be the greatest on the earth.
I
It was, however, in New York that one came to the inner shrine of American idealism. I had stayed for two days in the academic calm of Princeton, had heard Lord Bryce lecture in iced and polished and classic phrases on the age-long problem of Church and State; had spoken to two hundred theological students who might just be in Oxford or Edinburgh, for their eyes were just the same—the eyes of youth, who perennially believe that they at least were born to put this old world right. (That is the wonderful feeling that keeps pulpits filled—the feeling that however much the message has been spurned and others have failed, yet I cannot fail—glorious dream of youth!) From that atmosphere of reposeful idealism I was suddenly projected into the midst of New York. It was a bewildering experience. A friend who knew his way in the maze guided me to the Pennsylvania hotel, 'The biggest hotel in the world, with 2200 baths!' I found a room on the twentieth storey, served by an 'express' service of lifts. I could enter into the feelings of the countryman who, descending in one of those for the first time and seeing floor after floor flash past, murmured, 'Thank God, I am safe so far.' Having secured our 'baths' we went forth to see New York by night.
Straight as an arrow my friend brought me to the spots where the full blaze of the illumined streets burst into view. On every hand the street fronts blazed with multi-coloured lights. Rainbows of dazzling splendour spanned the avenues. Above every sky-scraper, darkening the stars, letters of fire proclaimed 'The Greatest Boot Emporium in the World' or 'The Vastest Store in all the Universe.' St. John in his dreams of apocalyptic splendour in Patmos could never have dreamed anything weirder than this. Far as the eye could see down Fifth Avenue the quivering lights proclaimed to the silent stars: 'We are the people—the greatest on the earth!' But, after all, the world is but a tenth-rate little gutta-percha ball in the immensity of infinitude, and it was a comfort to think that the constellations were not impressed. On our way back we rested in a 'Soda-Fountain' refreshment room where we sucked nectar through straws. 'This,' said my friend, 'was a notorious saloon before the war, and here are we, two douce parsons, drinking in all the phylacteries of respectability.' That, on the whole, was the most wonderful thing we saw that night in New York. But as I looked from the dizzy height of my room in the sky-scraper, out on that city of glittering light, I seemed to realise what it meant. That building of monstrous height, these proclamations that darkened the heavens, making the stars but a background for vaunting—what are they but the pursuit of the ideal; the scaling of heaven by force; the soul laying hold on immensity by both hands. It is humanity on its knees before the wrong altar.
II
It is the same when the Great War is recalled, as it inevitably is every hour. To the American his share looms so vast that he is convinced he won the war. Among certain classes 'We won the war' has become a watchword. 'My brother last year travelled through Italy and France and part of Germany,' a typical American will confide in you, 'and he met a German officer, and this German told him that they thought little of the English and less of the French, but that when the Americans came in they recognised their masters and quitted at once.' Hereupon a quiet man in a corner begins to talk. 'We air a wonderful nation, sir, and that's a sure thing,' he nasalises; 'we had only 50,000 casualties, and you had a million, and the French a million and a half, and the Russians perhaps two millions, and the Italians half a million—say five millions in all among the Europeans. My friend says we won the war with 50,000 casualties! His idea seems to be that an American is worth a hundred of his brethren in Europe. It is the atmosphere here, sir. We air a great nation, sir.' Upon this the first eyes the second speaker askance. But a Canadian takes up the tale. 'There was an Englishman down in Florida this summer and he went bathing,' thus the Canadian. 'There was a poster forbidding bathing at a particular beach; but there the Englishman, having donned his bathing suit, plunged in. The watcher of the beach rushed to him on his return to shore and reprimanded him for disobeying orders. "Oh! I am all right, for I took precautions," was the answer. "What precautions?" exclaimed the watcher, at once professionally interested. And the bather turned round and showed his newly-bought bathing suit. On one side it bore the stars and stripes and on the other the legend "We won the war." Pointing to these he said, "I was perfectly safe, for no shark that ever swam in the ocean would swallow that!"' ... The Canadian can beat the Yankee at his own game. He just pricks the tube and you hear the wind whizzing. But in a few years nobody in the States outside the ranks of the learned will know anything about any one's sufferings and heroisms in the Great War except their own. Just as to-day it is a surprise to a German to learn that Wellington won Waterloo, so in the future it will be a surprise to an American to learn that Britain and France by rivers of their blood won the Great War. 'We won the war' has only begun as yet to run its course.
III
It was, however, at Mount Vernon, sixteen miles south of Washington, that I seemed to be nearest to the soul of America. It was with a quiet thankfulness that I left the city behind and went on pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. There the scenes amid which the Father of his country moved and had his being are unchanged. In the city, the Washington monument, a shaft of white marble rising to a height of '555 feet 5 1/8 inches,' confronts one's eyes at the end of every vista. But here no monument challenges the world by its height. The plain, wooden building, painted to resemble stone, with a piazza extending along the whole front, consisting of two storeys and an attic with dormer windows, surmounted by a small cupola and an ancient weathervane, is just as it was when Washington lived and died. In these rooms with the tables and chairs and bed and pictures, and the books (duplicates mostly), just as they were a hundred and fifty years ago, there were dreamed dreams that have changed half the world. Out of this farm-house came the impulse and the power wherewith 'The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.'
There could be found few spots on earth in which one could better muse on the mutability of earthly affairs than in these rooms tenanted by ghosts. Here in the main hall is the key of the Bastille, sent by Lafayette from Paris as a gift to Washington after the capture of the prison in 1789. 'Give me leave, my dear General,' wrote Lafayette, 'to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted country, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.' No nation ever owed so great a debt for its liberty as the United States owed to France. George Washington won the War of Independence because half the people of Britain sympathised with him, knowing that he was fighting their battle for liberty as well as his own; but mainly because France espoused his cause on sea and land, and sent him money, and men, and leaders such as Lafayette. But in the realm of international politics gratitude has no place. When France in 1914 faced the menace of overwhelming and final destruction; when Belgium, to whose independence the United States was a signatory at the Hague Convention, was overrun, the Government at Washington did not even enter a protest, and the President still addressed the Kaiser as 'great and good friend.' While France that won her liberty for America was for three years in Gethsemane, the States were 'too proud to fight.' As late as 1917 there was the famous speech about 'peace without victory.' It was only when a Presidential Election was gained by 'the Man who kept us out of the war,' and when the interests of the States on the high seas were threatened with ruin, that the Americans at last entered the fray. If Britain had acted as the States did, France to-day would have been the conscript appendage of Germany. When the American Ambassador in London declared in a candid moment that America came into the war for 'her own interests,' the resolutions passed and the speeches made disowning him were amazing. That key of the Bastille there in Mount Vernon is a monument of international ingratitude. There is no reason to narcotise ourselves into believing that poor humanity has been changed for ever in this year of grace at Washington.
IV
To-day Mount Vernon is a shrine, and a sky-scraping monument dominates Washington, but George Washington learned in his own day the lesson that in politics there is no gratitude. The founder of the great Republic did not escape the common fate. He was accused as President of drawing more than his salary, of aping at monarchy; there were hints of the guillotine being needed; until at last the scurrilous attacks drove Washington to declare at a Cabinet meeting in 1793 that he would rather be in his grave than in his present position. It is said that at the end he would have preferred to seek reunion with Britain. (An American lecturer was howled down in New York two years ago for venturing to refer to that!) This at least is sure, that Washington was glad to end his days in the peace of Mount Vernon. If this may seem incredible one has only to think of the fate of Clemenceau, of Venizelos, or of Woodrow Wilson. There is to-day in Washington a living monument of national ingratitude. Whatever may be thought of many of the acts of President Wilson, of his leaving France to her fate until he won his election to the second term of office by the help of the anti-British and pacifist votes, yet posterity will undoubtedly acclaim him as Lincoln now is acclaimed. It was he who not only, with the dreamers of all the years, dreamed the dream of perpetual peace, but by his unbending will-power forced the nations of Europe to place that dream, materialised in the League of Nations, in the forefront of the Treaty of Versailles. That was one of those epoch-making events on which the history of the world turns. It is idle to think that the coming generations will not place the man who did that among the greatest of the human race. And yet to-day his own countrymen can find no words strong enough to express their contempt and dislike. There is no more pathetic figure in all the world. A shattered body gains him no respite from abuse. When the broken man drove for the last time from the White House to his own home—the burden at last laid down—a demonstration organised by the League of Nations Union cheered him at his gate. They would not go away until he spoke. He was taken to a window, and after saying a few words he pointed to his throat, in token that he could not further reply to the ovation. History can scarcely parallel that tragedy. But Woodrow Wilson can comfort himself with the thought that the hosannas will rise in chorus when he is dead. George Washington has now a monument 555 feet high; a hundred years hence Woodrow Wilson will have a monument 666 feet high. The generations of those who garnish tombs never fail. 'I tremble for my country,' said President Jefferson, 'when I remember that God is just.'
V
The world has raised a chorus of rejoicing over the results of the Conference at Washington. While we rejoice at the prospect of reducing the number of battleships, we can only rejoice with trembling. (It is America, who had the Japanese navy on the brain, that has the greatest cause to rejoice.) But agreements and treaties are not going to save us. The crucial question is not the form and context of a treaty, but rather whether there is among men sufficient truth and righteousness to fulfil its terms. The warfare of the future will be a warfare of chemistry. (According to a statement ascribed to Edison, the whole population of London can in the future be wiped out in eight hours by poison gas!) Is there a possibility of restricting laboratories and the massing of deadly germs? The men who will release the energy in an atom will be able to destroy a world. If we look at facts we shall not be drugged by oratory. 'Rhetoric,' said Theodore Roosevelt, 'is a poor substitute for the habit of looking facts resolutely in the face.' The facts confronting us are ominous enough. Twice recently one of the greatest of nations has thrown over the signature of its Supreme Head and its Secretary of State. The United States repudiated its President and refused to ratify the League of Nations; and not only that, but refused also to ratify the Agreement made with France and Britain to secure France against future aggression. The present misery and unrest in Europe are largely due to the failure of one hundred and ten millions of the English-speaking race to honour the signature of their Chief. The best of them bewail it, and say that it is the fault of their political system. Under the worst system of European government such events would be impossible.
But though the failure to ratify treaties be grievous, yet the failure to observe treaties duly ratified is still more grievous. And the history of our relations with the States is largely the history of broken treaties. There was the famous Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 regarding the Panama Canal; it was repudiated in 1880, and its history since is a history of broken agreements. There have been so many conferences, so many agreements, so many treaties since the days of the Holy Alliance to the days of The Hague, and the end has always been the same. In 1916 Mr. Elihu Root made a speech in the American Senate, the echoes of which will ring round the world in the coming years. The burden of his sorrow was shame for his country's repudiation of their obligation to protect Belgium. Here are some sentences:—
'Wherever there was respect for law, it revolted against the wrong done to Belgium. Wherever there was true passion for liberty, it blazed out for Belgium. Wherever there was humanity it mourned for Belgium.... The law protecting Belgium was our law and the law of every civilised country.... We had played our part, in conjunction with other civilised nations, in making that law.... Moreover, that law was written into a solemn and formal Convention, signed and ratified by Germany, and Belgium and France, and the United States.... When Belgium was invaded, that Agreement was binding, not only morally, but strictly and technically, because there was then no nation a party to the war which was not also a party to the Convention. The invasion of Belgium was a breach of contract with us for the maintenance of a law of nations.... The American Government failed to rise to the demands of a great occasion. Gone were the old love of justice, the old passion for liberty, the old sympathy with the oppressed, the old ideals of an America helping the world towards a better future, and there remained in the eyes of mankind only solicitude for trade and profit and prosperity and wealth.'
Yes, humanity might mourn for Belgium, and the States stand aloof in spite of its plighted word, but what of that when an election had to be won and the Irish vote conciliated! The world being what it is there can be no hope of deliverance along the road of treaties. There can be no salvation by parchments. You cannot make a treaty when there is no sense of truth and honour. You cannot make a treaty with paganism. There is no truth or honour there for a treaty to rest on. And the world is still overwhelmingly pagan. Europe may have been baptized and America also, but Asia still dreams that its day will return. Japan is haunted by the dreams of Potsdam, and the hunger of empire is in her eyes. China, India, Africa, and the Turk are not yet even baptized! And yet people think that we have arrived at last within sight of the millennium. The characteristic of humanity is its credulous simplicity. Men cannot rid themselves of the fond belief that they can reform the jungle by manicuring the tiger's claws.
VI
The march of events is the proof that the woe of humanity is too deeply seated to be healed by any human salve. There is no balm in any Gilead for these wounds. The first step towards the rehabilitation of the world would be the mutual cancelling of the nations' debts to each other. The United States alone makes this impossible. Money that we borrowed for our allies, and which we cannot recover from our allies, America insists that we pay. And yet that money was spent to save America as well as ourselves. To realise that one has only to think what would have happened if Germany had won? The greatest day in the history of Scotland was when the German fleet, its crimes against the laws of Neptune for ever ended, came sailing into the Forth to surrender. Through the mist that shrouded it there never moved a procession so humiliating and so woeful. Judgment at last overtook the murderers who gloated over the Lusitania! But supposing Germany had won, what then? The first condition would have been the surrender of the British fleet at Kiel. And we would have no choice; for a starving nation must sacrifice everything to feed its children. But what would have happened then? Think of the Emperor William master of the British and French fleets as well as his own. What would have become of the Monroe Doctrine next morning? What would have become of the scores he had to settle about the supplying of munitions to his foes? In face of the might confronting her, America would have been helpless. New York would have been given to the flames if America came not to heel. We saved the great Republic as well as France and ourselves. And now, having given our sons and our treasure, we are being bled white that we may pay America for the munitions which we used in her defence. These payments are earmarked for the payment of American war-pensions! The world has never seen so grotesque a situation. The protected and the delivered demand that their protectors and deliverers should pay for the privilege of protecting and delivering them! What is at the back of so preposterous a state of things? It is this, that there is the shadow of a Presidential Election looming ahead, and the cancelling of the debts guaranteed by Britain would be unpopular. One can quite realise the use the Irish orators would make of that. We forget that Anglophobia is still the staple of American history as taught in her schools. The Boston Tea Party and the War of Independence were due to British vices and the triumph of American virtues. To cancel the debts for which such a nation is responsible would be to repudiate the makers of America! ... What is required, of course, is the right education of the American democracy. Schools should teach that it is impossible in so imperfect a world that all the right can be on one side. Yet that is how history is taught, not only there but here. Our foes also were always wrong! There will be no peace in the world until the spirit of spread-eagleism is replaced by that of meekness; until nations and men realise that we are members one of another, and that we are here to help and serve each other. Until that new spirit breathes through the masses of humanity, there will be war. And we shall have to endure. We who saved America must pay for the privilege of saving her; and we must do it while every opportunity of doing so is snatched from us. A tariff that will exclude our goods has been established; the only way left to pay is by acting as carriers on the seas! Now we are to be driven from that service by nationally subsidised mercantile American fleets! And yet we must pay! ... If anything could waken humanity to the fact that the conversion of the people can alone save the world, it would be this. Missionaries to convert the hearts of the American voters is the world's supreme need.
VII
One of the most impressive sights in New York is the tomb of General Grant. Its site overlooking the deep-gorged Hudson river is most impressive. It is a square building of white granite without and white marble within, surmounted by a cupola with Ionic columns. Above the door, between two figures emblematic of peace and war, are inscribed the words, 'Let us have peace.' These are the closing words of his letter accepting the Presidency. Grant had a right to use the words, for he was a great peace-maker. He made peace by conquering the forces of disruption. He kept stubbornly at it. But when he won at last he would not humiliate Lee by taking his sword from him; and when he was told that Lee's men owned their own horses—'Let them keep them,' said Grant; 'they will need them for the spring ploughing.' Nor would he allow any salvos of victory. 'We are all citizens of the same Republic,' said he; 'let us have peace.' To-day the whole world is one Republic woven together by the mighty shuttles of steamships, airships, and wireless. In that world there can be no hermit nation. In that world, 'let us have peace.' In the Governor's garden at the base of the slope that leads to the citadel, in Quebec, there is an obelisk that stirs the heart. It is a monument to Wolfe and Montcalm. The one died content that he had won a dominion greater than he knew for the nation that he loved; the other, dying, comforted himself with the thought that he did not live to see the surrender of Quebec. There, these two heroic souls, near the scene of their heroism, share a common monument. The inscription is the most beautiful I know:—
Mortem, Virtus, Communem,
Famam Historia
Monumentum Posteritas
Dedit.
'Valour gave them a common death; history a common fame; posterity a common monument.' That obelisk visualises the hope of the future. It would indeed be a miserable world in which men went on hating for ever. Only the spirit of Him who for the love of men stooped to a cross can dig the grave of hate and war at last. When the world shall awake from its nightmare and shall listen to Him, then the world will have peace.
VIII
When I shall have forgotten all else, I shall remember a morning spent in Trinity Church, New York. The oldest grave in the graveyard surrounding it is that of a little child, Richard Churcher, 'who died the 5 of April 1681 of age 5 years and 5 months.' The child's name has outlived the city; for the old city is gone. A few years ago the spire of Trinity Church was a landmark. Now they are completely hidden by the buildings of enormous height that surround them. By contrast the church and spire look like toys. One building soars to 724 feet—49 storeys, with elevators rising 41 storeys in one minute, and express elevators 30 storeys in 30 seconds! Even St. Paul's Cathedral surrounded by buildings such as the Woolworth, rising to 800 feet, would be dwarfed into significance, and Trinity Church is small compared to St. Paul's. It is when one ponders such a scene that one realises what it is that is wrong with the world. The towers and pinnacles of Mammon soar everywhere high above the puny sanctuaries of faith. The evangel of the Carpenter of Nazareth is jostled aside and crowded out. What the world has to do is to make room once more for love and self-sacrifice—for idealism. That is the only road to salvation. Nobody knows that better than the American. He likes to listen to oratory about world-peace; but when the oratory is done he smiles. 'We might as well,' says he, 'try to lift ourselves by our bootlaces.' And that is the moral of it all.
*****
The United States refused the mandate for Armenia, and the mandate for Constantinople, and dishonoured the signature of its chief magistrate guaranteeing the security of France. To-day the blood of the slain cries to Heaven, and Britain is left alone holding the gates of Europe against a race whose only rule is government by massacre. And from America the Press reports a cablegram to the Prime Minister:—'Win civilisation's everlasting appreciation by keeping the brutes out of Europe. Americans expect every Englishman to do his duty.' What a strange species of humour! In very truth the regeneration of the world's democracies is the only road to peace.