V.
Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and monstrosity of war.
In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead—of the western Allies, at any rate—have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.
Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.
The increased dreadfulness of war due to modern weapons is, however, only one consequence of their development. The practicability of aggressive war in settled countries now is entirely dependent on the use of elaborate artillery on land and warships at sea. Were there only rifles in the world, were an ordinary rifle the largest kind of gun permitted, and were ships specifically made for war not so made, then it would be impossible to invade any country defended by a patriotic and spirited population with any hopes of success because of the enormous defensive capacity of entrenched riflemen not subjected to an unhampered artillery attack.
Modern war is entirely dependent upon equipment of the most costly and elaborate sort. A general agreement to reduce that equipment would not only greatly minimize the evil of any war that did break out, but it would go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be greatly facilitated.
And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey, Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons. It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.
But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to smithereens.
At the risk of being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted great numbers of investors and financial people. It is perhaps the most powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns, to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.
From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy. It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers. Russia, with her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the value of machinery and so enhanced that of men. Beyond this and certain American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade. The problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.
It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.
Now none of this really involves the abandonment of armies or uniforms or national service. Indeed, to a certain extent it restores the importance of the soldier at the expense of machinery. A world conference for the suppressing of the peace and the preservation of armaments would neither interfere with such dear incorrigible squabbles as that of the orange and green factions in Ireland, (though it might deprive them of their more deadly weapons,) nor absolutely prohibit war between adjacent States. It would, however, be a very powerful delaying force against the outbreak of war, and it would be able to insist with a quite novel strength upon the observation of the rules of war.
It is no good pretending that mere pacifism will end war; what will end war, what, indeed, may be ending war at the present time, is war—against militarism. Force respects itself and no other power. The hope for a world of peace in the future lies in that, in the possibility of a great alliance, so powerful that it will compel adhesions, an alliance prepared to make war upon and destroy and replace the Government of any State that became aggressive in its militarism. This alliance will be in effect a world congress perpetually restraining aggressive secession, and obviously it must regard all the No-Man's Lands—and particularly that wild waste, the ocean—as its highway. The fleets and marines of the allied world powers must become the police of the wastes and waters of the earth.