EDITORIAL NOTES
Soldiers of All Nations
It is difficult to realize that while this note is being written, men are dying, every moment: not in the fulness of time, for the glory of God and their own rest; but unduly and by wanton violence, in the prime of manhood, with the whole making and purpose of their lives incomplete and unrenewable. They lie in strange places, and must sleep, not uncompanioned, but uncoffined and without memorial: mere broken bits of life-stuff, shattered from the resemblance of humanity by machines that must be fed with the food that women travail for, and pray for, and, losing, break their hearts. Well, may they sleep soundly, these soldiers of all nations who will march no more to music, nor answer the reveille at dawn! God be gracious to them, gallant men all, if graciousness be needed where they have gone now!
Paying the Cost
If the death of warriors were war’s only penalty, men perhaps might be forgiven for their battles, since heroes are made known by them. But the world has gone to school again, to learn the lesson that is enforced with cannons; and it knows the whole cost of war, and is paying it, and will continue to pay it for many a year. In this country, we have not contributed much, so far: only a hundred millions officially, and who shall say how many millions unofficially, in disorganized industry? But they have paid a large sum in Belgium, where the prices are plainly marked; they have paid in France (it is an ill winter that follows unreaped and rotting harvests); they have paid in Austria; and the bill for the other countries is being added up.
Christianity and Civilization
But it is not true that Christianity has broken down, or that civilization has broken down, as some have said in the first flush of their indignation and sorrow. Civilization and Christianity
have never yet been tried in the world, so they cannot very well have broken down. What we have had, so far, has been a pseudo-Christianity and a pseudo-civilization. It is not so much that we have been deliberately insincere, perhaps; but we have not faced life and the problems of life as they should be faced; we have accepted the imitation instead of insisting upon the genuine thing; we have given lip-worship, but not heart-worship.
Rebuilding
We are living, and some of us are dying, in strange, wonderful, terrible days. There is no room for pessimism or for bravado. Barbarism is showing us what deeds it can produce. We must answer with deeds.
Let no man who has held high rank in the Government of any country think now that he has done well or deserves acclamations. So far as his vision led him, he may have tried to do his duty, with foresight, devotion, faithfulness. Yet he has failed. The Government which cannot save its country from war has failed, whatever its other achievements. The new ideas, the new hopes, have not been fully comprehended. And so suspicion and enmity have been allowed to grow steadily, and the thought of war has been constantly in men’s minds, as the inevitable end to which the world was drifting.
The thought of war should have been as impossible as the thought of murder. The press of all nations, instead of pandering to misunderstanding and animosities, should have educated the people, day by day and year by year, until the curse of nationalism was lifted from the world.
For nationalism has been a curse, and will remain a curse, so long as devotion to one country can involve enmity to any other. We are brothers in one boat, as we pass from the unknown to the unknown. Let us learn to understand each other.
Benedict XV
The election of Cardinal della Chiesa was certainly unexpected, and it may be hoped that this element of surprise will
be extended to his general policies. But if his Holiness continues, as Pontiff, to carry out the principles of the Archbishop of Bologna, the Church will lose far more than she can gain. What is needed now is not a saint or a scholar or a skilful administrator, though saintliness and scholarship and executive talent are admirable qualifications. If the Church is to do anything more than merely mark time, or actually lose ground, she requires as her head now a man of profound imagination and unswerving courage. The tendency of the Papacy has been too much toward mechanical routine, the neglect of new opportunities, the discountenancing of new ideas, the refusal of new life. The creative genius of the great artist, the incommunicable imaginative insights of the great novelist or poet or painter, could give the Vatican a new leadership in the spiritual affairs of mankind. We have seen the Pope who condemned Modernism dying of a broken heart because Europe was turned into a field of desolation and slaughter. The impotence of the Pontiff to secure some regard for Christian teachings amongst supposedly Christian nations, is at once the measure of the Church’s weakness and the condemnation of her methods. In the spirit of the Modernists, if not in the spirit of Modernism itself, Benedict XV could remove many of the mountains that stand in the way of the direct line for the Twentieth Century, Limited. Mountains may be picturesque: but, in the wrong place, they are merely a nuisance.
Uncensored
The press has not had an easy task in attempting to gratify the natural desire of the public for dramatic details of the war operations. But even after making the fullest allowances for all difficulties, whether due to the censorship, to broken communications, or to the indiscretions of partisans, one can scarcely congratulate the newspaper world as a whole upon its achievements. In New York, for instance, there have been two or three papers which have maintained reasonable standards; but most of the papers have published and republished so-called news of a kind that should never have found public record. Why should any journal waste time in announcing, in large type, that “the Servians
swear that the enemy will never enter the capital so long as one house stands and one Servian lives”? This is mere bombastic rubbish, and has nothing to do with the patriotism and fortitude of the Servians. The appearance of perpetual “war extras,” with no additional information, but with immense scareheads, is another unpleasant sign of the shallowness and insincerity that we permit in these busy days. Frothy journalism may flourish for the moment: but the public has a better memory than it is sometimes supposed to possess.
“Civilized Warfare”
Some one, somewhere, appears to be laboring under a rather serious mistake, or we should not have been exposed so frequently during the last few weeks to the phrase “civilized warfare.” There is no such thing, of course, as civilized warfare. All war is necessarily barbaric in its methods, and ludicrous in its assumption of semi-decency. When nations go out, in the name of God, to mangle and destroy their fellow-creatures, they are reverting to the primitive profession of murder. The glory of war is the glory of murder, however it may be embellished by infantile brains.
We have heard much of atrocities and “uncivilized” outrages. Probably most of the stories are utterly false: but even if they were true, they would only be in full accord with the whole purpose, methods, and disgrace of war.
Let us realize, very clearly, that war is necessarily and always murderous and barbaric, and let us abandon the pretence that we are shocked at the annihilation of towns, the rape of women, the slaughter of children, the desolation of once-prosperous communities. These are the trimmings of war. If we order the feast, let us pay for it; but let us, in the name of all decency, give up the pretence that we are either civilized or Christianized.
Saintless Petrograd
The official change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd removes the intrusive saint from the Russian capital. The city
was named after Peter the Great, of somewhat uncouth memory, and the subsequent sanctification by the rest of Europe was perhaps a tribute to the religious reputation of Holy Russia.
Now that the Ice has been broken, such cities as Florence, for example, may begin to assert their right to be known, even in the Anglo-Saxon world, by their real and native names.
Thumbs Down
In his clever, whimsical and symbolistic play, Androcles and the Lion, Mr. George Bernard Shaw has fallen—or a zealous proof-reader has made it appear that he has fallen—into the usual error of “thumbs down,” as the death signal.
It is strange that this mistake should be so widely prevalent, and should even be repeated by the Encyclopædia Britannica. But the error, like ’round for round and laid for lay, will no doubt pass steadily through the years.
However, anyone who has not yet read Mr. Shaw’s little play should do so at once, paying special attention to Ferrovius.
The Earl of Whisky
The oddities of childhood are rarely understood completely, even in these days of ingenious educational devices. The child lives and moves and has his being in his own world. He may emerge at moments, he may seem to understand or be understood by the great confederation of blundering adults: but he must go back as soon as possible to the realm of his real allegiance, where fact and fancy, dreams, doubts and discoveries are so cunningly intermingled.
Why do we forget our own childhood, and turn deaf ears and unseeing eyes to the sounds and sights that once we should have comprehended so easily? The world of flame, the glory of color, the music in the winds and the darkness, the actuality of romance, the strange limits and restrictions of knowledge! Can you remember when the earth stretched twelve miles out, beyond doubt, and perhaps a little further? Or the immense
significance of double figures when the tenth birthday painted a huge 10 across the entire sky, but nobody else particularly noticed the phenomenon? Or the fantastic associations of certain names from time to time, so that to live in Champagne would have seemed a comic-opera infliction, and a Duke of Burgundy was as Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque as a Marquess of Claret, or an Earl of Whisky, or Baron Beer?
Yet we have long had Sir Loin, and scarcely remember the cause of that famous knighting; and now we have our copper kings, beef barons, pork princes, and what not. Perhaps we are not so remote from the whimsicalities of childhood as we have imagined, after all.
Jaded Appetites
A recent advertisement of a well-known New York restaurant announced: “Whether it is in luncheon, dinner or supper, you will find in our menu of delicious cold specialties, ready for your selection at our buffet in the main dining room, creations to tempt the most jaded of appetites.”
It is comforting to know that the grossly overfed man or woman need not starve. When the appetite fails through constant indulgence, it can be tempted to new excesses by these “delicious cold specialties,” and so enough nourishment may be secured to preserve life.
It is indeed a pitiable spectacle to see the forlorn victim of piggishness sadly regarding a menu that can no longer entice him to abuse his stomach. Let him now take heart and visit the restaurant that has learnt how to “tempt the most jaded of appetites.”
It is a noble work that this restaurant is doing; one well worthy of our civilization.
But who will tempt the unjaded appetites of the slum-dwellers?