IX
It is the interest of exploitative capital that makes the Morning Land, Mexico, China and Africa rotten stones in the arch of civilization. But for exploitative capital, those regions might remain backward, socially and politically: this would not greatly concern any industrial nation, except in so far as it responded to a missionary impulse. The backward states afford, however, possibilities of sudden wealth; and since this is the case, they must attract exploiters, who must seek, and obtain, the backing of their home governments, with resultant international rivalry, hostility, war.
If we could confidently predict the industrialization of the backward countries, we should be able to foresee an end of this one most fruitful of all sources of international strife. But China will not be industrialized for a generation, at least; and many generations must elapse before the tropics are concession proof. Accordingly the one hope for universal peace would appear to lie in the possibility of divorcing, in the popular consciousness, the concessionary interest from the national interest.
For the present war will settle nothing. When it is over, the skeleton titles thrown about the undeveloped lands may have undergone change; but underneath the new order, the struggle of exploitative capital will emerge as before. Diplomatic squabbles will again arise; popular envy will be wrought upon; international hostility will be fomented; military and naval rivalry will again crush out progress. The minor interest will once more drag the major interest to ruin.
There will, however, be in the situation one element new, at any rate, to us. In a generation we shall not be, as now, a nation with almost all its capital secure within its own boundaries. Our strong men of speculative finance will be established in the undeveloped countries; concessions will figure conspicuously among the items of our national wealth. The foreign contingent of our capital will join battle with that of the group of nations destined to fare best in the present struggle: if Germany and Austria, in South America; if Russia and Japan, in the Orient. And who shall say that our country may not be a protagonist in the next great war? One half of one per cent of our capital just failed of forcing us to subjugate Mexico.
The concession and the closed trade are the fault lines in the crust of civilization. Solve the problems of the concession and the closed trade, the earth hunger will have lost its strongest stimulus, and peace, when restored, may abide throughout the world.
THE WAR
BY A MAN IN THE STREET
That a kindly old man having his nature temporarily reversed by a passion for revenge for the murder of two relatives, should have the power to waste a large portion of the lives and treasure of the civilized world, is so counter to everything that civilized men ordinarily consider reasonable, that it is perhaps the sharpest evidence yet given of the tyranny of the past over the present.
Perhaps the strangest thing about such a circumstance is that, while it is counter to the deliberate reason of nearly all sane and civilized men, millions of sane and civilized men are contributing to its occurrence, not only with devoted self-sacrifice, but with enthusiasm.
The conflict between these two utterly opposing conditions is, in the last analysis, simply the conflict between the jungle and the railroad, between the lion and the savage, between the savage and the civilized man.
And the same conflict is in each man’s soul. Behind the man of today, who reasons, is his savage ancestor who merely felt; behind the gentleman in evening dress who goes to the boxing match is his ancestor who turned his thumb down over the arena; behind the jurist who arbitrates at The Hague, is his ancestor who commanded a pirate ship in the neighboring sea; behind the German who, less than a generation ago, was leading civilization, is the barbarian who attacked Rome, and who now has come out to attack Belgium.
Now absolute power is old fashioned, alliances are old fashioned, even violence and revenge are old fashioned, and among civilized nations they are “not done,” except through the madness or the imbecility of crowds. Nobody really wants to do either of them, except the rulers and soldiers who see a chance of gain.
Of the hosts of men sacrificing, fighting, suffering, dying, not one in twenty wants to do it, or even knows why he is doing it, or what is to be gained by doing it, and not one in fifty thousand was consulted about doing it. Mr. Lowes Dickinson after expressing himself in the London Nation somewhat to the foregoing effect, adds:
We are sane people. But our acts are mad. Why? Because we are all in the hands of some score of individuals called Governments.... These men have willed this thing for us over our heads. No nation has had the choice of saying no. The Russian peasants march because the Czar and the priest tell them to. That of course. But equally the German socialists march; equally the French socialists. These men know what war means.... They hate it. But they march. Business men, knowing too, hating too, watch them march. Workingmen watch them march, and wait for starvation. All are powerless. The die has been cast for them. The crowned gamblers cast it, and the cast was death.
But “some score of individuals” is too many. The New York Nation puts that better:
Whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back again into a position enabling three Emperors—one of them senile, another subject to melancholia, and the third often showing signs of disturbed mental balance—to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.
The German tradition of 1870, so strongly in favor of getting in the first blow, made it impossible for a spreading of the war to be seriously threatened without Germany striking that blow, and so turning any possibility of a general war into the reality.
In fights between individuals, the wrong has usually been laid to the one who struck first. There is equal reason for so laying it between nations.
When to the tradition in favor of the first blow is added the military habit diffused through the nation to a degree absolutely strange to modern times; when over a nation thus accustomed to arms, there is a ruling class whose only ambition and only hope is in War, and when at the head of this class is a ruler with a megalomaniac ambition and conceit, the wonder is not that such a nation has gone to war with virtually all its neighbors, but that it has so long been at peace with them.
This war is probably the world’s greatest illustration that a condition of “preparation for defence” is apt to lead to war. Forty years of such preparation has developed in the peaceful scholarly German nation an oligarchy of swashbucklers who crowd women off the sidewalk and cherish an ambition to conquer the world.
More specific causes of the low condition of Germany are not far to seek. If a hundred portraits of each of the rulers of, say, the ten leading nations were culled at random from the leading illustrated publications, a due proportion being kept of the various functions in which the rulers were engaged when the pictures were taken, there is no reasonable doubt that the absolute rulers would be represented the greatest number of times in military dress—like savages in war paint, and that William of Germany’s proportion would be larger than that of any other ruler. The presidents of republican France and the United States would not appear in war paint at all, and the king of democratic England would so appear less often than the head of any other dynasty.
Of all alleged civilized rulers, William II has alone borne the barbarous title of “The War Lord,” yet before last August he never saw a battle. He was “The War Lord” simply because it was his delight to pose as such, and what a man poses, he wishes to become. Since 1870, and to some extent before, the Kaiser’s country has been, to a degree approached by no other in Europe, an armed camp. In Germany, gentleman and army-officer have been almost synonymous terms: no amount of learning, genius or eminence in any other direction has brought a man as high social consideration as eminence in the army. The army has been the dominant interest of the Emperor, and, despite the enormous industries, the dominant power in the eyes of the people—a power more recognized than the legislature and the courts. Among the aristocratic and would-be aristocratic classes, it has been the one career, and the one avenue to eminence. But in times of peace, promotion is slow: it is liveliest only when war kills off or wears out superiors. Hence in the German army the chief yearning—all the stronger for being suppressed for nearly half a century—has been for war: the daily toast at the officers’ messes has been for many years “Zum Tag!” Of such conditions as these, the natural outcome has been the barbarities in Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain.
For these conditions of course neither the German people nor their Kaiser has been entirely to blame: everybody knows how, at the start, the conditions were forced upon them. But what pains have been taken to keep at the lowest terms their barbarizing influence, not to speak of doing away with it altogether? What has been the general attitude of Germany, under the Kaiser’s influence, toward the proposals instituted by the Tzar—sovereign of a far inferior people—for the development of machinery for international peace?
This war, in its murders and destructions, is probably the worst calamity the world has ever known. Yet it is doubtful whether the murders and destructions are the worst things about it: for it has, for the time being, turned a people long among the most admirable and lovable and peaceable in the world, into a nation of destroyers, and made some of their admirable qualities—their coolness, their patience, their energy, their system, their ingenuity, their coöperation, their patriotism, all of which were long among the chief agencies of the world’s progress, into the chief agencies for its misery and debasement.
But, with all the German’s old-time merits, there is no blinking the fact that the current of civilization which came through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome does not flow through his veins. He came into civilization late, and he shows it despite the virtues Tacitus saw him bringing with him: he still holds the barbarities of a highly inflected speech, a highly centralized government, and a ruthless disregard of the finer amenities of both peace and war. But we repeat that, except as his barbarian warlike passions have been trained since the fifties, and now been specially aroused, the great virtues which he had evolved even when History first knew him, made him admirable and lovable, and when he has felt the consequences of his mistakes, will make him so again.
The obvious conditions would suggest, even to the visitor from another planet, that there must be two Germanys; and so there are—the Germany of industry and peace, and the Germany of idleness and war. The higher Germany—not the higher in the army or the state, but the higher in intellect and morals, even less than a generation ago was among the greatest examples of mankind. The lower Germany—baser though more brilliant—nurtures a nest of microbes, and they have entered into the blood of the higher, and made it mad.
One thing that has made possible this great tragedy is the survival of old ideas of high and low, which, like many other ideas, were once true, and in the progress of evolution have now become false—more destructively false in Germany than anywhere else in civilization. In all savage communities, the ruling class is apt to be the best. Evolution approaches equilibration—the beam of the scale approaches the level—by the arbitrary power of the upper class going down, and the capacity of the lower class rising up, until at last, we may hope all classes will be on a level. The scale of course oscillates until, if ever, equilibration shall be reached: the revolutionary movements at times place the lower classes in the ascendant, even make them for brief moments the rulers,—often very ridiculous and even destructive rulers, as in the French revolution, and the ascendancy of the silverites in the American congress. But the mistakes of the temporary rulers from the ignorant classes have been nothing beside the excesses of a Zenghis Khan, a Tamerlane, an Alexander, a Nero, a Henry the Eighth, a Napoleon, and a William II of Germany.
The claim that Germany is waging a war of defence is too thin to justify attention. The Kaiser’s responsibility for spreading the conflict is of course disputed by him and his supporters; but the thing has been brewing from the day the young Emperor, imitating the pirates and stage villains, pasted up his moustache farther than any other man’s to make himself look fierce. No man of peace or modesty ever hung out such a sign.
He has hardly ever made a speech without showing his megalomania, and placing his army first among his many interests; in agreements proposed for the promotion of peace, from the first meeting at The Hague, he has been the one to hang back; and he refused the arbitration suggested by Sir Edward Grey, which the other nations seemed ready to accept.
But his responsibility for spreading the war is of little consequence beside his conduct since it began. His first step was to trample under foot his own nation’s contract with Civilization itself; to violate the rules that, with infinite labor and through infinite suffering, had been slowly built up in aid of international peace and justice; to begin murdering an unoffending people whose peace his own country had solemnly pledged itself to maintain—devastating their country and robbing them of millions on millions, all because they had defended rights which, as already said, were pledged by his own country.
He had prepared for this by debauching his own peaceful, industrious, scholarly and harmony-loving people into such familiarity with the apparatus and drill and idea of war, that they have been taking on the army ways, ideas, ambitions and megalomania at a progressive rate that has saddened the former admirers who have visited them at sufficient intervals to notice the change. Even among the scholars, not only has the army influence spread, but the old allegiance to the simple life is gone. Our exchange professors report the deterioration. Says one: “They have been bought by court favors.”
And they, like us, have been corrupted by their prosperity; their patriotism has become perverted into greed; and the vast industry, the vast wealth, even the vast population that this once exemplary people had built up in spite of the Emperor’s colossal military waste, he is destroying to feed his own lust of power, and he has impregnated them with that lust, and the trade which his people have made worldwide by their industry, he is, for most fallacious and insignificant reasons, seeking to extend by their blood.
He is widely believed to be insane. However that may be, I do not see how any candid and unbiased judgment can find him other than a man forsworn, a robber, a murderer of the innocent—of his own people no less than of other peoples, a destroyer of civilization, an enemy of mankind.
Perhaps the worst tragedy in the whole awful drama is this man’s militarism rotting out the morality of the people of Luther, Kant and Fichte. His ministers now talk of the highest moral stand a nation ever took, in England’s defence of Belgium’s neutrality, as the absurdity of going to war over a little piece of paper. It is also a large part of the present German philosophy that force and cunning are essential agents in evolution. The pity and tragedy of it!—that the German race, long the moral leaders of the world, should have sunk to a Machiavelism below Machiavelli—one not even, like his, superficially intelligent and refined, but throughout stupid and brutal.
This German military philosophy that reckons only with itself, carries the elements of its own destruction. It is already actually at war with most of civilized Europe. It may not be destroyed this year or even next, but destroyed it will be; and until it is destroyed, civilization stops and stands at bay.
If necessary, its every resource must be called into play. Even those of remote Japan are already in action. If the need becomes greater, inaction on the part of nearer nations will become disgraceful. The wisdom that ignored the comparatively petty issues in Mexico, will become folly if it ignores anything so colossal as the present issues may become, especially as they already deeply concern our own blood.
If the outcome of the battles shall be the Kaiser’s victory, it will be for us only to reflect that the end is not yet, and that the Power which works out our good, often does it by ways that appear to our limited vision strangely devious. But if the battles shall destroy his dynasty, and dismember the artificial and cruel Austrian empire which ostensibly initiated all these horrors, and lead to a concord of the nations against such disasters in future, the justice of the Power above all empires will, despite all the misery, again be made plain.
It must no longer be possible for any madman who happens to sit upon a throne to wreak worldwide destruction. Whatever the cost, the peace of the world demands that Germany shall not hereafter be left in a condition to strike the first blow—that she shall not be permitted to keep an army large enough to give the military class the control of the nation, and that for her crimes against International Law she shall be made to bear proper penalties.
The next step to the limitation of her armies will be the limitation of all, and the uniting of them ostensibly, as they are now in reality, as the police force of the world.
It may be a relief to turn from the barbarity of the war to its absurdity. All its conditions are of course heritages from the barbarous past, and the only process of doing away with them is the slow complexity of human progress. Not the least element of that progress is the development of a sense of humor. If everybody felt the supreme ridiculousness of these conditions, they could not stand a year.
Another ridiculous element in the situation is the shortsightedness of capital. The force of the fighting world is in its wealth—directed by its brains. An army is proverbially a monster that crawls upon its belly. Now how long are the brains of the world going to permit its wealth to feed this monster, and leave industry and exchange paralyzed? Yet though those in control of the world’s wealth have not prevented the war, they must have learned that it will pay to devote a good percentage of the wealth to perfecting the machinery for peace which centers at The Hague. That the capitalists have not already taken hold of those agencies, is as little creditable to their sense of their own interests as to their sense of the interests of mankind—and of the ridiculous.
The nations are still in the stage of civilization that individuals were when every man carried a sword, and impromptu fights were matters of course. The first step out of that stage was the organization of the premeditated duel, with its “code of honor.” The next stage was the leaving of quarrels to arbitration and the courts, and the prohibition of individual fights and of carrying weapons to facilitate them.
The nations have lately made rapid progress toward the second stage. Yet International Law, though rapidly growing before Germany’s attack on it, is, so far, nothing but a “code of honor.” It prescribes rules for the conduct of international duels, both for the principals and for neutrals, but, like the code of the duello, it has no sanctions to enforce the rules but public opinion.
Among the most important of these rules is respect of combatants for the peace and independence of neutral states, especially when the neutrality has been specifically guaranteed by the warring states. Another very important rule is that unfortified towns shall not be bombarded, and that to fortified towns twenty-four hours’ notice shall be given, to permit the removal of non-combatants. The military oligarchy who have corrupted and misrepresented the German people, have not attained to, or have fallen from, the stage of civilization needed for the observance of these rules. They invaded Belgium and Luxemburg, and dropped bombs into Antwerp without notice.
In these acts, the Germans have done what they could to destroy the International Law which has been one of the most laborious and most hopeful products of civilization.
All law, local and international, has been made by the most advanced people, and must be guarded by them against the less advanced. Each civilized nation has a police force to guard its national law, but International Law has not yet progressed so far. Yet whatever may have been the origins of the present war, the Germans’ conduct of it has made them international outlaws, and constituted the nations fighting them a police to maintain the law.
Whatever the time and sacrifice involved, whatever other nations may be needed to strengthen the police force, the law must be vindicated, or civilization must go backward generations, and build the law up again.
That a union to develop and enforce International Law may result from the present war, seems among the possible compensations of the waste and misery. The world will have had enough of war, and more than enough, to a degree never before concentrated in as brief a period. In the early and long wars, men had not outgrown the stolid conviction that war was the inevitable and normal condition of the race; and at that stage of the race’s evolution, so it was. But evolution has progressed, men’s—many men’s—ideas are different, and during this unparalleled tragic absurdity, they are going to become still more different, and at an unprecedented rate. Never before did a nation go to war as England now has done, to vindicate, enforce, and preserve what had been evolved of International Law. The German barbarities have made all England’s allies warriors in the same cause, and have opened the eyes of the world, as never before, to its value, its dignity, and, the blood flowing for it is going to add, its sacredness. To the seed planted at The Hague, this blood will be a fertilizing stream, and a growth may be expected that will be a shade and a defence to the nations.