THE WAR STATE
BY
WINTER RUSSELL
The war state stands before us to-day proud and unafraid. It is however self-conscious. To use the figures and similes of Carlisle in his “Characteristics” like Doctor Kitchener, it has a good system. It is not like the Indian war state that knew no other kind of state and therefore didn’t realize that it had a system nor was it like Countryman and “had no system.” The war state to-day has a system and it glories in it. Its rules are God’s laws and man’s vices and crimes are its virtues. It knows its purposes which it says are divine.
Those purposes are first to secure order within, second to make war without. It might almost say that its purpose is to make war without. In no sense of the word does it make war without so that it can keep order within. Its purpose therefore is to make war for it keeps order within so it can better make war without. It might almost say, in fact, it does say that if it did not make war it would have no right to exist. If it doesn’t make war better than another it has no right to exist. It makes war that it may grow, that it may develop, that it may progress, that it may enlarge itself. It ceases from war for the time being only that it may prepare to make war again. War is its health, its vocation. Its provisional peace is its novitiate, its apprenticeship, its years of training. Should it cease to grow and enlarge itself, it would thereby cease to be healthy and true to its main purpose.
An axiom with many people is that the truth or falsity of many if not all contentions can be found by magnifying them or trying to make them universal. If the contention of the world state is valid this axiom would seem to have found its Waterloo, for it is obvious that if the perfect war state is ever achieved it must constantly grow, it must extend its boundaries continuously. When the war state shall have reached its zenith it will fall into the inevitable decay and degeneration that comes with peace, unless it should divide the World state up into tiny and imperfect war states and begin over again the centuries which were spent in warfare, to see from which centre of the globe the new war state shall spread itself. For it is apparent that since war is necessary, a world of peace would almost be worse than no world at all.
If wars cannot come with the inevitableness with which astute ministers try to clothe them they must be consciously and openly caused merely for the sake of having war.
It may be said and it indeed often is that such a conclusion is impossible, that no constantly growing war state can evolve. War’s spokesmen say that power too widespread places the beneficent uses of conflict beyond the reach of the majority of such a state and malign peace causes inner decay. Eternal bloodshed it would appear is the price of national health. And several hostile war states must forever rock progress in its crimson cradle.
This presents to us the other horn of the logical dilemma. All states owe it to themselves and to the world to become thoroughly militarized. Hatred and rivalry must be constantly cherished. Socialism’s dream of an international brotherhood that has beguiled the hearts of many who fear most of its other principles is indeed only a dream to be dispelled when the State’s real function is exercised.
Iron, hinting its own scarcity, must be primarily used for Busy Berthas, submarines and breast piercers. Motor trucks which it was hoped were to be the disseminators of food and strength are to become the swift germs of international disease.
Much of the ever-growing spring of inventive geniuses must be turned from its natural channel of construction to flow through the ways of death and destruction. The works we glory in in times of peace must become the enemies of life. Ships that float upon the bosom of the air deal their horrible and flaming shafts. The dove-like aeroplane becomes the eye of the army dragon.
War states shall build this commerce but to destroy it as children knock down their toy houses. Philanthropists shall attempt to soften and heal the sore spots of society but to see the nations’ statesmen tear and rend the living flesh, leaving ulcers that cannot close for years.
The war state of course has satisfactory reasons for making war for growth and development. It must make war to spread its civilization and destroy other civilizations. There could be no concert or symphony of civilizations properly speaking. Civilizations serve their purposes only as they die and pass away. The myriads of philanthropists, social workers, statesmen and jurists in various states that have not received the gospel of war are not building for all time. They are building primarily to render more glorious the victory of the war state. Artists that create, architects that build are only making structures whose rôle in man’s history is to be noble ruins.
Physicians and scientists shall study man’s body, make warfare upon his unseen enemies, plan and plot the life of health, spend years in study and research, that they may save a few from the plagues of typhoid, of pneumonia, consumption and the other afflictions of man’s body only to see man’s latest death dealing toy destroy in seconds the healthful tissues it has taken years to build. They shall see their systems of sanitation and hygiene fall like a phantom castle in the air. Disorder, rapine and lust shall spread more disease than health boards could cure or prevent in a decade, and last of all they shall find themselves marshalled and arrayed as one of the brigades in the cohorts of death.
The students of sociology and of economic reform will plan and contrive systems of life that shall create and preserve the rights and property of all only to see them swept away as the tidal wave sweeps away a city in its ruthless coming on. Education realizing as it does that its purpose is not only to instruct but to nourish and tutor the soul, to win the mind to love and inspiring thoughts, sees its gentle years made worse than wasted by the hours of passion and hatred that lengthen into weeks, months and years of war. It sees its histories made hateful and horrid with the tales of grief and death. Seeking in some small way to assist the church in its work of winning love for one’s neighbor, it has to place upon its shelves the stories that engender hate and fear. Not the good things that our neighbors have done us but the ill that we have done to them and they have done to us are made the subject of story and glory. Art is conscripted to herald forth the might, majesty and mystery of hell, caparisoned in all the trappings of death’s glitter and brandishing the latest implement of pain. Poetry’s sweet notes become rasping and strident as they reiterate the tales that should only be told or sung by the furies and witches of Hades.
Two thousand years ago we were told that no man could serve two masters and yet the apologists of war tell us with astounding frankness that the morals of the state and of the individual not only can but should be different. Man can at the behest of state, wound, maim, tear, and kill, he may commit rape, robbery, arson and murder and yet be virtuous. He can do this and still be expected to go back to his home and be as noble and loved a rational creature as he was before. While he is doing this and spreading misery, those whom he has left behind for a time or forever are also ennobled and inspired and those to whom he comes, whose villages are crushed by shot and shell and rendered a flaming sacrifice on the altar of war, are taught the power of godlike soldiers. The time will come, however, when we shall realize that man cannot serve not only God and Mammon but he cannot serve God and Mars. Who knows but we are simply awaiting the scientist who shall show the unerring and uninterrupted flood from the horrors of war to the criminal years of peace. The seeds that we sow in the years of hatred and pain bring forth the fruit that fill our prisons and render our normal life so fretful and feverish.
The war state tells its people to forgive and forget, to coöperate, to sacrifice, to be unselfish and yet it says to its people: “You as a unit shall not coöperate, you shall fight, you shall not forgive and forget, you shall cherish revenge and nourish the passion to retaliate. You shall not as a people make sacrifices, you shall take from others and make others sacrifice.” Either Mars or God, must and will at length prevail. The world cannot forever serve them both.
The war state is to its neighbor as the robber is to the unprepared banker. The war state says: “You have had years to prepare for war and you have not prepared. You have put your strength to the uses and arts of peace, you have developed the mind and the spirit of your people and since you have neglected its iron body you must render tribute unto me.” So a robber might say to a bank president: “You have had time to build your vault of steel and install your burglar alarms yet you have not prepared and I have come with my revolver and lantern to deprive you of your well earned gain. I shall deprive you even of the earnings of the poor that have been entrusted to you, for might makes right and force is the power that rules the world.” The pugilist might as well say to the college president: “You have had years to develop your muscles, and to perfect yourself in the art of fisticuff and self-defense and you have neglected it, therefore I shall assume your position and if you like it not I shall give you a knockout blow and drag you from your college office.”
A world of harmony, a world that shall in truth know the music of the spheres will not be known until it becomes a world of forgiveness, of international coöperation and sacrifice. As difficult as it was and long as it took, the modest forgiveness that has marked the relations of the North and South and the wholeness that has blessed that forgiveness and coöperation is an unquestionable witness to the virtue and necessity of applying to peoples and states the same virtues and the same ethics that we apply one to another. We have got to limit not only the war state but the war man. We have got to realize that not only as individuals but as states, we are all members one of another. Nationalism is in its best sense, a virtue just as individualism is in its best sense a virtue. The individual should give to the world the best that is in him and so should the state, but no more can a state give it by making war than can a man by being an enemy of his fellows.
Much of the nationalism that we hear about is worse than useless because it engenders hatred and nourishes pride. Who to-day thinks that Hayne’s ideal was higher than Webster’s? What is there in being a South Carolinian, or of the State of Massachusetts, so important as being a citizen of the United States or what is there about being a citizen of the United States so glorious as being a brother of all mankind?
PEACE THROUGH ECONOMIC PRESSURE
HOW COMMERCE CAN BE AN EFFECTIVE FORCE BEHIND THE WORLD COURT—ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE WORLD COURT CONGRESS IN CLEVELAND ON MAY 14TH
BY
HERBERT S. HOUSTON
DELEGATE TO THE CONGRESS FROM
THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES
The President of the United States has spoken in strong, sane words, in the message to Germany published this morning, and the country will be behind him and with him to a man. In the clear logic of a great mind the distinction is made that no agency of warfare should be employed that, by its own limitations, cannot respect the accepted rules of war. That argument I believe will be accepted by the neutral nations and ultimately by the world. In effect, it is a declaration that if there is to be war it must be conducted according to the rules of the game, according to the rules and limitations which Germany and the other nations of the world have set up through the centuries.