"You've said something," Andy replied quietly. "Leaving aside the sordid causes of war, war itself is the most senseless pastime any nation can engage in. There's a confusion of sentiments, a queer mixture of anger and defiance, vindictive cravings for retaliation, and hatreds that civilized men should have outgrown. An ingrowing fever to see your own side win. Once the first gun pops, it doesn't seem to matter why—any more than it matters to two men scrapping what the scrap started over. What each wants is to whip the other. But this particular war—commerce is at the bottom of it. You know it. You're too wise not to know. Struggle for commercial supremacy has started every war since the Crusades, and a few of the dynastic rumpuses. This is a row over property rights, real or potential. And as a member of the propertied class you have a vital interest in it. The bird who started that fuss in front of the Province wasn't so far wrong. He has nothing to fight for—nothing worth fighting for. You have."
"From a purely material point of view, certainly," Rod answered. "But can't you see any more in it than that?"
"Should I?" Andy asked musingly. "Can there be an obligation of service to one's country without one's country assuming some obligation in return? And does one's country assume any obligation toward such men as me? If it does I don't know what it consists of. The man with nothing but his hands has few rights and no privileges. What does the casual worker, the completely propertyless man receive from his country that he should gladly cross the seas to die for it on foreign soil? Can you tell me? I don't think you can. In that sense one doesn't mean one's country geographically. These mountains we call ours will stand unchanged, the forests will grow, the rivers run to the sea, the salmon go up to the spawning grounds, the birds will mate and sing, whether we win or the Germans, or if both sides fight to the last man and the two races expire. So that really one's country means Bill Jones and Sam Smith and Jack Robinson—human society—the national unit. If Sam Smith, by skilful exercise of the acquisitive instinct, acquires ownership of the hills and the forest, and permits me and Bill Jones and Jack Robinson to work for him whenever he can profitably use our labor, and has no responsibility for our welfare at such times as he can't employ and pay us wages, why should we shoot and kill, and be ourselves shot and killed in defense of his hills and forests?
"That," Andy went on in his low, deliberate voice, "is one way of looking at it, one way of putting it. I'm what they call a common worker. So far as I know, my people have never been anything else but workers, tied to a job because they knew nothing else. I've never had anything but a job myself. I've dug up quite a lot of assorted facts and a variety of knowledge out of books between hours on the job. I've done quite a bit of thinking about what I've seen, and heard and read. Every dollar I've ever had, the food I've eaten, the clothes on my back—since I was nine years old I've earned 'em all by sweat and aching flesh. By way of illustration I'll cite the fact—with no personal reflection, you understand—that the Norquay estate employed last year on its timber operations upward of three hundred men. The net profits for the year run over two hundred thousand dollars. That's what your country means to you. But that means nothing to me. I have only myself, my energy, the strength of my arms and a certain skill to sell. And you don't employ me because I'm hungry or need clothes, or because I'm ambitious to better my condition. Oh, no. You don't recognize me as having the slightest claim on you for subsistence. You will only hire me at a wage where my labor can be transformed into cash at a profit to yourself. In slack times I can starve. It doesn't make any difference to you. That attitude and practice is typical of the industrial system of every civilized nation. I present you with the case of the intelligent worker, when he analyzes his situation in and relation to society. I ask you if we, who are the have-nots, should be proud and glad—as they tell us we should be—to die for the perpetuation of this state of affairs?"
Rod had an uncomfortable impression of the perfectly ordered and smoothly moving world he knew being critically examined and condemned by a dispassionate, impartial, and very acute intelligence. As Andy Hall put it, there seemed no bond of common interest, of sentiment, even of common justice to bind them together. Andy did not ask on behalf of his class, nor of himself as an individual, "What is there in it for us?" He only asked in moody accents, "Why should we, who have only the shadow, sacrifice ourselves for those who have the substance?"
Only a sophist could make other than one reply. And Rod was no sophist. He was only an earnest and troubled youngster reacting to the day and hour, according to the best traditions of the best of his class. He felt that there was more to be said on the subject than a laconic answer to Andy's "why?" There must be, or his world was a sham, thriving on social usury, and patriotism was a farce. It did not seem to Rod this could be possible. But he could not voice the thing that was in him. It was an emotional certainty, not a reasoned conviction. And he knew that as an impulsion to act the first was by far the greatest driving force in all men.
"I don't know. A man,—each man—must answer that for himself," he spluttered. "It's like this. We're all in the same boat. If everybody stands on his rights and demands a readjustment of a faulty arrangement of things before he will make a single defensive move—we'll be whipped out of hand. In fact, it looks as if the Germans had us staggering now. And I daresay two thirds of their armies are made up of the working class of Germany—who seem to be quite in accord with their masters' policy of conquest, or they wouldn't put up such a corking fight. If you fellows as a class refuse to meet them at their own game——" he threw out his hands in an eloquent gesture.
"Hell, you think I'm so thick-headed I can't see both sides of the fence?" Andy grunted. "I wasn't speaking for my own class. It's speaking for itself every day—to the recruiting sergeant. I'm speaking to you as a thinking, feeling individual who sees himself being sucked into a whirlpool. I'm trying to point out to you in the most rational manner possible what the real situation is. You can't deny it. It exists. Why, if the bulk, even a working majority of the damn fools that call themselves men, had a few glimmerings of social and economic wisdom there wouldn't be any German or French or Russian or British armies in the field. Only a few handfuls of atavistic adventurers. I'm not by nature a humble, peaceful toiler. I'd just as soon as not fight for anything that's worth fighting for—and all the hard fighting isn't done with guns, either. All my life I've seen the show run by arrogant, power-proud people who aren't nearly so clever as they seem to be. They make a mess of things too often to be really clever. And the rest of us growl and knuckle down to our jobs. We're slaves, not so much to our masters, as to our own inertia, our own lack of intelligence, slaves to the common, well-nourished illusion that to get something for nothing is the solution for all our difficulties. We merit contempt. No one among the well-fed and the cultured who have never soiled their hands with common work has more impatience with the bovine mass than some of us who are of the mass. We lose faith in ourselves and our own kind—but our masters never lose faith in us—in our docility to fetch and carry. They know how to use us without our knowing how it's done. They tell us now that the Germans threaten our lives, our freedom, our country and its cherished institutions. That's true enough. But we risk our lives daily in industry with very much less freedom of choice in the matter than even primitive man had in pursuing his food, clothing, and shelter. What cherished institutions of ours are threatened that we should go five thousand miles to fight in a quarrel between Russians, Germans and French?
"And still," Andy drummed on the polished bar with his finger tips, "in spite of my reasoned convictions I find myself as much of a herd animal as the rest. Logic tells me this row is the same old thing on a larger scale—an affair in which the have-nots will do the fighting as they do the work. But logic doesn't help me where I live, inside of me, when I see fellows I know, fellows I like, getting ready to go. The old tribal instincts that are stronger and deeper than civilization and industry keep stirring up in me, nagging at me. The flag—it's only a symbol. Patriotism, patriotic duty has only a hollow sound when I hear the phrase used. And still—something gets me—I don't know quite what it is—but it's there.
"It's a queer pass for me to come to," he finished whimsically. "Wouldn't it be? Me to go and fight for things and people that I don't believe in? Why should a man find his rational conclusions upset by an emotion he can't define? I stood looking at the Gulf the other day, and I thought how easy it would be for those German cruisers that are reported off the West Coast to start slinging shells in here. And the picture of 'em potting at us made me sort of swell up and get all hot and angry inside. It's illogical and absurd for me to feel that way about what's going on in Europe. And still—there it is. Some of these days I'll find myself in the army headed overseas. And I'll be wondering how in hell I got there. How, I ask you, can a man who thinks as I do, feel the way I do, about this?"