The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

We prepared for peace and we have had peace. The whole history of our country has been, in the main, a history of peace. Since 1789, a hundred and twenty-one years ago, only three foreign wars have interrupted our progress, and they lasted, all told, less than eight years. For the other one hundred and thirteen years our swords have been plowshares, our spears have been pruning-hooks, the fine steel of our young manhood has been devoted to those useful activities which do not destroy, but feed and save. If we can thus live and grow to be one of the mightiest nations on earth by the policy of peace, why this sudden spasm of military preparation now retarding our genuine development!

But we have become “a world power” men say, and some of the nations might attack us! Why should they? Never since we became a republic have we been attacked, though for decades and decades our navy was a negligible quantity. “But suppose Germany should land a hundred thousand soldiers on our Atlantic coast,” some man shrieked out recently. Why should she? Sane people deal with probabilities, not with wild and imaginary possibilities. If Germany wanted to attack us, why did she not do it in those years when we had no navy at all worth mentioning? We buy millions and millions of dollars worth of goods every year “made in Germany.” Does Germany wish to fight one of her best customers? If some man who keeps a meat-market has a customer who comes in every day to order chops or a steak for his lunch and a roast of beef or a leg of lamb for his dinner, does the butcher want to beat that customer over the head with a musket? Any one can see the absurdity of it! Is folly any the less folly when raised to the nth power by being made international?

So much for Germany! As for England, she ruled the sea for all those decades when we had no navy worth considering and she never thought of attacking us. Why should she fight the people of her own race and language whose commercial interests are so closely interwoven with her own economic life? France is our traditional and hereditary friend. No other nation on that side of the globe need be taken into our calculation. What a nightmare it is which sets us to building ten million dollar warships for fear some respectable neighbor might attack us!

But there is Japan! At the very hour when ten thousand Japanese boys and girls were singing songs of welcome along the streets to the officers and men of the American fleet, when the whole empire from the officials of high rank down to the jinrikisha men in the street was showing its cordial good-will to the representatives of our country, an excitable young man, who owes his fame to the fact that he did one brave deed at Santiago and was thenceforth miscellaneously kissed by a lot of impressionable women—this excitable young man was rushing about saying, “War with Japan is inevitable!” And here on the Pacific coast recently a tired, sick, disappointed old man, an admiral in the navy, said to a bunch of newspaper reporters who wanted something yellow to fill up the front page, “Japan could tear this coast to ribbons in sixty days!” He made this thoughtless deliverance at the very time when the ink on the notable agreement entered into by President Roosevelt and the emperor of Japan was scarcely dry! The thoughtful people of both nations smiled and then mourned over his foolish word. Germany, England, France, Japan, these four are the only nations on the globe that we need take into such a consideration! How absurd to be imposing upon the toiling people the useless burden of expensive armament against these neighbors.

But “we have colonies now and we must defend them—there are the Philippines!” Who wants the Philippines? Nobody! They have been, as all the world knows, an expensive and troublesome burden. We have already spent several hundreds of millions of dollars upon that undertaking, and the end is not yet. We could well afford to pay any country fifty millions of dollars to take them off our hands. But this is not the way national business is transacted. We found ourselves with the Philippines in our possession, contrary to the wish and judgment of many of us at the time, and now by an expenditure of these hundreds of millions of dollars upon schools and churches, upon better government, public improvements, and economic development, we have been trying to do our duty by that backward people. But nobody wants to fight us to get the Philippines. “They can be left out over night,” as Dr. Jefferson said in New York, “without the slightest anxiety on our part.” We certainly do not need to increase our military expenditures three hundred per cent to prevent some nation from robbing us of that precious colony.

There are enemies against which we do need to arm ourselves! Not England and Germany, not France and Japan—no, the common enemies of hunger and cold, pain and disease, ignorance and vice, greed and graft, unemployment and inequitable distribution! Against these enemies we do need to arm. These alien elements are the dangerous foes of the republic, and they have landed their devastating forces upon our shores. Against them we must enlist; against them we must build the best armaments which statesmanship can devise and generous treasuries provide. And in that great and honorable warfare against the real enemies of human well-being the exalted Leader of our race, the One whose name written above every name is called the Prince of Peace, will march at the head of the advancing host.

Not only the costliness, but the futility of this burdensome armament smites us in the face when we begin to think. Some years ago in Russia, a man named Jean Bloch began to write about war. He was not a dreamy sentimentalist; he was a banker and the administrator of a great railroad system. He had been studying war upon its scientific and economic side. He advanced the argument that the introduction of long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder made decisive engagements between large bodies of troops impossible; and thus made useless the appeal to arms as a mode of settling international disputes.

A small force of men securely entrenched can now hold at bay indefinitely a mighty army. When men could safely march up within two or three hundred yards of earthworks, fortified positions were sometimes carried by the assault of a superior force. All this is now changed. The zone of fire today extends for more than a mile. Across that space the man behind the earthworks can shoot with marvelous accuracy fifteen to twenty-five bullets per minute. Smokeless powder keeps the zone of deadly fire clear, so that he can see how to shoot. The field is not obscured by smoke as it was when Longstreet made his advance at Gettysburg. Smokeless powder and the recently invented noiseless rifle make it impossible to locate the foe either by sight or by sound—men simply drop dead as they undertake to advance across that zone of fire which extends for a mile. The effect of all this upon the morale of an army undertaking to carry a fortified position by assault is instantly apparent. Such attempts are now things of the past.

Jean Bloch had scarcely published his argument when the South African war came on to demonstrate the essential soundness of his main conclusions. The British empire was making war upon two little republics numbering all told, men, women, and children, about eighty thousand people—less than enough to provide inhabitants for some third-rate city. Imagine some unimportant city of eighty thousand people undertaking to wage war with England! Yet with all the resources of her army and navy, with the treasury drawn upon at the rate of a million dollars a day, with Lord Roberts in the field, and with the splendid courage of her best troops matched against the scanty numbers of the opposing forces, the Boers held out against Great Britain for nearly three years.

It was a bitter experience for England. It burdened her with an increase of debt under which she staggers in her present industrial depression. It hastened the death of the good Queen Victoria. It brings an apologetic note into the voice of almost every Englishman one meets today when he refers to it, and yet it was the British empire against eighty thousand people. Imagine what it would have been in costliness and in futility had she been trying to overcome an equal! Picture the folly of England trying to overcome Germany, or of France trying to conquer the United States. Jean Bloch was right, and many of Europe’s wisest statesmen are openly endorsing his claim. They are using the sensible argument of this business man to stem this tide of militarism now sweeping across the face of Christendom.