The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

Artillery has become all but useless against modern fortifications. Plevna told us that, thirty years ago. The Russian general, Todleben, said of that campaign, “We would bombard Plevna for a whole day and kill perhaps a single Turk.” The South African war repeated the same sentiment with a loud “amen.” The correspondents on the English side reported, “We bombarded Cronje for a solid week and after the struggle was over we found he had lost in all that time less than a hundred men.”

The costly operations of modern warfare, when a fleet can fire away fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ammunition in a few minutes and when armies in the field run up bills correspondingly great, impose burdens which lift the luxury of such performances out of the reach of all but the well-to-do nations. When the old-time fighters used battle-axes and broadswords, they could go out and hew Agag in pieces before the Lord as long as the strength of their right arms and the supply of Agags held out—they could do this indefinitely without entailing any serious expense upon their countries. But the costly weapons now in vogue, with their voracious appetites for expensive ammunition, make war another matter.

Even these terrible outlays might be borne by the powerful nations for a brief period, but the inability of any large army to win a speedy and decisive victory over another would cause the campaigns to drag along until the economic resources of both parties to the struggle would be taxed beyond limit and thus the futility of the appeal to arms would again be demonstrated. All this has become so apparent that some of the wisest statesmen in Europe are insisting that war between great nations of approximately equal strength has become, on the face of it, such an absurdity as to make such an event in the highest degree improbable.

In the city of Lucerne, on the shore of that lovely lake with the Rigi and Pilatus rising up in front, Jean Bloch caused to be erected a “Museum of Peace and War.” He knew that abstract arguments are sometimes weak where visible, tangible facts are strong in their power of appeal. He provided for exhibits of the various forms of armament from arrow-heads and primitive tomahawks down to Mauser rifles and Krupp cannon. He has shown how complete defenses may be made where barbed wire obstacles are stretched across that deadly zone which extends for more than a mile in front of the fortified spot—obstacles which men can neither cut nor pass under fire. He has shown the penetrative power of modern bullets. Napoleon used to say bluntly, “A boy will serve to stop a bullet as well as a man.” But neither boy nor man stops the bullet from one of these modern rifles, it goes right on in its bloody career. Experts had calculated that a rifle bullet from a Mauser gun would pierce fifteen thicknesses of cowhide, a hardwood plank three inches thick, and then go through a dozen more inch boards placed at intervals. I saw there in that museum the results of the test—the bullet pierced the cowhide, the three-inch plank, and went through sixteen inch boards, lodging in the seventeenth. Army men say that a bullet with force enough to pierce an inch board will kill a man. With such penetrative force any one can see the deadly effect of these long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder. It takes away some of the glamour and romance from the terrible business of war to have its appliances thus scientifically exhibited.

In that same museum at Lucerne, where the exhibits of deadly weapons are educating thousands of tourists from all the nations of earth as they come and go, year by year, other exhibits show the increase of international arbitration as a means of determining differences. Within the last ten years eighty of these arbitration treaties have been signed, our own country being a party to more than a third of them all. There is a growing and an insistent demand in all the enlightened nations of the earth for an international judiciary. Men have come to see that this costly international dueling does not really settle anything. A few men have to sit down finally around a table somewhere and determine what shall stand. And as statesmen get their eyes open they will more and more insist that this shall be done before the costly and futile experiments in killing men take place rather than afterward.

The great arbitrations of history might certainly be made as conspicuous in our schools, in the press, and in literature as the great battles. Beside that volume bound in red, “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” there ought to stand another more significant volume bound in white and gold, “Fifty Decisive Arbitrations of the World.” Let the church and the university join hands in helping the people of our country to realize that when the final estimates are made up, it will not be “Blessed are the warmakers,” but “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” How mighty would be the influence of the thirty millions of professing Christians in our own land in shaping public opinion, in determining our national policy, could their hearts be really fired with the magnificent principles and the passion for human well-being which possessed the heart of the Prince of Peace!

There is a growing unwillingness among the nations to discount their futures by killing off large numbers of their bravest and most patriotic young men in war. David Starr Jordan’s two familiar principles are absolutely sound: “The blood of a nation determines its history,” and “The history of a nation determines its blood.” The truth of the first statement we see at a glance, for the blood, the inner life-quality, of any nation shapes its history. And the second statement is equally true; if the history of a nation is stained by incessant warfare, if generation after generation consents to the destruction of those courageous, virile young men whose hearts respond readily to the call for heroic sacrifice, such a history eliminates from the blood of that nation those very elements which it sorely needs.

It cost us the lives of half a million men to abolish slavery and to keep our country whole. If that result was to be secured in no other way, men who love liberty and love the Union may say that the price was not too great for such unspeakable benefits. But we know that the nation today is less able to grapple with its present problems, with the greed and the graft, with the fraud and the lust which confront us, because of the loss of those brave men and of the children they might have reared, bequeathing to them their own heroic spirit, had their lives been lived out in peaceful industry. They went down cheerily to die at Shiloh and Chancellorsville, at Antietam and Gettysburg, but the nation to this hour feels the loss of such a priceless heritage of public spirit and uncalculating heroism. The serious-minded nations are becoming ever more reluctant to make such costly sacrifices for the sake of the doubtful advantage of a great war.

In the growth of international agreements, in the gradual advance of what might be called international litigation before courts of arbitration replacing the barbarous methods of slaughter and conquest, in the steady increase of that good understanding and mutual good-will promoted by travel and the interchange of products, by fellowship in the work of science and education and through the joys of sharing responsibility in the cause of philanthropy and religion—in these vast movements of thought and feeling lies the hope of that better day when peace shall hold an undisputed sway. The nineteenth century, by steam and telegraph, by increased travel and the ready exchange of commodities, made the whole world a neighborhood. It is for the twentieth century, by the permeation of international intercourse with finer principles and a nobler spirit, to make the whole world a brotherhood.

It is the duty of right-minded, honest-hearted people everywhere to use their utmost endeavors to maintain and increase that body of good feeling out of which shall issue this higher type of international life. To such proportions has this sentiment already grown, that if these four nations, England, Germany, France, and the United States, were to make arbitration before a properly constituted international court the method of their dealing with one another, the other Latin, Slavic, and Oriental countries would find themselves powerless against this mighty tide setting ever in the direction of the determination of all differences by the more rational method.