The first pleasant illusion was that modern progress had made war impossible, at least war between the great nations of the earth, which, profiting by the examples we had set them, enjoyed more or less free governments, where production mounted from year to year, where wealth was ever increasing. Destiny plainly meant more and more iron dug from the ground and turned into steel machinery, larger, more powerful automobiles, taller and taller buildings, swifter and swifter elevators, more and more capacious freight cars, and destiny would not tolerate stopping all this for the insanity of destruction.
Moreover—how good were the ways of Progress—the ever increasing mastery over the forces of nature which had been fate's latest and best gift to humanity, approaching a sort of millennium of machinery, while creating vaster engines of industry had brought into being more and monstrous weapons of warfare.
Life with benignant irony was making man peaceful in spite of himself. His bigger and bigger cannon, his more and more lethal explosives were destroying his capacity for destruction. War was being hoist by its own petard. The bigger the armies, the more annihilating the shells piled up in the arsenals, the less the chance of their ever being used.
Progress, infinitely good toward man, had found a way out of war, the plague that had blighted the earth since the beginning. What religion could not do, the steel foundries and the chemical laboratories had done. They had made war too deadly to be endured. In effect they had abolished it. Peace was a by-product of the Bessemer oven and the dye vat. Man's conquest of himself was an unconsidered incident of his conquest of nature.
Then there were the costs of war. Progress had done something more than make fighting intolerably destructive of men and cities; it had made it intolerably destructive of money. Even if we would go to war, we could not since no nation could face the vast expenditures.
Two little wars of brief duration, the Boer War and the Balkan War, had left great debts to be paid and had brought in their train financial disturbances affecting the entire world. A European war would destroy immensely more capital and involve vastly greater burdens. No nation with such a load on its shoulders could meet the competition of its peace keeping rivals for the world's trade. No government in its senses would provoke such consequences, and governments were, of course, always in their senses.
You did not have to accept this as an act of faith; you could prove it. Shells, thanks to Progress, cost so many hundreds of dollars each. Cannon to fire them cost so many thousands of dollars each and could only be used a very few times. Armies such as the nations of Europe trained, cost so much a day to feed and to move. The demonstration was perfect. Progress had rendered war virtually impossible.
If in spite of all a war between great modern nations did start, it could last only a few weeks. No people could stand the strain. Bankruptcy lay at the end of a short campaign. A month would disclose the folly of it, and bring the contestants to their senses; if it did not, exhaustion would. Credit would quickly disappear. Nations could not borrow on the scale necessary to prolong the struggle.
The wisest said all these things as governments began to issue orders of mobilization in 1914. Emperors were merely shaking their shining armor at each other. There would be no war. It was impossible. The world had progressed too far. Anachronistic monarchies might not know it, but it had. Their armies belonged as much to the past as their little titles, as all the middle-age humbug of royalty, their high-wheeled coaches, their out-riders in their bright uniform, their debilitating habit of marrying cousins, their absurdities about their own divine rights. They had armies, as they wore upturned mustachios, to make themselves look imposing. They were as unreal as the pictured kings in children's story books or on a deck of cards. Forces mightier than they had settled forever the question of war.
And when hostilities actually began an incredulous America knew they would be over in three months. Anybody with a piece of paper and a pencil could prove that they could not last. It took all of Kitchener's prestige to persuade society that the fighting would keep on through the winter, and his prediction that it would continue three years was received as the error of a reporter or the opinion of a professional soldier who overlooked the economic impossibility of a long war.