Then came Foch, the professional soldier. Study for nearly ten thousand students was suspended; a holiday was proclaimed; a great assembly was called; and here, with speech and song and academic garb, with national colors mingling and waving palms, the laurel wreath was placed upon the soldier’s brow. And this University, founded in the name of the Prince of Peace, dedicated to Christian life and learning, crowned the profession of arms as it can crown no other profession, and gave its highest sanction to bloody war.
I do not fail of gratitude to Foch. I only stand in horror that he is, and had to be. I would have had the Nation at the pier to meet him, but clothed in sackcloth, and every citizen with ashes on his head. I, too, would have suspended study and work everywhere for an hour; and, stretching crape across the Arctic Circle till the sign of mourning hid Matamoras and Cape Sable, I would have called an assembly of the continent, and begged this half of the hemisphere to cry, “O God, the foolishness and futility of war!”
The Duty to Dig is older than the practice of war. It was designed to prevent war; and to-day it is the only biological remedy certain to cure war. I must not stop here to explain its therapeutics as applied to war, for I am dealing with another theme. But just before the war broke upon the world, I wrote an editorial for a paper I was serving, advocating that a hive of my bees be sent to the German Emperor and one also to the war lord of Austria. I had extra hives for the British Prime Minister, the Tiger of France, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt. If I could have interested these gentlemen, and a few others, in bee-keeping, I could save the world from war.
The editorial and the offer of bees were both rejected by the careful editor. “I must stay strictly neutral,” was his timid excuse. At the very time I was writing, the Reverend Price Collier, a former Hingham preacher, was publishing a book called “Germany and the Germans,” in which he set forth the old theory of military preparedness as a preventive of war. Speaking of the German army (this was in 1913), he says:
It is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is a necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race; it is essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany together; it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people confidence; the poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps the level of social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the service of their country; it keeps the peace in Europe; and until there is a second coming of a Christ of pity and patience and peace, it is as good a substitute for that far-off divine event as puzzled man has to offer.
It is a minister of the Gospel who makes this profound observation. But it sounds like our present Secretary of War, a banker, and like our present Commanding General, a professional soldier. Here is sure proof that the human race cannot learn the essential things, and so, is doomed.
But I wish I might try my bees. This old hoax of preventing war by preparing men to fight has been so often tried! And we are at it again. But no nation has tried my simple and inexpensive substitute of bees and plough-shares, and pruning hooks. They have tried, from time out of memory, to beat their swords and spears into garden tools, but a sword makes a mighty poor ploughshare. It has never been successfully done. The manufacturing process is wrong. It takes the temper out of good garden steel first to heat it in the fires of war. We must reverse the process: turn the virgin metal into garden steel first, and give every man a hoe, and a ploughshare, and a pruning hook; then he will never have need for sword and spear.
III
Instead of universal military training, I would advocate a hive of bees for everybody, or a backyard garden. A house should have both lawn and garden, even though the gooseberries crowd the house out to the roadside, where the human house instinctively edges to see the neighbors in their new pony-coats go by. Let my front door stand open; while over the back stoop the old-fashioned roses and the grape-vines draw a screen.
But give me a house with a yard rather than a hole in the wall, a city tenement, or a flat. The whole trend of society is toward the city, or camp, military, rather than agricultural. The modern city is a social camp. Life is becoming a series of mass movements, military maneuvers, at the command of social leaders. Industry has long been militarized both in form and spirit, and is rapidly perfecting its organization. Today, 1923, there are more than a hundred different automobile manufacturing concerns in this country. Only those capable of “quantity production” will survive. Already the manufacturers see the entire industry reduced to five different concerns. This is strictly military, the making of society into a vast, and vaster machine, which, too great at last for control, will turn upon and crush its makers.