Fighting for peace

by Henry Van Dyke

In effect, the United States is a pacific nation of fighting men.

What was it, then, that forced such a nation into a conflict of arms?

It was the growing sense that the very existence of this war was a crime against humanity, that it need not and ought not to have been begun, and that the only way to put a stop to it was to join the Allies, who had tried to prevent its beginning, and who are still trying to bring it to the only end that will be a finality.

It was also the conviction that the Monroe Doctrine, so far from being an obstacle, was an incentive to our entrance. The real basis of that doctrine is the right of free peoples, however small and weak, to maintain by common consent their own forms of government. This Germany and Austria denied. The issue at stake was no longer merely European. It was worldwide.

The Monroe Doctrine could not be saved in one continent if its foundation was destroyed in another. The only way to save it was to broaden it.

The United States, having grown to be a World Power, must either uphold everywhere the principles by which it had been begotten and made great or sink into the state of an obese, helpless parasite. Its sister republics would share its fate.

But more than this: it was the flagrant and contemptuous disregard of all the principles of international law and common humanity by the Imperial German Government that alarmed and incensed us. The list of crimes and atrocities ordered in this war by the mysterious and awful power that rules the German people—which I prefer to call, for the sake of brevity and impersonality, the Potsdam gang—is too long to be repeated here. The levying of unlawful tribute from captured cities and villages; the use of old men, women, and children as a screen for advancing troops; the extortion of military information from civilians by cruel and barbarous methods; the burning and destruction of entire towns as a punishment for the actual or suspected hostile deeds of individuals, and the brutal avowal that in this punishment it was necessary that "the innocent shall suffer with the guilty" (see the letter of General von Nieber to the burgomaster of Wavre, August 27, and the proclamation of Governor-General von der Goltz, September 2, 1914); the introduction of the use of asphyxiating gas as a weapon of war (at Ypres, April 22, 1915); the poisoning of wells; the reckless and needless destruction of priceless monuments of art like the Cathedral of Reims; the deliberate and treacherous violation of the Red Cross, which is the sign of mercy and compassion for all Christendom; the bombardment of hospitals and the cold-blooded slaughter of nurses and wounded men; the sinking of hospital ships with their helpless and suffering company—all these, and many other infamies committed by order of the Potsdam gang made the heart of America hot and angry against the power which devised and commanded such brutality. True, they were not, technically speaking, crimes directed against the United States. They did not injure our material interests. They injured only our souls and the world in which we have to live. They were vivid illustrations of the inward nature of that German Kultur whose superiority, the German professors say, "is rooted in the unfathomable depths of its moral constitution." (Deutsche Reden in Schwerer Zeit, II, p. 23.)

But there were two criminal blunders—or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them two series of obstinate and stupid offenses against international law—by which the Potsdam gang directly assailed the sovereignty and neutrality of the United States and forced us to choose between the surrender of our national integrity and a frank acceptance of the war which Germany was waging, not only against our principles and interests, but against the things which in our judgment were essential to the welfare of mankind and to the existence of honorable and decent relations among the peoples of the world.

The first of these offenses was the cynical and persistent attempt to take advantage of the good nature and unsuspiciousness of the United States for the establishment of an impudent system of German espionage; to use our territory as a base of conspiracy and treacherous hostilities against countries with which we were at peace; and to lose no opportunity of mobilizing the privileges granted by "these idiotic Yankees" (quotation from the military attache of the Imperial German Embassy at Washington)—including, of course, the diplomatic privilege—to make America unconsciously help in playing the game of the Potsdam gang.

The second of these offenses was the illegal, piratical submarine warfare which the Potsdam gang ordered and waged against the merchant shipping of the world, thereby destroying the lives and the property of American citizens and violating the most vital principle of our steadfast contention for the freedom of the sea.