Defenseless America

by Hudson Maxim

A DANGEROUS CRIMINAL CLASS?

"Probably the most curious feature of the naval program is the regularity with which the sky clouds over as the day for the consideration of naval appropriations approaches. Year after year, after a long spell of pleasant weather, all at once storm clouds have drifted across the heavens, international relations have become suddenly strained, and the whole land has lain in the shadow of an impending conflict. Fortunately, the storm blows over as soon as the votes are counted, and in the beautiful sunlight which follows the storm, workmen are seen constructing additional battleships. Suspicious persons have occasionally imagined they saw a connection between the international weather and the Navy League."

Dr. Charles E. Jefferson.

"It is criminal that we should expend vast sums on warships and armament on the advice of interested parties alone...."

"War scares are heard the world over. The world over they are set going by wicked men for evil purposes."

Dr. David Starr Jordan, "War and Waste."

The pacifists have delved out of the infinite latency a very startling alleged truth, which they are effulging in language of lavish luminosity, to the effect that it is necessary only for a man to have a pecuniary interest or personal advantage involved in order to commit any kind of crime. They have discovered that room for a motive establishes the motive and proves the crime. They have discovered that those things which we call integrity and honor and conscience are no deterrents whatsoever to the commission of the most heinous offense against one's fellow men, so long as there is profit in it. They believe that, if only there is money in the game, an inventor or manufacturer or merchant will scheme for the commission of wholesale poisoning, maiming, and murder. They believe that the inventors and manufacturers of guns necessarily foster war in order to promote the sale of their wares. They surmise that inventors and manufacturers of smokeless powders and high explosives are capable of standing with the "black hand," capable of being gladdened at the dynamite outrage, at the street riot, at the slaughter of song-birds—anything that will consume dynamite or burn gunpowder.

According to the pacifists, the principal lay of makers of war-materials is to connive with the officers of the Army and Navy to stir up international dissension and foment war, in order to create a demand for their products. The pacifists believe that army and navy officers are only too willing to co-operate in the nefarious business, because war brings higher pay and rapid promotion. They believe that it matters not to these "interested parties" how many of their countrymen are sacrificed on the firing line, or how many widows and orphans are made. The groans of the wounded and dying on the battle-field, and the lamentations in the desolated home, are music to the ears of those who supply the war-materials; for, with every shot from a rifle, fifty grains of gunpowder are burned, while bullets enough miss their mark to equal the weight of each man they kill. Consequently, there is substantial profit to the cartridge-maker and the gunpowder-manufacturer for every man killed with a rifle ball.

But it is in shrapnel and the ammunition for the big guns that the greatest profit lies. Field-guns fire away ammunition costing from ten to twenty dollars a shot, at the rate of from twenty to forty shots a minute. This costs a lot of money. At the battle of Mukden, in the Russo-Japanese war, one battery of eight guns fired 11,159 rounds, or 1,395 rounds per gun. Think of the expense of that ammunition, and the profit to the manufacturers! It is estimated that when the big naval guns are fired, the cost of the smokeless-powder charge, the projectile and bursting charge, together with the wear and tear of the gun, amounts to more than $2,000 a shot, and the damage done to a warship hit may be many millions.

Look at it any way you will, war, according to the pacifist notion, is a real Klondike for manufacturers of war-materials. The peace sophists have been able to put two and two together, with the conclusions that such an opportunity for profit is too strong for human nature to resist, and that, as they have found room for the motive, they have proved the crime.

Of course, their accusation is a pretty severe arraignment of human nature, after all these years of civilization and Christian enlightenment.

It is strange how human nature can have improved so much lately, as claimed by the pacifists, and how the spirit of brotherhood and good-will can have suddenly become so dominant that the peoples of the earth now despise war, and are so afflicted with the horrors of it that, just as soon as the great European War is over, they are not going to fight any more, while still the makers of war-materials remain in the primitive savagery of the stone age. It seems to me that, if human nature has so improved as to be an efficient bar to a nation against waging war for plunder, regardless of the advantage and the profit, it ought also to be a similar bar to inventors and manufacturers of war-materials, and to army and navy officers, against precipitating war for pecuniary or personal advantage.

But, according to pacifist reasoning, those "interested parties" are more endowed with the spirit of the hyena than with the spirit of brotherhood. Perhaps, however, the manufacturers of war-materials, and army and navy officers, were not home when the great improvement in human nature knocked at their door.

If considerations of mere personal profit are sufficient to make the best of us foster war, which the peace fanatics esteem wholesale murder, it is strange that the inventors and manufacturers of drugs and medicines, the proprietors of drugstores, and the medical profession and undertakers, do not form a league and co-operate in spreading infectious diseases, in order to create a greater demand for their wares and for their services.