Of course, the reason may be that they have not yet thought of it, and it may be wrong for me to suggest the thing to them. Still, it is queer that it has not been suggested to them by what the pacifists have said concerning the conduct of our army and navy officers and of the inventors and manufacturers of war-materials.
Let us see what the facts actually are:
The inventors and manufacturers of war-materials, and our army and navy officers, by virtue of the study and experience that qualify them for their business or profession better than others, are also qualified better than others to judge what are our actual needs for national defense.
If the manufacturers of war-materials, and our army and navy men, are to be convicted of inciting war on the evidence that by so doing they create a demand for their services, then necessarily others benefited by a like demand may be convicted on the same evidence.
Mr. Andrew Carnegie himself is the greatest of all American armorers. He it was who introduced the Bessemer steel process into the United States, from which all our gun-makers and all our armament-makers have greatly benefited. It is his name and that of Herr Krupp which Neptune reads graven in the walls of fighting-ships. He still draws an income from his interests in the great armor-making steel corporation—an annual income big enough to pay the combined salaries of all the four thousand officers of the United States Army.
Truly, if the discovery of room for a motive proves both the motive and the crime, and is sufficient to convict these four thousand men of being willing to sell their souls in order to raise their salaries a few dollars, Mr. Carnegie himself is at least open to suspicion.
Likewise, the varied and many institutions—incubators of the doves of peace—born of the great armor-maker's generosity, which continue to be his beneficiaries, cannot escape the suspicion that taints their pedigree.
Even the leading man—the principal star on the stage where Uncle Sammy unter Alles is being played—Dr. David Starr Jordan, is paid from the Carnegie Peace Foundation with money equally tainted by the sweaty hands of the grimy men who are forging armor-plate in the Smoky City.
But we all know that Mr. Carnegie is above any such suspicion. We know that the pacifist method of reasoning must be false.
The education of our army and navy officers teaches them not alone military science, but also national devotion and personal honor. Devotion to duty is necessary in order to keep them in the service, under the altogether inadequate pay they receive. The pay of the American army and navy officers is smaller, in proportion to their knowledge and the value of their services, than that of any other class of men in the country. If every army and navy officer should abandon the service for a position in civil life when he could get a raise of wages for so doing, there would not be a corporal's guard left in the service.