What defense has the average person against being convinced by such sophistry, coming from so eminent a psychologist and philosopher as William James? The conclusion of the average person is: "A great man like him must know better than I, he having made a study of such things." This article was given wide circulation by the Association for International Conciliation. It was also published in McClure's Magazine, and again in the Popular Science Monthly.
Others have said, and are saying, similar silly things about the war against war, but they are not men of such intellectual eminence as was William James. It is true that Dr. David Starr Jordan is a very prominent person, and says things even sillier than anything that William James said, but exactly there is the saving grace of his sayings. Some of his conclusions are so utterly irrational and absurd as to enable a very large number of persons to perceive their falsity, whereas the error is not so easily perceived in such statements as the foregoing quoted from Mr. James.
Let us examine the proposition to make war on war. The only common-sense way to wage war on war is to war against the evils that produce war. To wage war on war, which comes like the visitation of a physician, to cure ills, would be like waging war on the medical profession to cure a decimating pestilence. To arrest the hand of the surgeon in order to save bloodshed is to let the patient die of cancer.
Our Civil War was merely a great surgical operation which removed a malignant cancer from the breast of Columbia. Mars, the old and experienced surgeon, made a good job of it. Columbia's ailment was one that could not be cured by physic, poultice, incantations, or other quack nostrums, which, Mr. James suggested, might have been tried. The patient had to be operated on with the sword, so that the question as to the right or wrong of the Civil War, and as to whether it should have then been fought, and whether, if it had been delayed till now, it should now be fought, depends upon a choice of evils—depends entirely upon whether or not American slavery was a greater evil than the American Civil War.
Two of my brothers were killed in the awful struggle to free the slaves and save the Union. It was worth the price to them, to me, and to the rest of my family; and I am of the opinion that every other family in the country who made a like sacrifice would agree with me that to free four millions of human beings from bondage was worth the price. Emancipation then not only freed four millions, but it saved, between that time and now, more than twenty millions from the yoke and the lash. But, what is still more important, the emancipation of the slaves emancipated their masters also—emancipated all of us, North and South—and raised the proclamation of human equality by our country's fathers from a mockery and a shame to a reality.
If there were men and women and children bought and sold in this country today, you and I, reader, would mix up in the infamous business with gun and sword, and we would not wait long to do much voting about it, either. "Great national problems," said Bismarck, "are solved not by speeches and resolutions of majorities, but by blood and iron."
It is very evident that it would have been wrong in 1860 for some powerful external force, waging war against war, to have prevented the Civil War, and thereby have prevented the emancipation of the slaves.
It is all very well at this time to prate about the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the differences between the North and South before the Civil War broke out. That is exactly what was tried. Even after the war broke out, Lincoln, one of the greatest men that America ever produced, tried with all his might to do that very thing. War was the only way.
A very large percentage of the wars of the world have been waged for freedom—have been wars for justice, and against tyranny. To war against such wars would be to war for tyranny, and against freedom and justice. Actually, those who today are recruiting for the war against war are asking you to enlist in a campaign to shackle the hands of the oppressed in future years, and tie them down with ball and chain to prevent them from striking for liberty. They are to be denied the right of war for freedom, which was our right in the Revolution.
Every man exerts a positive influence either for good or for evil. If the advocates of disarmament and non-resistance are exerting a good influence, then I am exerting a bad influence, and every advocate of armed defense is a worker of evil. You, reader, must judge between us.