We have as a heritage of our military past, not a sense of the grim tragedy of war, but traditions which award the highest meed of personal glory to the warrior. The roster of the world's heroes contains two classes of names—great soldiers and great altruists. Poet and orator and populace unite to do honor to him who was not afraid to fight and to die for his home, his king, his liberty, his country, his convictions. Bravery has ever won its laurel crown, for an instinct within us applauds physical courage and aggressiveness. And the gilded uniform and clanking sword, the drumbeat and the bugle call, the camp fire and the "far-flung battle line," stand as the most dramatic expressions of a deep sentiment, primitive and thrilling.
Akin to this martial hero worship is the argument that success in war gives training for the higher contests of peace. Out of the war of 1776 the nation took George Washington for President; out of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor; out of the Civil War, General Grant; out of the Spanish War, Theodore Roosevelt. The badge of the Grand Army of the Republic is a certificate of merit. The cross of the Legion of Honor opens the door to social and political and business prosperity. Battle is regarded as a supreme test of sturdy manhood, and the harsh discipline of the camp as education for the finer arts of the council. War creates a heroism which later devotes itself to spiritual ends.
Moreover, say the advocates, the interests of class require force for their conservation. The hereditary nobility of Europe was founded by military process for military purposes, and, with the passing of war, loses its warrant for existence. On the other hand, it is claimed that the under classes may come into the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, common to all humanity, only by means of the sword. Witness the peasantry of Russia! Even in America so great a prophet as Henry Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who freely predict, even for our democratic land, a desperate rebellion of a proletariat of poverty against an aristocracy of wealth.
Finally, the demands of national egoism are urged in behalf of war. For example, Japan needs new territory for her growing millions and must assume the conqueror's rôle. Or France goes mad with the lust of empire and goes forth untamed until the day of Waterloo. Or Great Britain must have new markets; and, falsely reasoning that trade follows the flag, and the flag follows the bayonet, she seizes a realm upon which the sun may never set. Or the interests of white men and yellow men, of black men or red men, clash; and then the cannon must be the final test, might must make right, and the strongest must survive. The greed of territorial aggrandizement, the spirit of national adventure, the longing for commercial supremacy, the honor of a country, the pride of racial achievement—each is urged to justify the necessity for bloodshed and carnage. Such are the arguments of the advocates of war.
To balance these, the advocates of peace plead four greater considerations: against personal glory, the economic cost of militarism; against the moral education of war, the higher heroism of peace; against class interests, the sanctity of human life; and against national egoism, the deeper spirit of national altruism.
A single modern battleship costs more than the combined value of the property and endowment of all the colleges of a certain great state. Two thirds of the money passing through the treasury of the Republic goes to the support of the military system. Computing two hundred dollars a year as the average loss to society occasioned by the withdrawal of each soldier and sailor from productive toil, and adding this sum to the war budgets of the nations for the past fifty years, we obtain a total of billions, beyond the reach of all imagination. The money which armies, navies, wars, and pensions have cost the world in fifty years would have installed in China a system of education equal to that of the United States; would have transformed the arid deserts of India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings. The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce pauperism, elevate the peasantry of Europe, lighten taxation, and work an economic revolution.
The argument for moral education mistakes national gratitude to warriors for tribute to the training of the camp. But grant that war develops the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war; it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities and powers and rulers of the world-darkness calls forth the maximum powers of manhood. Wendell Phillips stands in the ranks of heroes as high as Philip Sheridan. The moral loss from war transcends the moral gain.
Yet war levies toll more tragic than any toll of dollars, more appalling than any moral cost. A famous painting reveals the world's conquerors, Xerxes, Cæsar, Alexander, Napoleon, and a lesser host, mounted proudly on battle steeds, caparisoned with gorgeous trappings; but the field through which they march is paved with naked, mutilated corpses, the ghastly price of glory. The trenches at Port Arthur were filled level-full with the bodies of self-sacrificed martyrs, and upon this gruesome slope the final charges were made. Stripped of all sentiment, war is organized and wholesale murder, a savage and awful paradox which proclaims the shallowness of civilization. Said General Sherman: "Only those who have never heard a shot, only those who have never heard the shrieks of the wounded nor the groans of the dying, can cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." God grant the world may soon heed the Voice, sounding down from the solemnity of Sinai, laying the divine command upon each man and each nation: "Thou shalt not kill!"
There yet remains the ethical argument for peace. Will any one say that the supreme duty of altruism is binding upon men as individuals, and not binding upon the same men acting conjointly as a nation? When the people and the statesmen of one nation are able to put themselves in the places of the statesmen and of the people of another nation; when there is a common will to do international justice rather than to despise the weaker country; when not selfish interest alone, but the greatest good of the greatest number, becomes the driving impulse of humanity; when the thrill of fraternity crosses geographical lines and pauses not on the shores of the seas—then war will be impossible, the energies of the world will turn to the constructive arts, and from the midst of contentment unshadowed by hunger, from prosperity unmenaced by want, in the peaceful spirit of the Christ, the world will sing:
"The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star is brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face, a kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves, and travel downward to dust of graves.
Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: blind creeds and kings have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path: our hope is in the aftermath.
Our hope is in heroic men, star-led to build the world again.
To this Event the ages ran: Make way for Brotherhood—make way for man."