Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association

by Intercollegiate Peace Association

But are they right? Does war make for national greatness? Before we can give a rational verdict we must answer certain other questions. What is our nation, anyway? What are the factors that make for its greatness? And how does war affect these factors?

Plainly our nation is not some abstraction that haunts the marble halls at Washington. Nor is it our vast dominion on which, like England's, the sun never sets. You will find it rather in workshop and store and factory; it is no more nor less than our men. If the capital at Washington is founded on pygmy manhood, it will be blown away like thistledown before some passing wind of revolution. Russia, Turkey, Spain, will tell you that. If our men are giants, the nation will be lasting as adamant. England and Germany and America are monumental testimonies.

Now what are the qualities in our men that make the nation great?

Here a problem in analysis confronts us. Let us go about it as does the student in the laboratory. He dissects a plant or mineral to find the mysteries of its nature. We are to dissect a civilization to find the factors of its strength. One little specimen will reveal the secrets of the whole species. So one sample of civilization will show the hidden springs of all. Go with me to the public square of any modern city and there you will behold the qualities that build all civilization. From the hum and rattle and roar that rises from the sea of humanity come a thousand various voices, but all speak of one theme—industry. There in the center of the throng and press a slender monument rises, crowned perhaps with a figure of Liberty or Justice. It tells you a simple story of Idealism. Yonder stands a silent, vine-clad church, crowned by a mighty finger pointing heavenward and beckoning always to the higher life. What need of going farther? Industry, Idealism, Morality—already we have found the secret of human success, the triple key to all advance, of man or group or nation. Here is Carlyle, with his gospel of labor, the labor that conquers all things; here is Ruskin, with his exalting idealism, that gives an aim and purpose to all human toil; here is the great apostle Paul himself, who transfigures that toil and exalts that purpose with his everlasting gospel of moral sublimity. Here is our threefold criterion, by which every nation must stand or fall. The Anglo-Saxon is what he is through unceasing industry, perpetual aspiration, and moral strength. The Central African is what he is through inbred sluggishness, total lack of purpose, and almost total absence of morality.

These are the basic elements of national greatness. But the great question still remains, How does war affect them?

Concerning the effect of war on labor, we declare unhesitatingly that the two are everlasting foes, and that whenever War lays hands on Labor's throat, it strangles her. This is part of the inevitable program of war, for note that it is on the laboring men that the dreadful claims of war must fall. Mark its course. A bugle sounds the call to arms. From workshop, mill, and factory the laborers pour forth; out go the men into a trade where plunder and robbery are a means of livelihood; when pillage and slaughter wane, indolence becomes the order of the day; commerce degenerates into blockade-running by sea and marauding by land. How tame the life of peace to this wild life of war! And all the time the love of toil is fading from men's minds; at home the factory wheels are turning more and more feebly, and when at last the sword is laid aside, there is only "confusion worse confounded," for the channels of labor are choked with men reared in habits of indolence or trained in the school of vice. Before the scar on that nation's industry can finally be healed, decades and perhaps centuries of peace must pass away.

But if war is a scar on the nation's industry, it is likewise a blot on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he pulls himself across the chasm and into the larger life. To advance at all, man must have ideals—for himself, for his family, for his nation. But mark the effect of war on these ideals. In place of the ideal of peace—to serve men and uplift them—one is taught the ideal of war—to make himself the most widely feared of professional murderers. Instead of the ideal of peace—to make his family comfortable, happy, and prosperous—comes in the war ideal, by whose terms the family head deserts his own flock to kill other family heads for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes. As for his ideal of the nation's greatness, we have ample testimony that when bullets and cannon balls cone crashing through the splendid structure of his purpose, it speedily crumbles into an ignominious desire to hide himself behind the nearest tree. No; do not say that war builds up ideals; it tears them down and tramples them in the dust; aye more, it sets back crime itself where they should rightly stand.

But if war so dethrones a nation's ideals, what may it not do to a nation's morality? Imagine if you can a million men, the core of the national power, turning themselves into machines to carry out blindly the schemes of leaders who may be right or wrong; schooled in the belief that manslaughter is manliness, that the rash courage of the brute is above the moral courage of a man; forgetful of the meaning of human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering, makes the infliction of suffering his study and end."

No, Mr. Roosevelt, for once at least you are wrong! We cannot believe that war builds up a nation. Rather will we believe those words of Herbert Spencer, more sweeping but far more true, "Advance to the highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism."

"But wait," you say; "all this is theory and abstraction. We want matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy, teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of them. But no, not quite all either. On a sandy stretch of seashore, half hidden by the unwieldy empires around it, we see a timid, peaceful little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries. Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight; over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay. Finally, like the cloud no bigger than a hand, it rises from the island of Corsica and moves toward Central Europe. All too well does Europe know its meaning. From north and south, from east and west, she pours into the field the finest armies that the Old World ever saw. Then she pauses. Europe grows tense with a nameless dread. The storm cloud blackens, hovers lower, then bursts with all its fury through the continent. For ten long years, at the command of an imperial butcher, the soil is drenched with blood, the sky grows lurid from burning Paris to burning Moscow, three million homes are draped in black. Grand, indeed, and glorious! But Europe lost more than her gorgeous standards, more than her ruined cities; she left her manhood on those bloody fields.