Yes, our honor may be arbitrated. If we are ill-prepared for war, we arbitrate. If we are sure of a favorable award, we arbitrate. But we must have a loophole, an ever-ready escape from obligation. Posing as the most enlightened nation on the face of the globe, we refuse entirely to displace those medieval notions according to which personal honor found its best protection in the dueling pistol, and national honor its only vindication in slaughter and devastation. To unlimited arbitration we refuse to submit.
Fifteen years ago England, the mighty England, gave us her pledge that no cause should ever justify war. This pledge our Senate in the name of honor refused. Unlimited arbitration agreements were suggested at both Hague Conferences. Americans promptly placed restrictions upon them in the name of honor. Again has England with enthusiasm just offered us unrestricted arbitration. Again she is repulsed by our Senate in the name of honor. France, too, bears to our doors an unqualified pledge of arbitration. France, too, is repulsed by our Senate in the name of honor. Germany and Japan express a desire to settle every question at the bar of justice. Impelled by honor we pass their desire unheeded. Our Clevelands, our Olneys, our Edward Everett Hales, our Carl Schurzes, our John Hays, have all urged unlimited arbitration. Our Davises and Clarks and Platts and Quays in Senate seats have undone their work in the name of honor. Our Charles Eliots and Nicholas Butlers, our Albert Shaws and Hamilton Holts, now plead for universal peace through unlimited arbitration. Senators Bacon and Lodge and Heyburn and Hitchcock, apparently impelled by constitutional prerogative, party prejudice, or personal animosity, now cast their votes for limitations in the name of honor. From the platform of peace conferences, from the halls of colleges, from the pulpit and the bench, from the offices of bankers and merchants and manufacturers, from the press, with scarcely a column's exception, there arises a swelling plea for treaties of arbitration that know no exceptions. In the name of honor that plea is defied.
Honor? No, an ocean of exception large enough to float any number of battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor? No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death! Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the cloak of shrewd politics, the mask of false patriotism! National honor? No, national dishonor!
Before the nations of the world the United States stands to-day in an unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen years our government has refused to touch the barrier of national honor and vital interests. England and France have now laid this duty squarely at our door. "It is a social obligation as imperative as the law of Moses, as full of hope as the Great Physician's healing touch." Let us here highly resolve that there shall be uttered a new official interpretation of national honor and vital interests, an interpretation synonymous with dignity and fidelity, sincerity, and integrity, and confidence in the vows both of men and of nations. "If we have 'faith in the right as God gives us to see the right,' we shall catch a vision of opportunity that shall fire the soul with a spirit of service which the darkness of night shall not arrest, which the course of the day shall not weary."
THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM
By Paul B. Blanshard, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
First Prize Oration in the Central Group Contest, 1913, and in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913