Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association

by Intercollegiate Peace Association

The disposition in individuals to pluck motes out of their neighbors' eyes and leave beams in their own, in the nation becomes what Herbert Spencer calls the bias of patriotism. According to him patriotism is but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view international affairs apart from national interests, we are handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers' Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with Japan, England's course in South Africa, and America's attitude toward the Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic pride.

The chief respect in which this bias interferes with the progress of international arbitration is in restricting the scope of general arbitration treaties, the average formula of such treaties excluding all questions which involve "national honor and vital interests." A greatly modified survival of the spirit which in primitive peoples regarded the tribe over the mountain or across the stream as a fit object of hatred and fear, the objection to a judicial settlement of such questions assumes that a nation's honor and vital interests are goods peculiar in that they may be inconsistent with justice. The attitude of the United States toward the recently proposed treaty between England and America may be taken as typical of the attitude which prevails on this subject generally. The formulators of the treaty took an advanced step in that, instead of reserving questions of national honor and vital interests, they provided for the arbitration of all differences which are "justiciable in their nature by reason of being susceptible of decision by the application of principles of law or equity," thereby recognizing the judicial nature of arbitration. The action of the Senate, however, which sustained the opinion of the majority report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, objecting to the last clause of Article III of the treaty,[2] would indicate that the significance of a general arbitration treaty attaches not so much to the definition of its scope as to who shall determine what cases conform to the definition. It would seem that the nature of the reservation is relatively unimportant so long as its interpretation devolves upon the parties at variance. The majority report, objecting to the delegation to the joint high commission of the power to determine the arbitrability of cases in terms of the treaty, contains this statement[3] in which the minority report likewise concurs: "Every one agrees that there are certain questions which no nation ... will ever submit to the decision of any one else." As cases of this nature it enumerates territorial integrity, admission of immigrants, and our Monroe Doctrine. The significance of this insistence upon a means of evasion is evident. There is not yet enough international confidence. The powers are not yet ready to submit to unlimited arbitration.

[2] The clause, referring to the commission of inquiry, reads:

"It is further agreed, however, that in cases in which the Parties disagree as to whether or not a difference is subject to arbitration under Article I of this Treaty, that question shall be submitted to the Joint High Commission of Inquiry; and if all or all but one of the members of the Commission agree and report that such difference is within the scope of Article I, it shall be referred to arbitration in accordance with the provisions of this treaty."—Editor.

[3] See Senate Document 98, 62d Cong., 1st Sess., 9-10.—Editor.

The other enemy to rational judgment—and rational judgment must be the only basis of arbitration—is the danger of emotionalism. The average man is yet largely irrational. When cool and self-possessed, and when his prejudices and traditions do not interfere, he can pass rational judgment upon questions in which his own interests are not concerned; but when his passions are aroused he dispenses with any effort to reason and acts in obedience to blind impulse. He knows that it is expensive to fight, that it is dangerous, and that it is wrong; but when he is provoked, he fights. The characteristics of the average man are the characteristics of society. We have not yet outgrown the mob.

Interwoven with this impulsive temperament and associated with some of the most cherished affections of the human heart is the spirit of war, developed by thousands of generations of ancestral conflict and passed on to us as a heritage to be rooted out of our nature before we shall realize in its fullness the ideal for which we strive. Mortal conflict sanctified by religion, devastation idealized by literature, pillage justified by patriotism, fellow-destruction ennobled by self-sacrifice—these form a complex of contradictory emotions from which men are as yet unable to unravel the one essential characteristic of war; namely, the attempt to dispense justice in a trial by battle, and make it stand out in its revealed inconsistency, dissociated from its traditional concomitants of which it is neither part nor parcel. The romance of knighthood and chivalry still appeals to the human heart, notwithstanding the fact that war, love, and religion, the knight's creed, are an inconsistent combination. Most men can be made to see this in their minds, but cannot be made to feel it in their souls. Many old Civil War veterans, who would not consent for their sons to volunteer in the Spanish-American War, would have gone themselves had they been able. Some did go. To men so disposed it is useless to talk of the horrors of war. Give us a just grievance; let some competent enthusiast inflame this passion with a war cry like "Remember the Maine," "Fifty-four forty or fight," "Liberty or death," and, reënforced by the animal inherent in man, it will arouse popular demonstrations devoid of all reason, creating a force that cannot be controlled by a cold, calculating intellect. Can you listen to a bugle call on a clear, still night without a quickening of the pulse as there flashes through your soul a suggestion of all past history with its marshaling hosts and heroic deeds? Can you see a military parade without a suggestion of "Dixie" and the Star Spangled Banner, or feeling your bosom swell with patriotic pride? This association may be, and doubtless is, a delusion, but it is a delusion developed and fortified by thousands of years of custom and precedent and it would be contrary to the history of human progress if man should become disillusionized in one generation. It may take centuries. If we are to have international arbitration in the near future, we must have it in spite of this spirit of war rather than by destroying the spirit. In fact, the only practical way to destroy it is to let it, like vestigial organs of which biologists tell us, degenerate from disuse. This inherited emotional tendency remains as a threat with which we, as exponents of arbitration, must reckon before we are justified in saying that the world is ready for peace.

Because of these two social characteristics—the patriotic bias which perverts judgment, and uncontrolled passions which submerge reason—the educational propagandists still have a task to perform.

Let us now examine the stand-pat idea that unlimited arbitration is but a dream as expressed in the quotation from Privy Councillor Stengel. This is farther from the truth than the other extreme just discussed. He who will, with an unprejudiced mind, examine cross sections of history at widely separated stages, cannot fail to see that along with the growing tendency of reason to predominate over passion, superstition, and custom there has been a parallel tendency to restrict militarism as a social activity. From a war conceived as religion to war as patriotism, then war as commercialism and the tool of ambition, man is now coming to the more rational conception of war as the despoiler of nations. David speaks of the "season of the year" when nations went forth to battle. Fifteen hundred years later governments pretended at least to justify their military operations on rational grounds. To-day war is the last resort, and even its most ardent defenders do not attempt to justify it except in disputes which involve national honor and vital interests.

In view of the foregoing facts it is evident that the modern peace movement has by no means the whole of the task to perform. Rather, we can almost justify ourselves in the assumption that war is not long to remain one of our social inconsistencies and that it is now making its last, and, therefore, most determined, stand on questions of national honor and vital interests.