Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

We may illustrate this by the most beneficent acts of war, when the military spirit claiming to carry forward civilization invades a country for the purpose of bringing it into the zone of the civilized world. Militarism enforces law and order and insists upon obedience and discipline, assuming that it will ultimately establish righteousness and foster progress. In order to carry out this good intention, it first of all clears the decks of impedimenta, although in the process it may extinguish the most precious beginnings of self-government and the nucleus of self-help, which the wise of the native community have long been anxiously hoarding.

It is the military idea, resting content as it does with the passive results of order and discipline, which confesses a totally inadequate conception of the value and power of human life. The charge of obtaining negative results could with great candor be brought against militarism, while the strenuous task, the vigorous and difficult undertaking, involving the use of the most highly developed human powers, can be claimed for industrialism.

It is really human constructive labor which must give the newly invaded country a sense of its place in the life of the civilized world, some idea of the effective occupations which it may perform. In order to accomplish this its energy must be freed and its resources developed. Militarism undertakes to set in order, to suppress and to govern, if necessary to destroy, while industrialism undertakes to liberate latent forces, to reconcile them to new conditions, to demonstrate that their aroused activities can no longer follow caprice, but must fit into a larger order of life. To call this latter undertaking, demanding ever new powers of insight, patience, and fortitude, less difficult, less manly, less strenuous, than the first, is on the face of it absurd. It is the soldier who is inadequate to the difficult task, who strews his ways with blunders and lost opportunities, who cannot justify his vocation by the results, and who is obliged to plead guilty to a lack of rational method.

Of British government in the Empire, an Englishman has recently written, “We are obliged in practise to make a choice between good order and justice administered autocratically in accordance with British standards on the one hand, and delicate, costly, doubtful, and disorderly experiments in self-government on British lines upon the other, and we have practically everywhere decided upon the former alternative. It is, of course, less difficult.”[16] Had our American ideals of patriotism and morality in international relations kept pace with our experience, had we followed up our wide commercial relations with an adequate ethical code, we can imagine a body of young Americans, “the flower of our youth,” as we like to say, proudly declining commercial advantages founded upon forced military occupation and informing their well-meaning government that they declined to accept openings on any such terms as these, that their ideals of patriotism and of genuine government demanded the play of their moral prowess and their constructive intelligence. Certainly in America we have a chance to employ something more active and virile, more inventive, more in line with our temperament and tradition, than the mere desire to increase commercial relations by armed occupation as other governments have done. A different conduct is required from a democracy than from the mere order-keeping, bridge-building, tax-gathering Roman, or from the conscientious Briton carrying the blessings of an established government and enlarged commerce to all quarters of the globe.

It has been the time-honored custom to attribute unjust wars to the selfish ambition of rulers who remorselessly sacrifice their subjects to satisfy their greed. But, as Lecky has recently pointed out, it remains to be seen whether or not democratic rule will diminish war. Immoderate and uncontrolled desires are at the root of most national as well as of most individual crimes, and a large number of persons may be moved by unworthy ambitions quite as easily as a few. If the electorate of a democracy accustom themselves to take the commercial view of life, to consider the extension of trade as the test of a national prosperity, it becomes comparatively easy for mere extension of commercial opportunity to assume a moral aspect and to receive the moral sanction. Unrestricted commercialism is an excellent preparation for governmental aggression. The nation which is accustomed to condone the questionable business methods of a rich man because of his success, will find no difficulty in obscuring the moral issues involved in any undertaking that is successful. It becomes easy to deny the moral basis of self-government and to substitute militarism. The soldier formerly looked down upon the merchant whom he now obeys, as he still looks down upon the laborer as a man who is engaged in a business inferior to his own, as someone who is dull and passive and ineffective. When our public education succeeds in freeing the creative energy and developing the skill which the advance of industry demands, this attitude must disappear, and a spectacle such as that recently seen in London among the idle men returned from service in South Africa, who refused to work through a contemptuous attitude towards the “slow life” of the laborer, will become impossible. We have as yet failed to uncover the relative difficulty and requisite training for the two methods of life.

It is difficult to illustrate on a national scale the substitution of the ideals of labor for those of warfare.

At the risk of being absurd, and with the certainty of pushing an illustration beyond its legitimate limits, I am venturing to typify this substitution by the one man whom the civilized world has most closely associated with military ideals, the present Emperor of Germany. We may certainly believe that the German Emperor is a conscientious man, who means to do his duty to all his subjects; that he regards himself, not only as general and chief of the army, but also as the fostering father of the humble people. Let us imagine the quite impossible thing that for ten years he does not review any troops, does not attend any parades, does not wear a uniform, nor hear the clang of the sword as he walks, but that during these ten years he lives with the peasants “who drive the painful plow,” that he constantly converses with them, and subjects himself to their alternating hopes and fears as to the result of the harvest, at best so inadequate for supplying their wants and for paying their taxes. Let us imagine that the German Emperor during these halcyon years, in addition to the companionship of the humble, reads only the folk-lore, the minor poetry and the plaintive songs in which German literature is so rich, until he comes to see each man of the field as he daily goes forth to his toil “with a soldier tied to his back,” exhausted by the double strain of his burden and his work.

Let us imagine this Emperor going through some such profound moral change as befell Count Tolstoy when he quitted his military service in the Caucasus and lived with the peasants on his estate, with this difference that, instead of feeling directly responsible for a village of humble folk, he should come to feel responsible for all the toilers of the “Fatherland” and for the international results of the German army. Let us imagine that in his self-surrender to the humblest of his people, there would gradually grow up in his subconsciousness, forces more ideal than any which had possessed him before; that his interests and thoughts would gradually shift from war and the manœuvres and extensions of the army, to the unceasing toil, the permanent patience, which lie at the bottom of all national existence; that the life of the common people, which is so infinite in its moral suggestiveness, would open up to him new moral regions, would stir new energies within him, until there would take place one of those strange alterations in personality of which hundreds of examples are recorded. Under a glow of generous indignation, magnanimity, loyalty to his people, a passion of self-surrender to his new ideals, we can imagine that the imperial temperament would waste no time in pinings and regret, but that, his energies being enlisted in an overmastering desire to free the people from the burden of the army, he would drive vigorously in the direction of his new ideals. It is impossible to imagine him “passive” under this conversion to the newer ideals of peace. He would no more be passive than St. Paul was after his conversion. He would regard the four million men in Europe shut up in barracks, fed in idleness by toiling peasants, as an actual wrong and oppression. They would all have to be freed and returned to normal life and occupation—not through the comparatively easy method of storming garrisons, in which he has had training, but through conviction on the part of rulers and people of the wrong and folly of barrack idleness and military glitter. The freeing of the Christians from the oppressions of the Turks, of the Spaniards from the Moslems, could offer no more strenuous task—always, however, with the added difficulty and complication that the change in the people must be a moral change analogous to the one which had already taken place within himself; that he must be debarred from the use of weapons, to which his earlier life had made him familiar; that his high task, while enormous in its proportion, was still most delicate in its character, and must be undertaken without the guarantee of precedent, and without any surety of success. “Smitten with the great vision of social righteousness,” as so many of his contemporaries have been, he could not permit himself to be blinded or to take refuge in glittering generalities, but, even as St. Paul arose from his vision and went on his way in a new determination never again changed, so he would have to go forth to a mission, imperial indeed in its magnitude, but “over-imperial” in the sweep of its consequences and in the difficulty of its accomplishment.

Certainly counting all the hours of the Emperor’s life spent in camp and court dominated by military pomp and ambition, he has given more than ten years to military environment and much less than ten years to the bulk of his people, and it would not be impossible to imagine such a conversion due to the reaction of environment and interest. Such a change having taken place, should we hold him royal in temper or worthy of the traditions of knight-errantry, if he were held back by commercial considerations, if he hesitated because the Krupp Company could sell no more guns and would be thrown out of business? We should say to this Emperor whom our imaginations have evoked, Were your enthusiasms genuine enough, were your insights absolutely true, you would see of how little consequence these things really are, and how easily adjusted. Let the Krupp factories, with their tremendous resources in machinery and men, proceed to manufacture dredging machines for the reclaiming of the waste land in Posen; let them make new inventions to relieve the drudgery of the peasant, agricultural implements adequate to Germany’s agricultural resources and possibilities. They will find need for all the power of invention which they can command, all the manufacturing and commercial ability which they now employ. It is part of your new vocation to adjust the industries now tributary to the standing armies and organization of warfare, to useful and beneficent occupations; to transform and readjust all their dependent industries, from the manufacturing of cannon and war-ships to that of gold braid and epaulets. It is your mission to revive and increase agriculture, industry, and commerce, by diverting all the energy which is now directed to the feeding, clothing, and arming of the idle, into the legitimate and normal channels of life.

It is certainly not more difficult to imagine such a change occurring to an entire people than in the mind and purpose of one man—in fact, such changes are going on all about us.