Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I]
Introduction
Newer ideals of peace are dynamic; if made operative will do away with war as a natural process	[3]
Of the older ideals the appeal to pity is dogmatic	[4]
The appeal to the sense of prudence also dogmatic and at this moment seems impotent	[5]
Outlook for universal peace by international arbitration	[6]
Primitive and profound impulses operate against impulse to war	[8]
Appeal to pity and prudence unnecessary if the cosmopolitan interest in human affairs is utilized	[9]
Social morality originates in social affections	[11]
Emotion determines social relations in the poorer quarters of a cosmopolitan city	[13]
New immigrants develop phenomenal powers of association	[14]
Their ideal of government includes kindliness as well as protection	[15]
Crowded city quarters the focal point of governmental progress	[16]
Life at these points must shape itself with reference to the demands of social justice	[17]
Simple foundations laid there for an international order	[18]
Ideals formed “in the depth of anonymous life” make for realization	[20]
Impulses toward compassionate conduct imperative	[21]
The internationalism of good will foreseen by the philosopher	[23]
A quickening concern for human welfare; international aspects illustrated by world-wide efforts to eradicate tuberculosis, first signs of the substitution of nurture for warfare	[25]
This substitution will be a natural process	[26]
Our very hope for it, a surrender to the ideals of the humble	[27]
Accounting must be taken between survivals of militarism and manifestations of newer humanitarianism	[28]
Tendency to idealization marked eighteenth-century humanitarian	[29]
Newer ideals of this century sustained only by knowledge and companionship	[30]
[CHAPTER II]
Survivals of Militarism in City Government
American Republic founded under the influence of doctrinaire eighteenth-century ideals. Failure in municipal administration largely due to their inadequacy	[31]
Modern substitutes of the evolutionary conception of progress for eighteenth-century idealism	[32]
Failure of adjustment between the old form of government and present condition results in reversion to military and legal type	[34]
National governmental machinery provides no vehicle for organized expression of popular will	[35]
Historic governments dependent upon force of arms	[36]
Founders placed too exclusive a value upon the principles defended by the War of the Revolution. Example of the overestimation of the spoils of war	[37]
Immigration problem an illustration of the failure to treat our growing Republic in a spirit of progressive and developing democracy	[39]
Present immigration due partly to the philosophic dogmas of the eighteenth-century. Theory of naturalization still rests upon those dogmas	[40]
No adequate formulization of newer philosophy although immigration situation has become much more industrial than political	[42]
Exploitation of immigrants carried on under guise of preparation for citizenship	[46]
Failure to develop a government fitted to varied peoples	[48]
Attitude of contempt for immigrant survival of a spirit of conqueror toward inferior people	[49]
Contempt reflected by children toward immigrant parents	[50]
Universal franchise implies a recognition of social needs and ideals	[52]
Difficulties of administering repressive government in a democracy	[54]
The attempt inevitably develops the corrupt politician as a friend of the vicious	[56]
He must be followed by successive reformers who represent the righteous and protect tax interests	[57]
Illustration from the point of view of humble people	[58]
Dramatic see-saw must continue until we attain the ideals of an evolutionary democracy	[59]
Community divided into repressive and repressed, representing conqueror and conquered	[60]
[CHAPTER III]
Failure to Utilize Immigrants in City Government
Democratic governments must reckon with the unsuccessful if only because they represent majority of citizens	[62]
To demand protection from unsuccessful is to fail in self-government	[63]
Study of immigrants might develop result in revived enthusiasm for human possibilities reacting upon ideals of government	[64]
Social resources of immigrants wasted through want of recognition of old habits	[65]
Illustrated by South Italians’ ability to combine community life with agricultural occupations, which is disregarded	[66]
Anglo-Saxon distrust of experiments with land tenure and taxation illustrated by Doukhobors	[67]
Immigrant’s contribution to city life	[69]
Military ideals blind statesmen to connection between social life and government	[70]
Corrupt politician who sees the connection often first friend of immigrant	[71]
Real statesmen would work out scheme of naturalization founded upon social needs	[72]
Intelligent co-operation of immigrants necessary for advancing social legislation	[74]
Daily experience of immigrants not to be ignored as basis of patriotism	[75]
Lack of cosmopolitan standard widens gulf between immigrant parents and children	[78]
Government is developing most rapidly in its relation to the young criminal and to the poor and dependent	[79]
Denver Juvenile Court is significant in its attitude toward repressive government	[81]
Good education in reform schools indicates compunction on the part of the State	[83]
Government functions extended to care of defectives and dependents	[84]
Ignores normal needs of every citizen	[85]
Socialists would meet the needs of workingmen by socialized legislation, but refuse to deal with the present state	[86]
At present radical changes must come from forces outside life of the people	[87]
Imperial governments are now concerning themselves with primitive essential needs of workingmen	[88]
Republics restrict functions of the government	[90]
Is America, in clinging to eighteenth-century traditions, losing its belief in the average man?	[91]
[CHAPTER IV]
Militarism and Industrial Legislation
American cities slow to consider immigration in relation to industry	[93]
Workingmen alone must regard them in relation to industrial situations	[94]
Assimilation of immigrants by workingman due both to economic pressure and to idealism	[95]
Illustrated by Stock Yards Strike	[96]
And by the strike in Anthracite Coal Fields	[97]
In the latter aroused public opinion forced Federal Government to deal with industrial conditions	[98]
In complicated modern society not always easy to see where social order lies	[101]
Chicago Stock Yards Strike illustrates such a situation	[104]
Government should have gained the enthusiasm immigrants gave to union	[107]
War element an essential part of strike	[109]
Appeal to loyalty the nearest approach to a moral appeal	[110]
Reluctance of United States Government to recognize matters of industry as germane to government	[112]
Resulting neglect of civic duty	[113]
The workingman’s attitude toward war as expressed by his international organization	[114]
Commerce the modern representative of conquest	[116]
Standard of life should be the test of a nation’s prosperity, so recognized by workingmen	[117]
Social amelioration undertaken by those in closest contact with social maladjustments	[118]
Present difficulties in social reform will continue until class interests are subordinated to a broader conception of social progress	[119]
If self-government were inaugurated by advanced thinkers now, they would make research into early forms of industrial governments	[121]
Autocratic European governments have recognized workingman’s need of protection	[122]
Has Democracy a right to refuse this protection?	[123]
[CHAPTER V]
Group Morality in the Labor Movement
Industrial changes which belong to the community as a whole have unfortunately divided it into two camps	[124]
These are typified by Employers’ Associations and Trades Unions each developing a group morality	[125]
Trade Unions at present illustrate the eternal compromise between the inner concept and the outer act	[127]
Present moment one of crisis in Trades Union development	[128]
Newly organized unions in war state of development responsible for serious mistakes	[130]
Tacit admission that a strike is war made during the Teamsters’ Strike in Chicago in 1905	[132]
Temporary loss of belief in industrial arbitration	[134]
Teamsters’ Strike not adjudicated in court threw the entire city into state of warfare	[136]
New organizations of employers exhibit traits of militant youth	[138]
Public although powerless to intervene, sees grave social consequences	[140]
Division of community into classes; increase of race animosity; spirit of materialism	[141]
Class prejudice created among children still another social consequence	[142]
Disastrous effect of prolonged warfare upon the labor movement itself	[144]
Real effort of trades unions at present is for recognition of the principle of collective bargaining	[145]
Trades unions are forced to correct industrial ills inherent in the factory system itself	[146]
Illustration from limitation of output	[147]
Illustration from attitude towards improved machinery	[148]
Disregard of the machine as a social product makes for group morality on the part of the owner and employees	[149]
Contempt resulting from group morality justifies method of warfare	[150]
[CHAPTER VI]
Protection of Children for Industrial Efficiency
Deficiency in protective legislation	[151]
Contempt for immigrant because of his economic standing	[152]
National indifference to condition of working children	[154]
Temptation to use child labor peculiar to this industrial epoch	[155]
Our sensibilities deadened by familiarity	[155]
Protection of the young the concern of government	[156]
Effect of premature labor on the child	[158]
Effect of child labor on the family	[161]
Effect on the industrial product	[162]
Effect on civilization	[163]
Intelligent labor the most valuable asset of our industrial prosperity	[164]
Results of England’s foreign commercial policy	[165]
Lack of consistency in the relation of the state to the child in the United States	[166]
Failure of public school system to connect with present industrial development	[167]
Correlation of new education with industrial situation	[168]
Child labor legislation will secure to child its proper play period	[169]
Power of association developed through play	[171]
Co-operation, not coercion, the ideal factory discipline	[173]
Actual factory system divorced from the instinct of workmanship	[174]
The activity of youth should be valuable assets for citizenship as well as industry	[175]
Military survivals in city government destroys this asset	[176]
The gang a training school for group morality	[177]
Concern of modern government in the development of its citizens	[179]
[CHAPTER VII]
Utilization of Women in City Government
The modern city founded upon military ideals	[180]
Early franchise justly given to grown men on basis of military duty	[181]
This early test no longer fitted to the modern city whose problems are internal	[182]
Women’s experience in household details valuable to civic housekeeping. No method of making it available	[184]
Municipal suffrage to be regarded not as a right or a privilege, but as a piece of governmental machinery	[187]
Franchise not only valuable as exercised by educated women, matters to be decided upon too basic to be influenced by modern education	[188]
Census of 1900 shows greater increase of workingwomen than of men and increasing youth of working women	[189]
Concerted action of women necessary to bring about industrial protection	[191]
Women can control surroundings of their work only by means of franchise	[192]
Unfair to put task of industrial protection upon women’s trades unions as it often confuses issues	[194]
Closer connection between industry and government would result if working women were enfranchised	[196]
Failure to educate women to industrial life disastrous to industry itself and to women as employers	[197]
Situation must be viewed in relation to recent immigration and in connection with present stage of factory system in America	[199]

NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

The following pages present the claims of the newer, more aggressive ideals of peace, as over against the older dovelike ideal. These newer ideals are active and dynamic, and it is believed that if their forces were made really operative upon society, they would, in the end, quite as a natural process, do away with war. The older ideals have required fostering and recruiting, and have been held and promulgated on the basis of a creed. Their propaganda has been carried forward during the last century in nearly all civilized countries by a small body of men who have never ceased to cry out against war and its iniquities and who have preached the doctrines of peace along two great lines. The first has been the appeal to the higher imaginative pity, as it is found in the modern, moralized man. This line has been most effectively followed by two Russians, Count Tolstoy in his earlier writings and Verestchagin in his paintings. With his relentless power of reducing all life to personal experience Count Tolstoy drags us through the campaign of the common soldier in its sordidness and meanness and constant sense of perplexity. We see nothing of the glories we have associated with warfare, but learn of it as it appears to the untutored peasant who goes forth at the mandate of his superior to suffer hunger, cold, and death for issues which he does not understand, which, indeed, can have no moral significance to him. Verestchagin covers his canvas with thousands of wretched wounded and neglected dead, with the waste, cruelty, and squalor of war, until he forces us to question whether a moral issue can ever be subserved by such brutal methods.

High and searching as is the preaching of these two great Russians who hold their art of no account save as it serves moral ends, it is still the appeal of dogma, and may be reduced to a command to cease from evil. And when this same line of appeal is presented by less gifted men, it often results in mere sentimentality, totally unenforced by a call to righteousness.

The second line followed by the advocates of peace in all countries has been the appeal to the sense of prudence, and this again has found its ablest exponent in a Russian subject, the economist and banker, Jean de Bloch. He sets forth the cost of warfare with pitiless accuracy, and demonstrates that even the present armed peace is so costly that the burdens of it threaten social revolution in almost every country in Europe. Long before the reader comes to the end of de Bloch’s elaborate computation he is ready to cry out on the inanity of the proposition that the only way to secure eternal peace is to waste so much valuable energy and treasure in preparing for war that war becomes impossible. Certainly no theory could be devised which is more cumbersome, more roundabout, more extravagant, than the reductio ad absurdum of the peace-secured-by-the-preparation-for-war theory. This appeal to prudence was constantly emphasized at the first Hague Conference and was shortly afterward demonstrated by Great Britain when she went to war in South Africa, where she was fined one hundred million pounds and lost ten thousand lives. The fact that Russia also, and the very Czar who invited the Conference, disregarded the conclusions of the Hague Tribunal makes this line of appeal at least for the moment seem impotent to influence empires which command enormous resources and which lodge the power of expenditure in officials who have nothing to do with accumulating the treasure they vote to expend.

It would, however, be the height of folly for responsible statesmen to ignore the sane methods of international discussion and concession which have been evolved largely as a result of these appeals. The Interparliamentary Union for International Arbitration and the Institute of International Law represent the untiring efforts of the advocates of peace through many years. Nevertheless universal peace, viewed from the point of the World’s Sovereignty or of the Counsel of Nations, is discouraging even when stated by the most ardent promoters of the peace society. Here it is quite possible that the mistake is being repeated which the old annalists of history made when they never failed to chronicle the wars and calamities which harassed their contemporaries, although, while the few indulged in fighting, the mass of them peacefully prosecuted their daily toil and followed their own conceptions of kindliness and equity. An English writer[1] has recently bidden us to look at the actual state of affairs existing at the present moment. He says, “Universal and permanent peace may be a vision; but the gradual change whereby war, as a normal state of international relations, has given place to peace as the normal state, is no vision, but an actual process of history palpably forwarded in our own day by the development of international law and of morals, and voluntary arbitration based thereon.” He insists that it is the function of international lawyers merely to give coherent expression to the best principles which the common moral sense of civilized Governments recognizes; in other words, that international law should be like primitive law within the nation, a formal expression of custom resting on the sense of a reciprocal restraint which has been found to be necessary for the common good.

Assuming that the two lines of appeal—the one to sensibility and the other to prudence—will persist, and that the international lawyers, in spite of the fact that they have no court before which to plead and no executive to enforce their findings, will continue to formulate into codes the growing moral sense of the nations, the following pages hope not only to make clear the contention that these forces within society are so dynamic and vigorous that the impulses to war seem by comparison cumbersome and mechanical, but also to point out the development of those newer social forces which it is believed will at last prove a “sovereign intervention” by extinguishing the possibility of battle at its very source.

It is difficult to formulate the newer dynamic peace, embodying the later humanism, as over against the old dogmatic peace. The word “non-resistance” is misleading, because it is much too feeble and inadequate. It suggests passivity, the goody-goody attitude of ineffectiveness. The words “overcoming,” “substituting,” “re-creating,” “readjusting moral values,” “forming new centres of spiritual energy” carry much more of the meaning implied. For it is not merely the desire for a conscience at rest, for a sense of justice no longer outraged, that would pull us into new paths where there would be no more war nor preparations for war. There are still more strenuous forces at work reaching down to impulses and experiences as primitive and profound as are those of struggle itself. That “ancient kindliness which sat beside the cradle of the race,” and which is ever ready to assert itself against ambition and greed and the desire for achievement, is manifesting itself now with unusual force, and for the first time presents international aspects.