Our action also shows how utterly futile it would be to try to treat a league to enforce peace as a substitute for training our own strength for our own defense. Let China be the witness of the truth of this statement. China has actually realized the ideal of the pacifists who insist that unpreparedness for war secures peace. The ideal of the internationalists is that patriotism and sense of nationalism are detrimental to humanity, and the ideal of the Socialists is that the capitalist régime is the only cause of popular misery. China is helpless to attack others or defend herself, her people have little sense of national unity and pride, and there are in China huge districts where there are no capitalists and where the misery of the people is greater than in any country of the Occident. China’s helplessness, instead of helping toward world peace, has been a positive encouragement to war and violence among her neighbors. Her future depends primarily, not on herself, but on what her neighbors choose to do. In spite of her size and her enormous population and resources, she is helpless to do good to others because she is powerless to prevent others from doing evil to her. Her agreement to a league of nations or to a league to enforce peace would be worthless, because she is unable to put strength back of justice either for herself or for any one else. The pacifists and internationalists if they had their way would turn the United States into the China of the Occident.
Let us put our trust neither in rhetoric nor hypocrisy, whether conscious or unconscious. Let us be honest with ourselves. Let us look the truth in the face. Let us remember what Germany, Austria, and Turkey have actually done. Let us remember what Russia has suffered from Germany and the worse than folly with which she has behaved to every one else. Let us remember what has happened to China and what we have made happen to Haiti and San Domingo. Then let us trust for our salvation to a sound and intense American nationalism.
The horse sense of the matter is that all agreements to further the cause of sound internationalism must be based on recognition of the fact that as the world is actually constituted our present prime need is this sound and intense American nationalism. The first essential of this sound nationalism is that the Nation shall trust to its own fully prepared strength for its own defense. So far as possible, its strength must also be used to secure justice for others and must never be used to wrong others. But unless we possess and prepare the strength, we can neither help ourselves nor others. Let us by all means go into any wise league or covenant among nations to abolish neutrality (for, of course, a league to enforce peace is merely another name for a league to abolish neutrality in every possible war). But let us first understand what we are promising, and count the cost and determine to keep our promises. Above all, let us treat any such agreement or covenant as a mere addition to, and never as a substitute for, the preparation in advance of our own armed power. Next time we behave with the ignoble folly we have shown during the last four years we may not find allies to do what France and England and Italy have done for us. They have protected us with their navies and armies, their blood and their treasure, while we first refused to do anything and then slowly and reluctantly began to harden and make ready our giant but soft and lazy strength.
No proper scheme designed to secure peace without effort and safety without service and sacrifice will either make this country safe or enable it to do its international duty toward others.
An American citizen, personally unknown to me, writes me that his three sons entered the army at the outbreak of the war, and that one of them, an aviator, was killed in battle at the front just two weeks before my own son was killed as he fought in the air. In his letter my correspondent adds:
Would that my country might learn and never forget that not only the winning of peace now, but the maintenance of peace at all times depends not fundamentally on treaties or leagues of nations, but on the readiness of citizens to fly to the aid of the wronged and to give their lives if need be that justice may be secured.
There speaks the true American spirit which holds fast alike to fearlessness and to wisdom, to gentleness and to iron resolution. There speaks the spirit of that fervent nationalism which would forbid America either to inflict or to endure wrong.
THE MAN WHO PAYS AND THE MAN WHO PROFITS
August 9, 1918
The men who do the fighting at the front and their mothers and wives back here are those who in this great and terrible crisis are paying—the blood of the men and the tears of the women, and with the suffering of men, women, and children—for our failure to prepare during the two and a half years before we entered the World War. For this failure to prepare, in spite of the most vivid warning ever given a Nation, the warning that befell the rest of the world during those two and a half years, the professed pacifists and the politicians who pandered to them are more responsible than any one else, except the pro-Germans. If, when the World War broke out, or at latest when the Lusitania was sunk, we had done our plain duty, we had then begun to build ships, field cannon and airplanes, and to train men exactly as we have been doing during the last year and a quarter, except that we should have done the work on a larger scale with more efficiency and with much less waste and extravagance. Remember that failure to provide great numbers of cannon and airplanes means that the infantry has to pay for it with a huge increase of slaughter. All the guns and airplanes we left unbuilt during the first three years of the war has meant so much more bloodshed, so many more Americans killed and crippled, not to speak of the tremendous loss of life to our allies. Moreover, when men in small numbers are put into battle, when only a few hundred thousand are forced to suffer heavy loss in doing work which two or three million men could have accomplished speedily and thoroughly and with very little loss, the responsibility rests on those who prevented the preparation in advance. If we had built quantities of ships and trained large numbers of men in advance, the World War would have ended almost as soon as we entered, and an infinite amount of bloodshed would have been prevented.