We still hear war extolled at times as the mother of valor and the prime agency in the world's advancement. By it, we are told, civilization has spread and nations have been created, slavery has been abolished and the American Union preserved. It is even held that without war human progress would have been impossible.
The answer: Men were at first savages who preyed upon each other like wild beasts, and so they developed a physical courage which they shared with the brutes. Moral courage was unknown to them. War was almost their sole occupation. Peace existed only for short periods that tribes might regain strength to resume the sacred duty of killing each other.
Advancement in civilization was impossible while war reigned. Only as wars became less frequent and long intervals of peace supervened could civilization, the mother of true heroism, take root. Civilization has advanced just as war has receded, until in our day peace has become the rule and war the exception.
Arbitration of international disputes grows more and more in favor. Successive generations of men now live and die without seeing war; and instead of the army and navy furnishing the only careers worthy of gentlemen, it is with difficulty that civilized nations can to-day obtain a sufficient supply of either officers or men.
In the past, man's only method for removing obstacles and attaining desired ends was to use brute courage. The advance of civilization has developed moral courage. We use more beneficent means than men did of old. Britain in the eighteenth century used force to prevent American independence. In more recent times she graciously grants Canada the rights denied America.
The United States also receives an award of the powers against China, and, finding it in excess of her expenditures, in the spirit of newer time, returns ten million dollars. Won by this act of justice, China devotes the sum to the education of Chinese students in the republic's universities. The greatest force is no longer that of brutal war, but the supreme force of gentlemen and generosity—the golden rule.
The pen is rapidly superseding the sword. Arbitration is banishing war. More than five hundred international disputes have already been peacefully settled. Civilization, not barbarism, is the mother of true heroism. Our lately departed poet and disciple of peace, Richard Watson Gilder, has left us the answer to the false idea that brute force employed against our fellows ranks with heroic moral courage exerted to save or serve them:—
'Twas said: "When roll of drum and battle's roar
Shall cease upon the earth, oh, then no more
The deed, the race, of heroes in the land."
But scarce that word was breathed when one small hand
Lifted victorious o'er a giant wrong
That had its victims crushed through ages long;
Some woman set her pale and quivering face,
Firm as a rock, against a man's disgrace;
A little child suffered in silence lest
His savage pain should wound a mother's breast;
Some quiet scholar flung his gauntlet down
And risked, in Truth's great name, the synod's frown;
A civic hero, in the calm realm of laws,
Did that which suddenly drew a world's applause;
And one to the pest his lithe young body gave
That he a thousand thousand lives might save.
On the field of carnage men lose all human instincts in the struggle to protect themselves. The true heroism inspired by moral courage prompts firemen, policemen, sailors, miners, and others to volunteer and risk their lives to save the lives of their fellowmen. Such heroism is now of everyday occurrence.
In our age there is no more reason for permitting war between civilized nations than for relaxing the reign of law within nations, which compels men to submit their personal disputes to peaceful courts, and never dreams that by so doing they will be made less heroic....