WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY[60]
Edwin D. Mead
It is a great mistake to think, as many are apt to do when some terrible war overwhelms some part of the world, that war is on the increase among men and that we are probably on the eve of a portentous new era of it. The temptation to think so is strong when two or three such wars come at the same time, waged by enlightened nations which we had fondly trusted had got beyond such wickedness and folly. But there is no warrant for the belief. There is seldom real warrant for any fear that the world generally is going backward, although it would be stupid not to see that there come many days which are far behind many yesterdays in insight, in ideals, and in conduct. The long view is the encouraging view, the view of progress.
We have entered a new century. As one looks back over the nineteenth century, which has closed, as one reads perhaps some brief historical survey of the century, it is worth while to ask oneself whether one would rather live in 1800 or in 1900, in the world pictured in the first pages of the book or that pictured in the last pages. The serious man can give but one answer. The England and France and Germany and Italy and Spain of the end of the century were, when every deduction has been made on particular points, vastly more habitable, better places to live in, than the same countries at the beginning of the century. The brilliant historian of the administration of Jefferson paints a masterly picture of the life of our own people in 1800. Every aspect of the social and intellectual life of the time is treated with marvelous fullness of detail and in the most graphic and impressive way; and there is an element of hope and buoyancy, of prophecy and promise, pervading the pages, which is at once inspiring and sobering. Yes, surely one would rather live in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century than at the beginning of the nineteenth. The century has been on the whole emphatically a period of progress. The same was true of the century before, and of the century before that.
What has been true concerning progress in general during the last few centuries has been especially true of progress out of the habit of war toward the habit of peace. Events at the close of the nineteenth century have been indeed deplorable; they were also deplored—and this is the significant thing—more than such events were ever deplored before. The body of protest against unnecessary and unrighteous wars becomes steadily larger, bolder, and more outspoken; the public conscience is more troubled by them; more and more men perceive their wastefulness and wrong, and discern the more excellent way; and to-morrow the total of protesting insight and morality shall be great enough to tip the balance and hold the tempted, ruffling nation to self-restraint, respect for others, and respect for civilization. There was much less war in Christendom during the nineteenth century than during the eighteenth, and there will be less during the twentieth century than during the nineteenth. The steady and sure progress of the world is toward the supplanting of the ways of greed and violence among nations by the methods of reason, legality, and mutual regard. As one travels over Europe, one is never far from some great battle-field. In Scotland one remembers how half a dozen centuries ago one clan was continually fighting with another, this group of clans warring with that, or all were leagued together against one Edward or another advancing with his archers from beyond the Tweed. The English armies fighting at Falkirk and Bannockburn and Halidon were straightway—they or their successors—in France fighting at Crécy and Poitiers and Agincourt. The wars between England and France were interminable; and so were the wars between France and other nations. There were civil wars and religious wars and wars of succession; seven-years wars and thirty-years wars and hundred-years wars. War was the regular vocation of nations, the profession of arms the chief profession, peace merely an occasional respite, in no sense to be reckoned on or presumed to endure as the natural condition of things.
All this has been fundamentally changed. Europe bends under the burden of her great armies and multiplies her costly battleships, and we say that it is wasteful and barbarous; but the soldiers and ships are almost never used. We grieve and blush at the shameful wars of subjugation in our own time; but these wars were anachronisms, sporadic survivals of courses common and universally approved three hundred years ago, when men did not blush for them, but not typical of the tendencies and civilization of the present age. The true exponent of the world's best judgment and increasing purpose and policy, as the twentieth century begins, is not the warring in Luzon and the Transvaal, but the Hague Tribunal. For a century the states in the United States, because we have had a Supreme Court, have settled there, and not by combat, their boundary disputes and other quarrels, graver often than many which have plunged European nations into war, while most of us have not known even of the fact of litigation. To-day, because an International Tribunal exists, the Venezuelan imbroglio is referred to it, which else might have gone on to the dread arbitrament of arms. Such references will multiply; the legal way instead of the fighting way will become easy, will become common, will become instinctive, will become universal; war will hasten after the duel, to be loathed and to be laughed at, and to cease to be at all; the cannon will follow the rack to the chamber of horrors; and nations when they disagree will not go into battle, but into court. This is the sure end of the process which the broad survey of history reveals. The critical student of war becomes the sure prophet of peace.
FOOTNOTE:
[60] By permission of the author.