Collecting knives; and never a day
Can pass, unless they buy a few;
And as their enemies buy them too,
They all avert the impending fray,
And starve their children and their wives
To buy the necessary knives.”
The children are quite at a loss to know what to make of such a strange way of life.
Many children of a larger growth have wondered at the phenomenon of the actual world of which Mr. Noyes’s fancy is an allegory. But in the cultivation of the fear of war it has been left for the present year to reveal an aspect of sordidness the like of which has never before been known.
The world was startled, and all Germans were overwhelmed with mortification and shame, when in April the facts were made known concerning the way in which a market for military supplies had been created at Berlin. One great manufacturer of guns had been guilty of giving bribes within the very walls of the War Office. Another large company dealing in arms and ammunition had sent money to France in order to hire writers of anti-German articles, so that warlike feeling might appear to be stirred up, and the German Government be induced to place large orders for rifles and cartridges. All this went far beyond the ordinary manipulation of a “war scare.” With that we are familiar. It has frequently been seen in the United States. More than twenty years ago, when there was foolish talk about a war with Chile, a New Jersey steel-maker was heard to say, after the flurry was over, “Well, anyhow, it was a good enough war to secure me an order for $600,000 worth of ship’s plates.”
Such tactics by armor-makers and powder-manufacturers have often been exposed, but they fall short of the fiendishness of these German plottings. It is bad enough to work up an artificial excitement in your own land, to form leagues for a bigger army and navy, to point to various alleged foreign “perils,” to ply committees of Congress with fantastic military arguments, and to do it all, and finance it all, solely in order to get some fat government contracts. But to do what the German firm did is to pass beyond the mischievous and dishonorable into the diabolical. Deliberately and by means of money sent abroad to seek to rouse a hostile spirit and provoke a war for the purpose of making the weapon business good—this is to be willing to coin money out of the misery of two nations. It is to take the position that the blood of the killed and wounded and the tears of widows and orphans may be ignored if only they are “good for trade.” We have heard much of the mad competition in armament being a reduction of militarism to the absurd. These German revelations are a veritable reductio ad horribilem—all the more shocking because the German Emperor is to-day one of the greatest forces for peace.