WAR AGAINST WAR
TACTICS THAT THE FRIENDS OF PEACE MAY LEARN FROM THE MILITARISTS
THROUGH Matthew Arnold we have been made familiar with one of the figures clearly limned by Clarendon. It is that of Falkland, whose humane spirit and love of peace made the casting of his lot in the time of the civil war in England seem peculiarly tragic. Often in the course of that bitter and bloody conflict he was heard to “ingeminate” the word “peace.”
A similar feeling of grief and frustration in the presence of war is one of the distinguishing marks of our own day. The best and wisest in the world hold peace congresses and conferences on arbitration (as they are to do soon in St. Louis), and seem to gain painful inches only to have all their efforts made apparently vain by some inrush of the war spirit. The Hague Tribunal is founded and The Hague agreement solemnly entered into, but that does not prevent one of the covenanting nations from seizing another’s land by the sword. Projects for universal arbitration are mooted, amid the applause of Christendom, and plans for the judicial settlement of international disputes are ripening, at the very time when tens of thousands of men are about to be killed in battle.
So it is that peace seems to be to the civilized world only an unattainable longing. We think of war to-day, in the Scripture phrase, with groanings that cannot be uttered. Never so hated, it sometimes appears as if it were never so fated.
It is well for peace-lovers now and then to put the case thus strongly, in order that they may face the difficulty at its darkest. The fact that the evil they struggle against is persistent is but one argument more for their own persistence. Pacifists must be as ready and resourceful as the militarists. If ever it is right to learn from an enemy, it surely is in this instance. Something has been gained in this way. The late William James, for example, contended that we must admit that there are some good, human weapons in the hands of the war party, and that the peace men must study, not only how to appreciate them, but how to use them. Professor James would have sought in peaceful pursuits the equivalents of the appeal which war makes to certain manly qualities. Heroism in private life, in scientific pursuits, in exploration, in reform—this is what he urged. The patriotic impulse transmuted into great engineering works, vast plans for sanitation, campaigns against disease and misery—that is what peace can offer to ardent youth. All this is sound, and good as far as it goes; but the question arises to-day whether there is not need of something more positive and aggressive, whether the spirit of militarism cannot be turned against itself; whether, in a word, there should not be war against war.