The conduct of a military campaign calls for an enormous amount of preparation and organization. Let the advocates of peace take this to heart. They cannot win simply by wishing to win. It is for them, too, to be far-sighted, to lay careful plans, to enlist every modern method of working in unison to a definite end. War mobilizes men. Peace must muster ideas, sentiments, influences. In the Kriegspiel the strategist seeks to mass his troops upon the enemy’s weakest point. The tactics of peace should be similar. Argument and persuasion and appeal should be made to converge upon the exposed flank of the militarists. This may be found, at one moment, in the pressure of taxation, which needlessly swollen armaments would make unbearable. At another time, it may appear that the thing to hammer upon is the pressing need of social reforms, even attention to which will be endangered if all the available money and time are squandered upon preparing for a war that may never come. Let peace, too, acquire a General Staff, whose duty it shall be to survey the whole field, to work out fruitful campaigns, to tell us where to strike and how, to lay down the principles of the grand strategy to be followed.
Nor need individual effort be ruled out. Despite the large and coördinated movements of soldiers in a modern battle, there yet remains room for personal initiative and daring. The shining moment comes when some one in the ranks or in command is called upon to risk all with the possibility of gaining all. And there are still “forlorn hopes” to be led. Why should not these methods and appeals of war be imitated by those who are fighting for peace? They can point to many services calling for volunteers. There is ridicule to be faced, unpopular opinion to be stood up for calmly in the teeth of opposition and even scorn, testimony to be borne, questions to be asked, protests to be made. There is, in short, every opportunity to import from war the heroic element and give it scope and effect in the propaganda of peace. The very wrath of man can be made to praise the growth of civilization.
War against war can be made very concrete and practical. Committees can be formed to watch the military authorities and Congress, and to elicit an expression of opinion when it will be most useful. It is a matter of frequent lamenting on the part of peace men in the House of Representatives that their hands are so feebly held up by the opponents of war. The other side is alert and active. When big-navy or big-army bills are pending, the mail of congressmen is loaded with requests—usually, of course, interested requests—to vote for them. The lovers of peace, on the other hand, appear to be smitten with writer’s cramp. They act as if they were indifferent. This state of things should not be permitted to go on. There should be minute-men of the cause all over the land ready to spring into action. That a sound opinion of the country exists, only needing concerted effort to call it forth, has been shown again and again. It was proved at the time when President Taft’s treaties of universal arbitration were pending in the Senate. In those days the desire of the best people of the United States came to Washington like the sound of the voice of many waters. Schools and colleges, chambers of commerce and churches, sent in petition piled on petition, and remonstrance heaped on protest. One of the senators who opposed ratification admitted to the President that he had never had so formidable a pressure from his own State as on this question.
That lesson should not be lost. By organization, by watchfulness, by determination, the peace spirit of the land can be given much more effective expression than it has yet had. The situation is not at all one that justifies discouragement; it simply calls for fresh and more intelligent action, with heightened resolution. If only the genius of a Von Moltke could be devoted to organizing and directing the forces that make against war, we might reasonably hope for a realization of the poet’s vision of peace lying like level shafts of light across the land.
THE GREAT FLOODS IN THE MIDDLE WEST
WITH THE RENEWED SUGGESTION OF A WIDE-REACHING PROJECT OF FLOOD-MITIGATION
ONE cannot read of the recent disastrous overflow of the rivers of the Ohio Valley watershed without a sinking of the heart, to think how near is happiness to grief. That thousands, apparently through no fault of their own, should be overwhelmed by the relentless powers of nature, takes us back to a pagan conception of the universe, until we begin to sum up the unpagan-like solidarity in the sympathy of mankind, the touch of human nature that makes the whole world kin. Senator Root recently said that “the progress of civilization is marked by the destruction of isolation,” meaning, of course, by the drawing together of men through common ideas, interests, and even sorrows. It is no perfunctory thought that out of such calamities come many of the heroisms, the sacrifices, the lightning-like-flashes of spiritual revelation that ennoble humanity.
With becoming awe at what seems to have been unpreventable, it is sadly appropriate to inquire what might have been done in past years to lessen the recurrent tragedy of the western floods. To be sure, one cannot by a gesture bid the tempest stand, but nothing is more demonstrable than that the greed and neglect of man have greatly contributed to the destructiveness of floods. The devastation of the ax leads direct to the devastation of the waters. The excessive deforesting of Ohio and Indiana for a hundred years is no illusory or negligible factor in the crisis of death and desolation that has fallen upon those States.
In this magazine for August, 1912, in an article entitled “A Duty of the South to Itself,” written apropos of the Mississippi floods of last year, we renewed a suggestion which we first made in 1904 and have since several times repeated, looking toward the mitigation of the annual peril to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It presented the urgent necessity of setting on foot a policy of coöperation among the Eastern States to save from destruction the flood-restraining upper reaches of the entire Appalachian range. As a matter of public interest, this article was sent to all senators and members of Congress, to the Southern and other newspapers, and to the governors and Chambers of Commerce in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Although the suggestion was in the plainest conformity with scientific opinion, it apparently fell upon deaf ears. The imagination of no governor or legislator has been roused to the point of action. After we have reckoned up the cost of the recent floods in lives and money, shall we lie down again to pleasant dreams, oblivious of the fact that to sow neglect is to reap calamity?