When for slight reason a continent shakes with the tread of marching battalions, it is easy to fall into moral despair. We seem to confront a world-order that limits the sway of reason between nations, and gives full scope only to the hatreds and destructive ingenuities of mankind. In the wholesale deliberate slaughter of multitudes of men of good will, workers, lovers, husbands, fathers suddenly dedicated to systematic homicide of their fellows, piling up in blood and travail grievous burdens for their own children’s children—in such a spectacle the thoughtful mind at first finds only nightmare. And nightmare intolerable it is, if to the end of time a few out of pride or fear or sheer incapacity shall thus be able to decree the last sacrifice and swift death to the many.
In such moments of natural dejection, the mind must rally to its own defence. We live after all in a moral world. Intelligence has persisted and grown through worse occultations. The future may hold out hopes of a world-order in which the nightmare of the present cannot repeat itself. Meanwhile if we face the thing steadily in the light of its underlying causes, considering the moral issues involved, looking forward to the just retributions that the world will surely require of those who have shattered its peace, we may reëstablish in ourselves the sense of an overruling moral order, toward which we may each in his degree work. Such an inquiry into the responsibility for the war will lift the obsession of universal, insensate violence. Even the offenders are obeying race loyalty, and responding to certain obsolete ideals which yet are deeply grounded in history, while the defenders are vindicating the cause of the world’s peace by the only course left open to them. Against the brute law of strongest battalions, they have been forced to fight, that ideals of forbearance, comity, and honor may still be held among nations.
On the broader moral issue of the war, mankind has already spoken. The military isolation of Austria and Germany is no more marked than their moral isolation. In the history of warfare, has there ever been so uniform a verdict of the human race? Though instinctive and rapid, the sentiment may also be rationally grounded. Let us test it by an examination of the causes of the war.
What made the war possible is the fixed antipathy between impatient, ruling Germans and restless, subject Slavs. Such racial discord is naturally most acute in Austria, where a domineering Teuton minority holds in uneasy subordination the Slavs of Bohemia, Austrian Poland, and the Balkan and Adriatic range; but it is a distinct factor also in Prussia, where an embittered and losing campaign against Polish national feeling in the Posen region has long been waged. These disharmonies are an inevitable incident of expansion without the consent of the annexed peoples. The part of wise statesmanship is to bear much of this sort of opposition, trusting to healing process of just government and time. In Austria and Germany, however, these antipathies, were deliberately fomented by the war clique. The surest way of getting huge army appropriations is to show a foe or a rebel in being. In 1908 the unrest of all the Balkan Slavs was increased by Austria’s assuming permanent tenure of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where by treaty she had been exercising a temporary, police jurisdiction. The annexation extinguished national hopes, and while it undoubtedly established order, did so in arbitrary and oppressive fashion. The fact that Germany supported the annexation, intimidating the natural ally of the Balkan Slavs, Russia, accentuated the racial feud. The recent heroic struggle in the Balkans, which resulted in the aggrandizement of the Slavic powers of Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, naturally excited the Slavs under Austrian domination. Austria, on the other hand, had maintained a persistent hostility to her southern neighbors, and after the war, had by diplomatic means, and again aided by Germany, frustrated many of the legitimate hopes of Servia and Montenegro. An illogical and already derelict Albania, is the chief result of Austria’s dog in the manger policy. Her smouldering resentment against Servia was raised to an intense pitch by the deplorable assassination of the Crown Prince and his wife. It was an act as foolish as heinous, but it was also a natural product of arrogant and oppressive rule. Though the deed was done on Austrian soil, the assassins were Slavs, and the plot traceable to Belgrade, and this gave Austria the chance to hold Servia nationally responsible for the crime. She issued an ultimatum in which Servia was virtually required to avow responsibility for the outrage, to investigate and punish anti-Austrian agitators, and in such proceedings to admit Austrian officials. In effect, Servia was asked to plead guilty, on penalty of invasion, and to place her case in the hands of Austria as both prosecutor and judge.
The ultimatum of July 23, was outrageous, such as no state ever dreams of issuing to an equal. Weakened by two wars and apparently menaced by overwhelming force, Servia drank the cup, hesitating only at the last dregs. With the bulk of the Austrian demands she complied, demurring only to the waiver of her own national estate implied in alien interference with her police. Even this humiliating stipulation she offered to arbitrate. The reply of Austria was to set 300,000 troops across the Danube, and to shell the undefended city of Belgrade. The history of war has shown few more baseless aggressions. Austria had reckoned on Servia’s weakness, and on the willingness and ability of Germany, as in 1908, to hold off Russia. Austria unwittingly reckoned with forces to which Russia and Germany are small. The analogy of the Bosnian annexation was false. There the deed had been carefully prepared and delay had blunted the effect of the final move. This time Austria suddenly and without preparation outraged the moral sense of the world. The official plea is that in some mysterious way the Austro-Hungarian Empire was threatened in its very existence by the machinations of the Serbs at home and in the newly annexed Austrian provinces. That plea is hollow. Austria was neither more nor less in peril than she has been for sixty years; she was merely enduring a slight, however sensational, exaggeration of the chronic difficulties of dominion over alien and unwilling races. The reality is that Austria was incensed by the prosperity of the new Slavic nations in possessions that she had prospectively marked out as her own. To confuse ulterior ambitions with immediate rights is characteristic of the mentality of neo-Imperialism.
So far, for convenience, I have spoken of Austria and other powers as units, and with the usual rhetorical personification. The practice is misleading. When we say Austria, in the political sense, we mean a mere handful of high administrative and military officers, a few diplomats and journalists, a portion of a small and exclusive aristocracy, a pack of manufacturers of arms and military contractors, a rabble of speculators hoping out of troubled waters to fish extraordinary profits—that is political Austria, that with slight differences is the permanent war party in every nation. The peace of the world ultimately hangs on the nod of a few hundred individuals—men at best of intense, narrow, and backward-looking vision; at worst basely interested in the destruction of their fellow beings, accustomed to regard carnage as normal business. The problem of insuring the world’s peace is that of putting such men out of control, and replacing them by men who think the thoughts and feel the feelings of modern civilization. Incapacity to grasp the modern man, is the defect of the war caste everywhere. It indulges mediæval alarms, appeals to factitious loyalties, speaks an obsolete tongue. Politically Austria is still very much where Metternich left her. A crafty balancing off of the aspirations of new nationalities has been the method of consolidating the artificial sway of the Emperor. There has been a constant disregard, perhaps ignorance, of the generous motives that move in modern society. The aged and afflicted Emperor has many times shown himself to have an insight superior to that of his counsellors. Had the present emergency not caught him infirm in body and spirit, I believe the event would have been very different. Free from his controlling hand, the war machine has worked almost automatically its fitting product.
When we say Austria and Germany, we must distinguish clearly between the peasants of many tongues, the thrifty tradesmen, the ingenious manufacturers and hardy artisans, the scientists and scholars, the keen students of public betterment, the artists and musicians,—between these socially useful people with their women and children, upon whom falls the actual burden of this war,—and a little, complacent, opinionated minority, miseducated, aloof from the generous instincts of humanity, dead to the kindling enthusiasms of the new century,—a little complacent, pitiful, minority which from any outcome of the worst war reaps its private harvest of profit, promotion, and prestige. Any genuine representation of the real Austria and Germany would have made this war impossible, any adjustment looking to permanent peace must include the elimination of the misrepresentative administrators who have frivolously plunged a continent into war.
In a moral analysis of the causes of the war, the single ambiguous term is Russia. On the face of it she promptly rallied to the support of her fellow Slavs in Servia, by diplomatic protests at Berlin and Vienna and by mobilizing on the Austrian border. Humanitarian and political motives combined to force some kind of intervention. Without denying the bond of race, Russia could not permit any Slavic nation to be ruthlessly overborne. Honor in the highest sense and policy combined to dictate some such course as Russia actually took. The official statements of Austria and Germany waver between two attitudes. On the whole, the Austrian apologists condemn the Russian move as merely defective and unhappy in form. Had Russia not mobilized, the Servian situation might have been adjusted diplomatically. As things went, the provocative moves of Russia, forced similar precautions first on Austria, then on Germany, with the unforeseen result of a general war. The speech of the German Chancellor, however, echoes that of the Kaiser, in charging Russia with deliberately provoking Germany and Austria into war.
To me the issue, though evidently a crucial one,—for if Russia is deliberately making a war, most of the European world is being dragged into devil’s work,—is set in such technical fashion by the German manifestoes, that their own sincerity is open to doubt. It remains a somewhat interesting academic question what a Russian protest without mobilization might have effected. The obduracy of Germany in the face of more formidable military preparations by France and England, seems to indicate that a wholly pacific intervention by Russia would have effected little. On an alternative theory, Germany and Austria are fighting solely on a point of technical honor. They couldn’t “take a dare” from a threatening neighbor. Doubtless some of the arbiters of war in Germany and Austria did honestly so feel. But in so feeling they were parrotting the phrases and indulging the alarms of forty years ago.
The figment of a ruthlessly expansive Russia has today little reality behind it, but for militaristic ends it is still a most useful bugbear. Twice in a generation Russia has tasted the bitter fruits of heedless aggression. Today she is overtaxed, not merely by the arrears of these wars, but also by the great task of assimilating her present subjects. Her political situation at home is one of instability. Direct gain from venturing to support Servia, Russia had none to hope for. Twice she has stood aside while her sphere of influence in the Balkans was being repartitioned. In short, there is no conceivable reason why Russia should have invited war at this time, and every reason why she should have desired peace. Her mobilization must be interpreted in that light. Ostensibly it was done pari passu with similar preparations in Austria and Germany, but suppose she began first. Mobilization means just what those who order it mean. It is not per se an offence, much less a cause of war. Russia made most solemn protestations that she would fight only in the last resort. All the world except the Germans and Austrians believed these assurances.