The decline in the physique of the average man in France has been usually cited in evidence of this tendency. But the same causes have produced like effects in every warlike nation, and the decline in stature is one of the least important of the results of reversal of selection. These changes are just as marked in England and Scotland, as in France, and they are not wanting in Germany. The loss of dash and initiative is one of these results. Havelock Ellis observes: "The reckless Englishmen who boldly sailed out from their little island to fight the Spanish Armada were long ago exterminated; an admirably prudent and cautious race has been left alive." Better men would make better history. Braver men would not cower at the war scares of to-day. Men of character and initiative would not wallow in the London slums. The sons of those war could not use, swell the records of pauperism. It is not the strength of the strong but the weakness of the weak that invites and perpetuates paternalism and tyranny, two names for the same thing. "Slaves may have wrongs, but only free men have rights."
Another count against the War System, not unrelated to this, is its pollution of the blood of the race. The "White Slave Traffic" goes with the "Conscription Act," both outgrowths of the War System. Army movement and barrack life have been leading, though not exclusive, causes of the widespread diffusion of infectious diseases, one of the most alarming features of civilization to-day.
Another count against war, as yet scarcely realized, is found in the vandalisms by which it has destroyed so much of worth as well as of intellectual importance in the art and the architecture of the past. War respects nothing. It was German bombs which burned the library at Strassburg. The devastation of the art world is chargeable to war. As I write this there rise before me the paintings in the gallery at Munich, of the twenty-one cities of Greece, from Sparta to Corinth, from Eleusis to Salamis, not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets by the blue Ægean Sea, not as they were in the days of the glory of Greece—but as ruined arches and broken columns, half buried in the ashes of war, the war which blotted out Greece from the world history.
It is plain that sooner or later such a system must come to an end. The influences that have abolished cannibalism, slavery, and religious persecution must in the end do away with international war. It seems also clear that this result will not be obtained primarily in any direct way by official action. The administrators of nations must follow public opinion rather than create it. Where public opinion demanded the burning of witches, the officials had only to see that it was done decently and in order. At the most, they could only limit the number to be consumed on any one occasion.
What is our line of attack on the War System?
For the suppression of war we must have a public opinion. And this opinion must not rest only on the fact that war is brutal and hideous. That is only half the struggle. There are many good men to whom the brutal is also the heroic, and still others to whom evil methods are condoned by success. We must further convince the world, that is, the common man, the man on the street, that modern war attacks his pocket.
The modern phases of the Peace Movement differ from the earlier ones in being educational rather than emotional. The early workers were convinced that war was wicked and unholy, and with this they were usually content to rest their case.
With the same conviction as to the immorality of war, in the bottom of his heart, the modern worker tries to find the facts. What is the historical evolution of war? What are its effects, economic, biological, moral? What can be found as a national substitute? And side by side with the study of war and war problems, rises the fabric of international law. We may not say that the modern method is more righteous than the earlier, or even more effective. But the treatment of the subject from all its various points of view, and not mainly from that of morals and religion, reaches a much wider audience and has a more immediate effect upon public opinion.