The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE
Perhaps we cannot eliminate war. It seems so deeply rooted in human institutions! It is so easy to stir up hate, so hard to create understandings! Thus, in the late eighteenth century, the republican must have felt about the elimination of kings. The institution of monarchy appeared unassailable—the task seemed at times hopeless. And surely we cannot, unless we work up the zeal of those early republicans, make reasonable pacifism a governing motive in our political thinking and action.
Yet this reasonable pacifism had made progress, even before the late war. Peace, all the reference books will tell you, had in the nineteenth century cast off its old negative meaning and taken on a positive meaning. It was no longer regarded simply as the rest between wars; it was an end in itself. The Hague Conferences, powerless as they were to prevent either the great war or its barbarities, still showed that a great part of humanity wanted peace, would take much trouble to get it. We, by our relations with Latin America, proved how two continents might live in practical harmony. When Secretary of State Blaine called the first conference with Latin America, he set up a milestone on the road to permanent peace.
So strong indeed had become this desire and hope among most Western European nations that the very militarists among the Allies were forced during the late war to use the phrase “the war against war” in order to keep up the fighting spirit among their people. And when the war was over, the attempt to form a League of Nations afforded still another proof. I shall not enter into the late controversy. But the League was the work of politicians, all responsible to democracies for their jobs. They would never have made the attempt had they not believed that it would be popular.
The Peace of Versailles, imperfect though it may have been, proved in other ways how far we had moved beyond old conceptions of national glory. After former wars, the conquerors usually took over without shame the territory of the conquered, no matter how the inhabitants felt. Even as late as 1871, the neutrals did not protest officially and but very little unofficially when Germany seized the unwilling Alsace-Lorraine. But in the Peace of Versailles, European statesmen had to give at least lip-service to the principle that no nation or no part of a nation may permanently be held by a conqueror against the will of the inhabitants, Again: they did this because they were politicians, and had satisfied themselves that a new moral consciousness in mankind demanded a new conception of national rights and methods.
Back from the war came the plain men of the democracies old and new—thirty or forty millions of them. The greater part of them, and especially the thinking part, had been quarreling in their thoughts with the institution of war. If our returned soldiers felt this less than their European comrades, it was because they had borne a shorter strain and had needed less of the propaganda of peace through war to keep up their morale. The Société des Anciens Combatants in France corresponds to our American Legion. Lodge after lodge of that society in 1919 passed a resolution saying that their real object now is “la guerre à la guerre” (war against war). The rumor, spread by governments as a feeler, that the British and French armies were going to Russia to fight the Bolsheviki produced instant riots and mutinies. I witnessed the Ruhr Rebellion of April, 1920, in Germany. Now while this revolt was stirred up by the Communists, the average Ruhr insurgent, I found, was out primarily to end militarism. “If those soldiers have their own way,” said the men of the Ruhr, “we’ll be fighting the French again in two years. We don’t want any more wars.”
Yet so strange are these times that governments, supposed to be the expression of peoples, emerged from the Peace of Versailles more nationalistic, perhaps more belligerent, than ever before. Nationalism, the denial of peace, is running riot. Those returned soldiers, with all their pacifist sentiment, find themselves like the rest of humanity caught in a wheel. Jean the Frenchman does not want any more war. But the North lies devastated; until the fields of the Somme are bearing again, the chimneys of Picardy smoking, his shop will never do good business. Hans the miner of the Ruhr district got out his army Mauser last year and tried to shoot a reactionary officer in order to show that he wanted no more war. But Hans believes that the indemnity which France wants is excessive; he knows that if Germany pays it, he himself will have lower wages and higher taxes all his life. So Jean and Hans put their interests into the hands of the strong men of Europe—men with the old ideas, men whose conception of statesmanship is force unlimited. “His only scheme of politics,” said an American diplomat of an eminent European confrére, “is ‘send a division.’”
The pacifism of the returned European soldier, of the disgusted but submerged European civilian, is a somewhat abnormal state of mind. It resembles a little the psychology of a religious revival. Not even the most enthusiastic revivalist expects that his people will maintain permanently all those heights of fervor and virtue to which he has raised them. The wise church is the one which consolidates its gains; makes the revival or mission yield permanent fruit in sober, day-by-day piety, unselfishness and good living. If we let this moment pass, the nations will forget. The memories of the horrors, the destructions, the follies of Armageddon will die out as its debts are paid off, as the new generation grows up; and, as in old wars, only the souvenirs of its glories will remain.
Now, I repeat, is the appointed time to consolidate what Armageddon won for peace, and we, both actually and potentially the strongest nation of the world, are the appointed people.
Along what practical lines may we proceed?
Doubtless accumulated experience, translated into policies and action by men of genius, and leadership will find us new ways. But here are the courses of possible action on which many are thinking at present and a few working:
First and most drastically, we may create a real law, not a mere set of gentlemen’s agreements between nation and nation. That is the kernel of the matter.
Law is the set of agreements, backed up by some kind of force, to prevent murder and theft and injustice between the individuals of a tribe or a state. In the savage beginning of things, men probably killed whomsoever they wished, took whatsoever they desired. But people could not get along and make progress on that plan. An individual with the fighting endowments of a Jack Dempsey had it all his own way. Before long, men got together and drew up primary rules of the human game. You kept, we will say, the stone knife which you had chipped for yourself. No one might take it from you except he give an equivalent; no one might kill you except with certain definite excuses. It was further agreed that whoever broke this rule should be punished by the collective action of all the rest. No one man could thrash the Jack Dempsey of the tribe; but two or three men could, much more the whole tribe, That was the beginning of law and order—an understanding as to the rules of the game, an agreement to punish whoever broke those rules. Wise old David Lubin used to say that he believed this was also the beginning of morals. And indeed, even if there was in primitive man some inbred sense of kindness and of property right, that feeling never expressed itself in action until men drew up rules and agreed to back them by force.
Nearly everyone who thinks must have wondered at times why it is supremely wrong to kill a fellow citizen in time of peace, supremely right to kill a foreigner in time of war; why lying and deceit, despicable when used against your fellow-countryman, become noble when used against your national enemy. I have explained the reason. As soon as we organized states and tribes, we began to endow them with a personality, to give them a being. And between these beings the law did not run. They had never got together, to draw up rules of the game and provide penalties against the violators of this code of morals. Consequently, there were really no morals between states. If in times of peace nations refrained from murdering the citizens of other nations, from seizing their property, that was because they feared the disagreeable consequences involved in these acts. It was, again, like the state of primitive society before men made laws and organized a police force. When one primitive man respected his neighbor’s property, it was because he did not care to get into a fight. The process was too disagreeable; it was not worth while. But when his desire grew greater than his fears or when his blood was heated, he took or killed with at best only a vague sense of moral wrong.
But finally, when the law within nations became so perfectly established that murder, theft and arson grew uncommon, sporadic, it was as though the reservoir of morals filled up and began to flow over the dams dividing nations. Diplomats and others who represented sovereign states went on lying, deceiving, committing daily in peace or war acts which, performed by one citizen of a state against another, would have been punished by ostracism, jail or the gallows. And they justified themselves to themselves and their fellow-citizens because it was done for the flag, the Patrie, the Fatherland. The cause sweetened any method, But public opinion concerning some of these methods grew so strong as to force these gentlemen at least to hypocrisy. Since the state knows no morals in its relation with other states, a treaty used to be a sort of temporary agreement for temporary advantage. You kept it because it did not suit your convenience to break it. If a treaty became no longer convenient to one party or the other—well, kings used to tear up treaties and feel very little necessity for apology or explanation. When Germany violated one of her most solemn treaties and invaded Belgium, she broke, really, no moral law. Do not believe that the cynical diplomats of the Entente Allies blamed her in their hearts. But peoples did blame her. The moral sense of individuals the world over rose against such an act; a man who behaved in this way counted himself out of society; why not a nation, too? The one fact which German propaganda could never explain away was the invasion of Belgium; it is perhaps the spiritual reason why Germany lost the war.
So we have already the moral basis for law between nations; at present, however, it is a force, not a power, because it has no machinery to make it useful. It is like the potential electricity going to waste in a mountain river. This force will not become power, will not turn wheels, run railroads and light cities, until you harness it—create for it some machinery.
We shall not strike at the root of wars until we organize fifty or sixty sovereign nations and self-governing colonies of the world somewhat as we organize individuals in a tribe or state or nation. In plain, human terms, they must get together, pass laws to define and forbid national murder and national burglary, and agree to punish, with their collective force, any violator of that law.
The punishment need not wholly, need not mainly, consist in physical force. The discussions preceding the League of Nations showed, theoretically at least, that a general economic boycott might be as effective as military action. This follows a rule of progress in human society. Once, law knew only one kind of penalty for crime—physical action. The criminal was killed or mutilated or flogged. In the eighteenth century, the English would hang a man for stealing six shillings. We have done away with flogging and mutilation, have abolished hanging except for the gravest crimes. We have substituted imprisonment and fine. Think it out and you will see that imprisonment is mostly an economic penalty, as a fine is wholly an economic penalty.
This book, I repeat, is not a plea for or against the existing League of Nations. Call your organization a League of Nations, an association of nations, a Hague Tribunal “with teeth in it”—call it what you will, organize it how you will. This is the specific for the disease of war. But while we wait for this inevitable organization to form and to become effective, we may use a few pain-killers and poultices.
Among these, the most important is disarmament—a pressing, vital question of the moment. Behind the present agitation lies a compelling economic motive. Europe cannot recover if she goes on with the old race for armaments. She will collapse under the double burden. The world is so interlocked that if Europe blows up in anarchy we, though we hold together, must suffer terribly. An agreement to limit armies and navies to the point where they cannot be used aggressively can probably be enforced. We have no formal law between nations, it is true; but that uncharted moral opinion of democracies is perhaps powerful enough to secure a rough working agreement until we get something better. It cannot be done without the consent—indeed without the leadership—of the United States. We have as much economic and industrial power to manufacture navies and munitions as any three European nations, more population to furnish soldiers than any two Western European nations. If we arm to the teeth, the rest must follow through fear.
Such partial disarmament will serve not only as temporary alleviation; it will be also in the nature of a remedy. Whatever movement sets the nations thinking positively about peace, whatever forces them into co-operation instead of competition, makes toward their final, complete understanding. Finally, it will prevent the psychological drift toward war which comes with perfected armaments.
If I have anywhere made it appear that the term “militarist” 1s equivalent to the term “professional soldier,” I have done the military clan a wrong. Only lately our two most eminent soldiers, Bliss and Pershing, have come out flatly for a disarmament program. They admit that it will not be easy; and no more will it. You cannot complete the job with a Congressional resolution and a flourish of the pen. Too many eminent gentlemen in all nations have something to gain by the race of armaments. But it is a first necessary step.
Then, even before we have a league, association or effective High Court of Nations, we may get at some of the economic causes for war.
The “financial imperialism” which brought on the Great War had three wholly commercial objects—trade, raw materials, export of capital. The struggle for trade—for profitable foreign markets—is, in the opinion of many economists, the least dangerous of the three. For while it is a cause of friction, it has also a pacific tendency. When two nations begin to trade with each other, there follow personal acquaintance and a community of interest. We saw that at the beginning of the Great War, when many Americans in the exporting business sincerely took sides either with Germany or England because they had with Germans or Englishman business relations and personal acquaintance. The most dangerous factor in national trade is tariffs. I am not preaching for or against tariffs. But they can be so drawn as to take unfair advantage, to work injustice against some given nation. The tariff is no longer purely a domestic question. We must draw our schedules no longer with an eye solely on immediate national prosperity; we must consider them also in the light of good and just international relations.
Some kind of international agreement concerning the distribution of raw materials seems necessary to permanent peace. If any great nation should in this year corner the international supply of flax, for example, the great linen industry of Belgium would be ruined; for Belgium raises only a little domestic flax. Italy has most expert and intelligent workmen, together with certain other manufacturing advantages; she has no coal nor iron ore. Shut off coal and iron from Italy and the Valley of the Po knows acute distress. No longer should any nation or combinations of nations be allowed to monopolize any imported raw material.
Finally: the advantageous export of capital was perhaps the main object of financial imperialism and so one of the main causes for the late war. In the intense struggle at home, your capital would yield you only three or four or five per cent. Put into a new, undeveloped country, it might yield you—anything. Only it would not return its big interest-rate for long if other capitalists in other nations themselves saw the chance, came in, and competed. The game of the international flotation houses which represented national surplus capital was to keep their “sphere of influence” exclusive. This was the chief commercial object of the huge armaments, the rattling of swords when diplomacy ran into a deadlock. Before the Great War that process was running a dangerous course in China. Here, you were in a British “sphere of influence”; in general non-British capital was not wanted, could not get a foothold. Here, the influence was German; here, French. And the nations were jockeying to extend their sphere further and further into China—without regard of course for the feelings of the inhabitants.
Some internationalization of export capital seems necessary to permanent peace. This may come through an association of nations; it may come before that association is effective through action of the great flotation houses. Most banking men want peace; war is too disturbing, armaments are too costly. But in strategic control of the world’s financial interests before the war were too many ruthless adventurers allied with the military and financial adventurers. Banking also was caught in a wheel. There are the signs that sober sense is coming into this business. The “Chinese consortium” is an association of the capital of many nations for investment in China. It may be open to criticism on some grounds; but let us give credit where credit is earned. Such an arrangement tends to do away with “spheres of influence,” with the seeming necessity for keeping up armament and a state of passive warfare in order to protect export capital. It squares with the international finance of the future.
Last but not least, we Americans have it in our power to abolish that secret diplomacy which, everyone agrees, makes toward wars. We cannot have much secret diplomacy ourselves, since all our international agreements must be thrashed out and ratified in the Senate, and so published. The trend of the period, fortunately, is against the gum-shoe method of arriving at national understandings which become in due time misunderstandings. Really, monarchs before the great war had not nearly so much irresponsible power as diplomats; and the right to conceal their agreements from their people was their best tool. That is changing. Great Britain, once as much a sinner as the rest, has but lately registered and published with the League of Nations the twenty-one treaties and agreements which she has made since the war, has given her national word of honor that she is holding nothing back. Even before we enter some kind of association of nations, we have probably the power to end much of the secret diplomacy. We need merely announce that we will not recognize any treaty which has not been published to the world.
Yet—returning to the kernel of the matter—we, the citizens of the world, shall not find that the organization of law between nations is enough in itself to keep peace; just as within the nations of the world law alone is not enough to prevent crime and establish order. You may happen to see this morning a beautiful automobile which you would like to own, standing unlocked and unguarded. Why don’t you jump in and drive away? First, because you fear disagreeable consequences from the law, The police will chase you, probably catch you, eventually put you in jail. But is that the only reason? No; you are restrained by an instinct first implanted in your little, savage bosom at your mother’s knee, and intensified by your whole education—the feeling that it is wrong to steal. In order to keep society together, we need both these forces.
So it goes with this question of order and morality among nations. We need the law; we need also personal ethics—international morality. By the forces of light which we have—churches, schools, all associations of men for spiritual and intellectual ends—we need to strengthen the belief that a state, including your own, can do wrong, that between nations there is such a thing as live and let live, that humanity is greater than mere race.
This does not mean abolishing the sentiment of patriotism. There are two conceptions of that noble old emotion. One ends at the mental condition of Germany in 1914—the state for the state’s sake, your hand ever on your sword to protect her honor and her interests, though every person in the state be rendered less happy by the process. The other regards the nation as an agency for the greatest good of the greatest number. He who follows this conception takes his pride not in his nation’s hollow victories of arms but in her achievements of order, common prosperity, art, science, industry. The one is the old-fashioned patriotism, grown in the twentieth century to a world-menace; the other is the patriotism of the future.
Again let me make a human comparison. In all times poets have sung of the nation as the Mother, of its citizens as her sons and daughters. Now you may interpret your love for your mother in two ways, one sane, the other a little insane. You may work peacefully to keep her happy and well-housed and well-fed. This, I suppose, states the attitude of most of us toward our mothers. But of course you may go round with a pistol in your pocket, always ready to start a fight with anyone who may say that she is not the best of mothers, or watching for an opportunity to hold up a shop and steal the fur coat which she happens to want. So, I suppose, the savage expressed his love for his mother in the days before the law; in recent ages we have had less and less patience with this form of filial devotion.