Volume II Part 20 (1/2)
2. It will unhorse our cranks and soft-brains.
3. It will make us less promiscuously hospitable to every kind of immigrant;
4. It will reestablish in our minds and conscience and policy our true historic genesis, background, kindred, and destiny--i.e., kill the Irish and the German influence.
5. It will revive our real manhood--put the molly-coddles in disgrace, as idiots and dandies are;
6. It will make our politics frank and manly by restoring our true nationality;
7. It will make us again a great sea-faring people. It is this that has given Great Britain its long lead in the world;
8. Break up our feminized education--make a boy a vigorous animal and make our education rest on a wholesome physical basis;
9. Bring men of a higher type into our political life.
We need waking up and shaking up and invigorating as much as the Germans need taking down.
There is no danger of ”militarism” in any harmful sense among any English race or in any democracy.
By George! all these things open an interesting outlook and series of tasks--don't they?
My staff and I are asking everybody what the Americans can best do to help the cause along. The views are not startling, but they are interesting.
_Jellicoe_: More s.h.i.+ps, merchant s.h.i.+ps, any kind of s.h.i.+ps, and take over the patrol of the American side of the Atlantic and release the British cruisers there.
_Balfour_: American credits in the United States big enough to keep up the rate of exchange.
_Bonar Law_: Same thing.
_The military men_: An expeditionary force, no matter how small, for the effect of the American Flag in Europe. If one regiment marched through London and Paris and took the Flag to the front, that would be worth the winning of a battle.
Think of the vast increase of territory and power Great Britain will have--her colonies drawn closer than ever, the German colonies, or most of them, taken over by her, Bagdad hers--what a way Germany chose to lessen the British Empire! And these gains of territory will be made, as most of her gains have been, not by any prearranged, set plan, but as by-products of action for some other purpose. The only people who have made a deliberate plan to conquer the earth--now living--are the Germans. And from first to last the additions to the British Empire have been made because she has been a first-cla.s.s maritime power.
And that's the way she has made her trade and her money, too.
On top of this the President speculates about the danger of the white man losing his supremacy because a few million men get killed! The truth is every country that is playing a big part in the war was overpopulated. There will be a considerable productive loss because the killed men were, as a rule, the best men; but the white man's control of the world hasn't depended on any few million of males. This speculation is far up in the clouds. If Russia and Germany really be liberated from social and political and industrial autocracy, this liberation will bring into play far more power than all the men killed in the war could have had under the pre-war regime. I observe this with every year of my observation--there's no subst.i.tute for common-sense.
The big results of the war will, after all, be the freedom and the stimulation of men in these weary Old-World lands--in Russia, Germany itself, and in England. In five or ten years (or sooner, alas!) the dead will be forgotten.
If you wish to make a picture of the world as it will be when the war ends, you must conjure up such scenes as these--human bones along the Russian highways where the great retreat took place and all that such a sight denotes; Poland literally starved; Serbia, blasted and burned and starved; Armenia butchered; the horrible tragedy of Gallipoli, where the best soldiers in the world were sacrificed to politicians' policies; Austria and Germany starved and whipped but liberalized--perhaps no king in either country; Belgium--belgiumized; northern France the same and worse; more productive Frenchmen killed in proportion to the population perhaps than any other country will have lost; Great Britain--most of her best men gone or maimed; colossal debts; several Teutonic countries bankrupt; every atrocity conceivable committed somewhere--a h.e.l.l-swept great continent having endured more suffering in three years than in the preceding three hundred. Then, ten years later, most of this suffering a mere memory; governments reorganized and liberalized; men made more efficient by this strenuous three years'
work; the fields got back their bloom, and life going on much as it did before--with this chief difference--some kings have gone and many privileges have been abolished. The lessons are two--(1) that no government can successfully set out and conquer the world; and (2) that the hold that privilege holders acquire costs more to dislodge than any one could ever have guessed. That's the sum of it. Kings and privilege mongers, of course, have held the parts of the world separate from one another. They fatten on provincialism, which is mistaken for patriotism. As they lose their grip, human sympathy has its natural play between nations, and civilization has a chance. With any Emperor of Germany left the war will have been half in vain.
If we (the U.S.A.) cultivate the manly qualities and throw off our cranks and read our own history and be true to our traditions and blood and get some political vigour; then if we emanc.i.p.ate ourselves from the isolation theory and from the landlubber theory--get into the world and build s.h.i.+ps, s.h.i.+ps, s.h.i.+ps, s.h.i.+ps, and run them to the ends of the seas, we can dominate the world in trade and in political thought.
You know I have moments when it occurs to me that perhaps I'd better give whatever working years I may have to telling this story--the story of the larger meaning of the war. There's no bigger theme--never was one so big.
Affectionately,
W.H.P.