Part 11 (1/2)
The Latin ideal is not predatory. Whatever they may have done in their past, the Latin peoples to-day are not greedy of conquest. If the Allies win, France will gain little territory. Both Italy and France have limited their territorial ambitions to securing their future safety by establis.h.i.+ng frontiers on natural barriers. France also expects indemnity for her huge losses and for outraged Belgium.
She must rebuild her home and be freed for generations to come from the inhibiting fear of invasion. One does not feel so confident of England: in the past she has had the pilfering hand. But from prudence if not from shame England may content herself with a reestablished prestige and a tranquil Europe. Russia has already reconciled herself to relinquis.h.i.+ng Poland, and except for her natural ambition to enter the Mediterranean she seems without predatory desires. Russia, it should not be forgotten, took up arms to protect her own kin from the Austrians. The Slav and the Latin have a spiritual sympathy that cannot exist between the Latin and the Teuton, which gives their present union more than an accidental significance.
Whatever secret ambitions may be brewing in the chancelleries of Europe, France has put herself on record against conquest too emphatically to countenance at the peace conference any predatory rearrangement of the map of Europe. She has made the great war a struggle of principle--the principle of national liberty against the principle of military conquest. It is this great principle which gives significance to her cause and justifies the awful slaughter and waste of bleeding Europe. If the pretensions of physical might, no matter with what excuses, can be thoroughly defeated, proved to be an impossible theory of life, so that never again in the history of the world will a nation attempt to take with the sword what does not belong to it, the b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice will have been well worth making.
The issues of the great conflict have been obscured, especially in America, but to the humblest soldier of France they are as clear as blazing sunlight. ”Never again!” Never the monstrous pretension that power alone makes right, that the will to eat gives free license to the eater, however great his appet.i.te or his belief in himself. That is the cause of all the world, for which the French are willing to give all that they have. And I know no cause more important to be settled for the future of the human race.
Are we not interested in the right decision of this cause? A peaceable people, loving our own way, jealous of interference, we should a.s.suredly present a lamentable spectacle were we called upon to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy. Possibly a more lamentable spectacle of inefficiency combined with corruption than England has given the world the past year! And at last we are becoming aware that our policy of selfish isolation does not mean immunity from attack. We are realizing that those ”three thousand miles of cool sea-water” no longer make an effectual barrier against the ingenuity of modern men.
But I would not put the matter on the selfish basis of our own security. It is vastly larger than that. It is, vitally, what manner of world we wish to have for ourselves and our children.
At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with splendid unanimity the response: Americans did not want the German world! Since then, alas, it would seem that the clear moral reaction of our people to the demonstration of the world struggle has been gradually weakening: we are becoming confused, permitting insidious reasoners to cloud the issue, listening to the prompting of the beast in our own bellies, hesitating, dividing, excusing, evading the great question--”seeing both sides.” As if there were two sides to such a plain issue stripped of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color of German ideals? Do we prefer the ”old German G.o.d” to the culture and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... ”We, too, have sinned.” In our blood is all the crude materialism of a triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We, too, are ready to enter the fierce war of commercial rivalry with England and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of economic expansion, though dubious about our own imperialism. Surely no people that ever lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the crossroads as America at this hour. Prudence has prevented us as a nation from p.r.o.nouncing that moral verdict on the cause which might have had decisive weight in hastening the world decision. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent us individually from realizing the immense importance to us of the decision that is being ground out in the tears and blood of Europe.
And no ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Americans who care for anything but their own selfish well-being from doing all in their power to make ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world.
Every soldier who dies in the trenches of France, who bears a maimed and disfigured body through life, is giving himself for us, so that we may live in a world where individual rights and liberties are respected, where beauty of conduct and beauty of art may endure, where life means more than the satisfaction of bodily appet.i.tes.
III
_Peace_
The real cynics of the war are the pacifists. They see nothing more serious in the European agony than what can be disposed of easily at any time in a peace conference--by talk and adjustment. So obsessed are some of them by the slaughter of men, by the woe and travail of Europe, that they would turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque farce by any sort of compromise--a peace that could be no peace, merely the armistice for further war. Their eyes are so blinded by the economic waste of the war and its suffering that they are incapable of seeing the great underlying principle that must be decided. Americans, having evaded the responsibility of p.r.o.nouncing a decisive moral judgment on the rape of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the extermination of the Armenians, play the buffoon with women's peace conferences, peace s.h.i.+ps, and endless impertinent peace talk.
We, who have forfeited our right to sit at the peace conference, who are busily making money off the war, having prudently kept our own skins out of danger, are officiously ready with proposals of peace.
What a peace! The only peace that could be made to-day would be a dastardly treason to every one of the millions whose blood has watered Europe, to every woman who has given a son or a father or a husband to the settlement of the cause. The parochialism of the American intelligence has never been more humiliatingly displayed than in the activities of our busy peacemakers.
No sane person believes in war. The sordidness and the horror of war have never been so fully revealed as during this past year. War has been stripped of its every romantic feature. Modern war is worse than h.e.l.l--it is pure insanity. We do not need peace foundations, peace conferences, peace s.h.i.+ps to demonstrate the awfulness of war. But crying peace, thinking peace, willing peace will not bring peace unless conditions that make peace exist. Here in America we use the word peace too loosely, as if it meant some absolute state of being which we had achieved through our innate wisdom rather than from the happy accident of our world position. But peace is an entirely relative term, as any one who has given heed to the social conditions we have created should realize. We have enjoyed a certain kind of peace, the value of which is debatable. And now, alarmed at the exposed condition of our eastern seaboard, we are agitatedly preparing to arm to protect ourselves--from what? From Germany? Or is it from England? And still we recommend an instant peace to Europe!
Awful as are the waste and suffering caused by war, hideous as modern warfare is, there are worse evils for humanity. To my thinking the perpetuation of the lawless, materialistic creed of the new Germany would be infinitely worse for the world than any war could be. When the German tide broke into Belgium and poured out over northern France, sweeping all before it, killing, burning, raping, the pacifists no doubt would have accepted the conqueror as the will of G.o.d and have made peace then!... There are none more eager for peace than the soldiers in the trenches who are giving their lives to press back the barbarian flood. But no peace until their ”work has been done, the cause won.” I have heard Americans express the fear that European civilization is in danger of annihilation from the prolonged conflict. Even that were preferable to submission to the wrong ideal.
But I see, rather, the possibility of a higher civilization through the settlement of fundamental principles, the reaffirmation of necessary laws. It is surely with this abiding faith that the enormous sacrifices are being freely made by the allied nations. ”It is of little importance what happens to us,” a Frenchman said to me in Rheims, whose home had been destroyed that morning, whose son had already been killed in the trenches. ”There will be a better world for the generations to come because of what we have endured.” That is what the American pacifist cannot seem to understand--the necessity of present sacrifice for a better future, the cost in blood and agony of ultimate principles.
This war is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic existence under degenerating influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in our armchairs at the thought of ”cannon food,” but why not shudder equally at the words ”factory food,” ”mine food,” and ”sweat-shop food”? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious of the lives ground out in industrial compet.i.tion all about us.
Between the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of suppressing human lives, the battle method may be the more humane--I should prefer it for myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire is not so much peace as bloodlessness. We should be honest enough to recognize that for many human beings,--possibly a majority even in our prosperous, war-free society,--a violent death may not be by any means the worst event. And it may be the happiest if the individual is convinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help others to realize a better life. That is the hope, the faith of every loyal soldier who dies for his country, of every soldier's father and mother who pays with a son for the endurance of those ideals more precious than life itself.
The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete sacrifice. There are many who have ”fallen on the field of honor”