Part 16 (1/2)
What other reasons Mr. Clarkson might have found were lost in the yelling of newsboys tearing down the Strand. Too excited to speak, the crowd engulfed them. The papers were torn from their hands. Short cries, short sentences followed. Here and there Mr. Clarkson caught an intelligible word: ”Revolvers taken at gate”; ”Expected Johnson would be shot if victorious”; ”Opening spar almost academic in its calmness”; ”Old wound on Jeffries's right eye opened”; ”Both cheeks gashed to the bone”; ”Jack handed out some wicked lefts”; ”Terrible gruelling”; ”Both shutters out of working order”; ”Defeat certain after eighth round”; ”Johnson hooked his left”; ”The Circa.s.sian remained on his knees”; ”Counting went on”; ”Fatal ten was reached.”
The crowd gasped. Then it shouted, it swore, it broke up swearing.
”Negroes had best crawl underground to-night,” said the American; ”it ain't good for negroes when their heads grow through their hair.”
”Another proof,” sighed Mr. Clarkson, ”another proof that, on Roosevelt's principle, the United States are unfit for self-government.”
When he reached his rooms it was nearly one, but a door opened softly on the top floor, and the landlady's little boy looked over the banisters and asked: ”Please, sir, did Jim win, sir?”
”Let me see,” said Mr. Clarkson, ”which was Jim?”
XXIII
PEACE AND WAR IN THE BALANCE[7]
When your Committee invited me to deliver the Moncure Conway address this year, I was even more surprised at their choice of subject than at their choice of person. For the chosen subject was Peace, and my chief study, interest, and means of livelihood for some twenty years past has been War. It seemed to me like inviting a butcher to lecture on vegetarianism. So I wrote, with regret, to refuse. But your Committee very generously repeated the invitation, giving me free permission to take my own line upon the subject; and then I perceived that you did not ask for the mere celebration of an established doctrine, but were still prepared to join in pursuit, following the track of reason wherever it might lead, as became the traditions of this cla.s.sic building, which I sometimes think of as reason's last lair. I perceived that what you demanded was not panegyric, or immutable commonplace, but, above all things, sincerity. And sincerity is a dog with nose to the ground, uncertain of the trail, often losing the scent, often harking back, but possessed by an honest determination to hunt down the truth, if by any means it can be caught.
It is one of my many regrets for wasted opportunity that I never heard Moncure Conway; but, with a view to this address, I have lately read a good deal of his writings. Especially I have read the _Autobiography_, an attractive record and commentary on the intellectual history of rapidly-changing years, most of which I remember. On the question of peace Moncure Conway was uncompromising--very nearly uncompromising.
Many Americans feel taller when they think of Lexington and the shot that echoed round the world. Moncure Conway only saw lynchers in the champions of freedom who flung the tea-chests into the sea; and in the War of Independence he saw nothing but St. George Was.h.i.+ngton spearing a George the Third dragon.[8] He quotes with approval the saying of Quaker Mifflin to Was.h.i.+ngton: ”General, the worst peace is better than the best war.”[9] Many Americans regard the Civil War between North and South with admiration as a stupendous contest either for freedom and unity, or for self-government and good manners. Moncure Conway was strongly and consistently opposed to it. The question of slavery did not affect his opposition. He thought few men had wrought so much evil as John Brown of Harper's Ferry, whose soul marched with the Northern Armies.[10] ”I hated violence more than slavery,” he wrote, ”and much as I disliked President Buchanan, I thought him right in declining to coerce the seceding States.”[11] Just before the war began, he wrote in a famous pamphlet: ”War is always wrong; it is because the victories of Peace require so much more courage than those of war that they are rarely won.”[12] ”I see in the Union War,” he wrote, ”a great catastrophe.”
”Alas! the promises of the sword are always broken--always.” And in the concluding pages of his _Autobiography_, as though uttering his final message to the world, he wrote:
”There can arise no important literature, nor art, nor real freedom and happiness, among any people until they feel their uniform a livery, and see in every battlefield an inglorious arena of human degradation.... The only cause that can uplift the genius of a people as the anti-slavery cause did in America is the war against war.”
For the very last words of his _Autobiography_ he wrote:
”And now, at the end of my work, I offer yet a new plan for ending war--namely, that the friends of peace and justice shall insist on a demand that every declaration of war shall be regarded as a sentence of death by one people on another; and shall be made only after a full and formal judicial inquiry and trial, at which the accused people shall be fairly represented.... The meanest prisoner cannot be executed without a trial. A declaration of war is the most terrible of sentences: it sentences a people to be slain and mutilated, their women to be widowed, their children orphaned, their cities burned, their commerce destroyed. The real motives of every declaration of war are unavowed and unavowable. Let them be dragged into the light! No war would ever occur after a fair judicial trial by a tribunal in any country open to its citizens.
”Implore peace, O my reader, from whom I now part. Implore peace, not of deified thunderclouds, but of every man, woman, or child thou shalt meet. Do not merely offer the prayer, 'Give peace in our time,' but do thy part to answer it!
Then, at least, though the world be at strife, there shall be peace in thee.”[13]
That sounds uncompromising. We cannot doubt that one of the main motives of Conway's life was ”War against War.” He suffered for peace; he lost friends and influence for peace; we may almost say he was exiled for peace. Those are the marks of sincerity. He, if anyone, we might suppose, was a ”Peace-at-any-price man.” But let us remember one pa.s.sage in an address delivered only a few months before his death. In that address, on William Penn, given in April 1907 (he died in the following November), speaking of Mr. Carnegie's proposal for a compulsory Court of International Arbitration, he said:
”In order to prevent swift attacks of one nation on another without notice, or outrages on weak and helpless tribes, there shall be selected from the armaments of the world a combination armament to act as the international police.... Even if in the last resort there were needed such united force of mankind to prevent any one nation from breaking the peace in which the interests of all nations are involved, that would not be an act of war, but civilisation's self-defence. Self-defence is not war, although the phrase is often used to disguise aggression.”[14]
Speaking with all respect for a distinguished man's memory, I disagree with every word of those sentences. An international police, directed by the combined Powers, would almost certainly develop into a tremendous engine of injustice and oppression. The Holy Alliance after Napoleon's overthrow aimed at an international police, and we want no more Holy Alliances. I would not trust a single government in the world to enter into such a combination. I would rather trust Satan to combine with sin.
Think of the fate of Egypt from Arabi's time up to the present, or of Turkey controlled by the Powers, or of Persia and Morocco to-day! But the point to notice is that you cannot alter things by altering names.
The united force of civilisation brought to bear upon any nation, however guilty, would be an act of war, however much you called it international police. Civilisation's self-defence would be war. Every form of self-defence by violence, whether it disguises aggression or not, is war. For many generations every war has been excused as self-defence of one kind or another. I can hardly imagine a modern war that would not be excused by both sides as defensive. By making these admissions--by maintaining that self-defence is not war--Moncure Conway gives away the whole case of the ”peace-at-any-price man,” He comes down from the ideal positions of the early Quakers, the modern Tolstoyans, and the Salvation Army. They preach non-resistance to evil consistently. Like all extremists who have no reservations, but will trust to their principle though it slay them, they have gained a certain glow, a fervour of life, which shrivels up our ordinary compromises and political considerations. But by advocating civilisation's self-defence in the form of a combined international armament, Moncure Conway abandoned that vantage ground. He became sensible, arguable, uncertain, submitting himself to the balances of reason and expediency like the rest of us.
A certain glow, a fervour of life--those are signs that always distinguish extremists--men and women who are willing literally to die for their cause. I did not find those signs at the Hague Peace Conference, when I was sent there in 1907 as being a war correspondent.
Such an a.s.sembly ought to have marked an immense advance in human history. It was the sort of thing that last-century poets dreamed of as the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. It surpa.s.sed Prince Albert's vision of an eternity of International Exhibitions. One would have expected such an occasion to be heralded by Schiller's _Ode to Joy_ sounding through the triumph of the Choral Symphony. Long and dubious has been the music's struggle with pain, but at last, in great simplicity, the voices of the men give out the immortal theme, and the whole universe joins in harmony with a thunder of exultation:
”Seid umschlungen, Millionen, Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”
Surely at the Hague Conference, in the fulfilment of time, peace had come on earth and goodwill among men. Here once more would sound the song that the morning stars sang together, when all the sons of G.o.d shouted for joy.
As loaders in that celestial chorus, I found about 400 frock-coated, top-hatted gentlemen from various parts of the world--elderly diplomatists, amba.s.sadors inured to the stifling atmosphere of courts, Foreign Ministers who had served their time of intrigue, professors who wors.h.i.+pped law, worthy officials primed with a stock of phrases about ”the n.o.ble sentiments of justice and humanity,” but reared in the deadening circle of uniforms, decorations, and insincere courtesy, having no more knowledge of the people's desires than of the people's bacon, and instructed to maintain the cause of peace chiefly by safeguarding their country's military interests. An atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy surrounded them, more dense than the fog of war.
For their president they elected an amba.s.sador who had grown old in the service of three Tsars, and now represented a tyrant who refused the first principles of peace to his own people, and repressed the struggle for freedom by methods of barbarism such as no general could use against a belligerent in the stress of war without incurring the execration of mankind.