WAR PROPHETS

The war is generating prophets as the Nile generated frogs under the mandate of Moses, and there is a similarity in the speech of both products. The prophets are too cautious to risk their reputation in predicting the events of the war; their forecasts relate to the sort of a world we shall find ourselves in after peace returns. But even this measure of prediction is a by-product of the soothsayers who, whether their lips have been touched with a coal from off the altar, or not, certainly wield the pen of the ready writer. The main industry of the busy prophets is to expound to us the meaning of the war, and to disclose to us those causes of the war which we should never have discovered for ourselves.

The ordinary uninspired man feels when he has read the diplomatic correspondence of a couple of weeks at the end of July and the beginning of August, 1914, that he knows fairly well what were the immediate causes of the war, and where the responsibility lies. If he carries his reading back as far as the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he is satisfied that he has a pretty comprehensive view of the forces that precipitated the war. And if he has read pretty abundant selections from the Pan-German literature and the panegyrics on war—such a literature as no branch of the human race, Christian or pagan, ever produced before—he thinks he understands how it was possible to plunge the German nation into this attack on the world.

But all this is merely a matter of reading and reflection. Any one can reach such conclusions. The prophet must reach some different conclusion in order to sustain his claim to inspiration:

The prophet has got to attribute the war to causes that would not have occurred to the common mortal, and see in it meanings that ordinary eyes cannot trace, or abdicate his tripod.

It is equally unreasonable and equally immoral to say that the war proves that Christianity is a failure, and to say that it proves Christianity has never been tried. Because if either of these hypotheses be correct, one set of belligerents is as deep in the mud as the other is in the mire, and there is no personal culpability for this war, and no national culpability either. We are all guilty of not being Christians, or all unfortunate in having grown up in ignorance of revelation, and beyond that there is no blame for the war.

If this war is not the result of certain perfectly well known individuals using their own nations for an attack on others, but is the result of impersonal enmity between Teuton and Slav, then no person or persons are responsible for the war, there is no more blame on one side than there is on the other, and the moral element is as lacking as it is in an encounter between the inhabitants of the jungle. It is a curious thing that the prophet assumes the role of a moral censor, and devotes much the greater part of his energies to confusing the moral issues, to obliterating moral distinctions, and to blunting the ethical sense.

To condemn all war, which is a congenial theme for a moralist, is rank immorality; for it puts the nation that attacks, and the nation that repels the invader, in the same category, and refuses to make any distinction between the burglar, the householder who resists him, and the policeman who overpowers him and drags him away to jail.

The prophet readily drops his eye on armies, and at once announces that it is their existence that accounts for the war. If there were no armies there would possibly be no wars, but we have shown more than once that armies can be pretty rapidly extemporized. Besides, this, too, confuses the moral issues. All nations have armies, and if America and England had relatively small armies before this war, they had the largest navy in the world and the navy which ranked second or third. The highwayman carries a pistol, and so does the paymaster who is obliged to transport a treasure chest. If the possession of a revolver was the cause of the homicide that occurred, the guilt lies equally on the souls of both.

We are told that no truth is more certain than that “if you create a vast fighting machine it will sooner or later compel you to fight, whether you want to fight or not”—which is about as dubious a truth as was ever paraded as an axiom—that “these vast machines, whether armies or engines of war, are made to be used,” and that “the military machine will overpower the minds which have called it into being.” Then their responsibility is not for the ensuing war, but for carelessness in leaving a war weapon around. But if these vast military machines were made to be used, then why complicate the question of responsibility by representing the machine as overpowering its careless but really peaceful creator, and compelling him to fight whether he wants to fight or not?

If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince and the General Staff and the military caste and the Pan-German element created the army to use against other nations, in accordance with Bernhardi’s alternative of “world domination or decline,” and if all the professors and preachers and pamphleteers had taught the people that war was a high, holy, and beautiful thing, and—more particularly—that Germany could beat any other nation in a few weeks, and the armies would return loaded down with spoils and indemnities and title deeds to new provinces, and that “our good old German God” had specially deputized the German nation to overpower all the rest of the world, make German the universal tongue, and the primitive moral code of Germany the ethical law of the world, then we know precisely who is guilty of this war. But if the German army compelled the German Government to back Austria in an attack on Servia, and on its own account to invade Russia, Belgium and France, we are very much at sea about the place where the moral burden is to be laid.

The prophet is particularly prone to find the causes of the war in a material civilization, in our existing industrial system, and especially in greed. The prophet and the political orator are equally stern in their denunciation of greed. At a time when prophets were so accustomed to physical exercise that they could run ahead of Ahab’s chariot, and in the absence of normal sources of supply, were fed by the ravens, their indignation at greed, their contempt for commerce, and their superiority to a material civilization, was free from incongruity. The modern prophet does not live on locusts and wild honey, nor is his wardrobe limited to a belt of camel’s hair. His uncompromising denunciation of his age is somewhat impaired by the obvious fact that he has “some of the pork.”

The deliverances of the prophet on this class of themes are rather tiresome in their iteration, and distinctly irritating in their oblivion to history. There is no civilization that does not rest upon the possession and acquisition of property; there is no clime or time in which men have not worked for their living, and sought the means of buying the things which their tastes, coarse or refined, craved, in which there have not been rich and poor, and in which it has not been much pleasanter to be the former than the latter. The earliest social satirist, like the latest, berated the accursed greed for gold, and castigated his contemporaries for their love of luxury and their eager pursuit of money. It would seem as if the prophet might recognize that it is a very old sermon he is preaching, and familiarize himself with the extraordinary age of those evils of his own day which he feels it his mission to chastise.

What distinguishes this age from others, and our own country from others is that here and now wealth is acquired more easily and more rapidly than at other times and places. This being the very obvious fact, it shakes our confidence in the whole fraternity of prophets that they should, one and all, attribute the larger fortunes made here and now to the greater love of money, or its more assiduous pursuit. The rich man is more successful in amassing wealth than the poor man, but he is not more mercenary. Two men try equally hard to get rich; one succeeds, and the other fails; the man who failed is quite likely to be more eager for money than the man who succeeded.

The industrial system never meets the approval of the prophet. An occasional prediction is that the war will destroy our deplorable economic life, in which every man is trying to get as high wages or as large a salary or as ample profits as possible, and will usher in the golden age, in which such base considerations as pecuniary compensation will have a very secondary place in every man’s mind. Before this war came, the most eminent educator in America assured the workingman that he ought to work for the pleasure of it, and not for the contents of his Saturday night envelope. Such admonitions have occurred, in one form or another, in the literature of the sages, for centuries and millenniums. But it was never evolved by a man who was digging postholes, and a noble ambition to mine the very best coal cannot carry a miner far when he is obliged to cut such coal as there is in front of him.

It is barely possible that by devoting some weeks to the task, a man could produce a pair of shoes notably superior to the ordinary run of shoes, and his professional pride as a devout follower of St. Crispin might take keen delight in the work of his hands; in the fact that he had made the very finest pair of shoes in the world. But, after all, he needs food, and possibly he is obliged to pay rent, and he ought to have a wife to make comfortable, and children to send to school in presentable form: so something besides pride in his work is necessary. If he is to be adequately compensated for his labor on that pair of shoes, their price will be such that only the rich—if the rich are to be permitted to survive—can buy them; and if such shoemakers prevail, the greater part of mankind will go barefoot. For does not the prophet who has poured out the phials of his wrath upon an economic system that makes quantity and cheapness, instead of real excellence, its ideals, recognize that the purpose of quantity is to supply the wants of a greater number of human beings, and the purpose of cheapness is to enable human beings to supply more of their needs? For certainly if the shoes which are the very best shoes in the whole world, and whose excellence affords the keenest satisfaction to the soul of the shoemaker, cost $50, then it is quite certain that the customer who carries them home will go without many other things that he ought to have. If the shoes are made by machinery and sold for $3, they may not be quite so beautiful or durable as the artistic product of hand labor, regardless of time, and yet be in the interest of the customer and the community.

After the prophet has got through with his ravings at the present industrial system, the fact will remain that there are a good many millions of us on this earth, and that we have got to earn our livings, and that the agriculture and industries of the Middle Ages would not keep all of us alive. In addition to which, we may also venture to suggest that the people of the Middle Ages were not quite as honest as we are, and were not less particular about getting a financial return for their exertions. The modern industrial system was not created by capital for capitalists; it is the result of the efforts of the community as a whole to supply the needs of all of its members, and to afford employment to all of them. Hunting and fishing are pleasanter than most of the industries, but 100,000,000 of civilized people are living and are equipped with intellectual and moral accessories, where a quarter of a million Indians once roamed. And although they toiled not (systematically), neither did they spin (much), they were not happier or better than we are.

One prophet of more discrimination than most of his clan admits that the industry and thrift which produce capital are valuable qualities morally, but he is still confident that the great wealth of the modern world is thoroughly demoralizing. Whence it appears that the safe course for the world to pursue is to work hard and save carefully and burn up its accumulations every year in order to keep itself poor but pious, like the parents of the subjects of a style of religious biography now quite out of date. Of course this prophet would prefer the wiser course of not earning enough to afford wealth to accumulate. If we would only adopt his system and work for the pleasure of working, and for the satisfaction of producing absolutely perfect products of our own skill, there would be no danger of our sinking our souls into perdition with a load of gold. Noah and his sons appear to have built the Ark by the processes of domestic industry, in distinction from the accursed factory or capitalist system. How their support was provided for during the 120 years has not been recorded, but if one man undertook to build a locomotive, instead of merely making repetitions of a single part, it would be necessary to make arrangement for this. And when we are trying to replace the vessels destroyed by German submarines, it seems necessary to use more rapid methods of construction than sufficed before the Deluge.

Will some prophet please tell us how poor we must be in order to be virtuous and pacific, and how virtuous and pacific the world was before it became prosperous? Were there no wars before the Twentieth Century? The extent of this war is scarcely a result of the world’s opulence, when Sir Edward, now Viscount, Grey, offered to keep England out of it if Germany would limit the war to the Balkans or to Russia. The war has involved most of the world because Germany began it by attacking France and Belgium, and followed that up by attacking Americans on the high seas, where they had as much right to be as at home.

This argument that the war is the result of wealth is immoral, because it makes the guilt of America and England even greater than that of Germany (for they are richer); and because it is the argument of the communist—that theft is not wrong, because it is the inevitable consequence of private property: if no one has any right to anything, then no one will steal anything.

Nothing holds the attention of the prophet better than the idea that the war is the result of commercial competition. This also is an invention of the devil to exculpate Germany. All of us are in business for gain; we are actuated by greed; we are making cotton cloth to cover Africans for the profit that we can get out of it; we ought to think only of clothing the naked, and if we would only give the cotton cloth to the Hottentots without material return, we should have the proud satisfaction of seeing them draped in chintzes, and we should be safe from that wealth which is so certain to make us wicked. On those terms there would be very little competition in supplying the Hottentots, and no danger whatever that any nation would fight us to gain that portion of the export trade.

But the “peaceful penetration” of all other countries by German industry and commerce had been going on for thirty years before the war. England had stamped “Made in Germany” upon the imports from that country under the delusion that people would not buy them if they knew they were not made by domestic industry, but the only result was to advertise German business. Shipping interests at Antwerp, factories in France, hotels in Switzerland, iron works in Italy, commercial establishments in China and South America, the trade and transportation of Turkey, passed into German hands, and no nation offered armed resistance. No less a witness than Prince von Buelow testifies that England could easily have stopped German naval expansion, but did not do so. German commercial expansion did not cause the war, unless Great Britain, the principal sufferer from German business success, attacked Germany in 1914. And this is the German official explanation of the war supplied for domestic consumption. And yet it is repudiated by the highest witness who could be put upon the stand. No less a person than Prince Lichnowsky, who was German Ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war, traces the war to Austrian projects in the Balkans, with the “blank check” of Germany, together with irritation in Russia caused by Germany’s own efforts to establish a dominating influence in Constantinople. This leaves nothing of the story invented for the German people, and propagated by the university professors, that England attacked Germany because the latter was getting its trade away from it. And this falsehood, invented to shield the guilty nation, has a special fascination for the prophets. It looks so much like taking a broad and general and impartial view of the world. Satan is very liberal; it pains him to have guilt attached to any individual. It is more in accord with his philosophic and humane ideas to regard crime as a product of social conditions, and war as the result of trade competition.

But the guilt of Germany is betrayed by the selection by Germans of Sir Edward Grey as the especial subject of hatred among all the hated British race. Nothing but the consciousness of guilt can explain the extraordinary vituperation of the British Minister who did in 1914 precisely what he was highly praised for doing in 1913 in a speech in the Reichstag by Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg. That was the speech calling on the Reichstag for an increase of about 136,000 men in the German army, an addition of $50,000,000 a year to the military budget, and a non-recurring capital tax for military purposes of $250,000,000. The difference between 1913 and 1914 was not in anything that Sir Edward did, but in the fact that before the army increase of 1913 Germany was not prepared for war and supported Sir Edward’s efforts for peace. After that increase Germany was prepared for war, and would do nothing to support Sir Edward’s efforts to avert war, and the coarse abuse of Sir Edward is a “smoke box” designed to conceal the changed position of Germany.

Dr. von Jagow, Foreign Minister from 1913 to 1916, has been put forward to reply to Prince Lichnowsky, but agrees with the Prince that England did not desire war, and that Sir Edward Grey, who is described by a German divine as having “a cancerous tumor in place of a heart,” acted in good faith in his efforts to find a peaceful solution for the difficulty. One American writer finds the origin of the war in the rival interests of Germany and England in the Bagdad Railway, but Dr. Paul Rohrbach, now or recently of the German Colonial Office, has admitted that just before the war opened the interests of the two nations were settled by a treaty, in which England made surprisingly large concessions. This is also stated by Prince Lichnowsky. So that the testimony of three particularly eminent Germans destroys the fiction that England attacked Germany because it was jealous of German commercial expansion.

The fundamental trouble with the whole race of war prophets is that they think the war is a new thing, and they feel called upon to tell the rest of us what to make of it. War is about the oldest human industry. This is the greatest of all wars, but that does not alter the meaning of war. Nor does it necessarily alter the results of war. While it is the greatest of all wars, it is not yet a long war, and in proportion to the population it is not certain that it is greater than other wars. It is not even certain that in proportion to the men involved, it is more bloody than other wars. We have no means of getting at the figures except in the loosest way, because the several Governments do not tell how many men they have at any given time or place, or the casualties in any individual engagements. But some approximations have been made, and they do not indicate that the great war is decidedly more bloody, in proportion to the armies, than other wars have been. Our Civil War lasted full four years; the War of Independence occupied seven. Before that was the seven years of the French and Indian war, and one war is known as the Thirty Years War. From the beginning of the French Revolution to Waterloo was more than quarter of a century, and at the end of that period another Bourbon was on the throne of France. Our Civil War made nearly, if not quite, as heavy a draft upon the population as the present war has made upon the population of England or France.

The moral and religious questions involved in war are not notably different in the greatest of all wars and in wars which are not quite so great. Most of them are involved in the ordinary administration of the criminal law by which an orderly community protects itself from its predatory members. Doubtless there will be social and political results from this war, but if other wars have not created a new heaven and a new earth, why should this one? The prediction that this war will produce great changes in the direction of democracy and of applied religion are probably well founded. But the war will act only as an accelerator. These changes have been going on for a long time; the movements for fifteen or twenty years before the war opened were very evident. Woman suffrage and prohibition seem impending, but they are not the products of this war: they had made great progress between 1900 and 1914.

None of the prophets betray any knowledge of history, or see things in any perspective. The great war is the first great cataclysm that they seem to be aware of, and they are rushing to and fro, like the Chaldeans, to find explanations of it, and to impress the public by their ability to forecast its consequences.

But when peace comes it will leave us face to face with greed and materialism, and an industrial system in which some men prosper and others do not, and an obligation to labor from which no important fraction of mankind can escape, and wants will multiply as fast as the means of satisfying them increase, and for the greater part of us the weekly pay envelope and the possibilities of a competence, and the demand from the other side of the world for the grain we produce, will continue to be our principal incentives to work.

Progress, intellectual and moral as well as material, has been made in the past, but the world has not taken great leaps ahead as the result of great wars, and still less has it changed the direction of its movement as the result of wars. The one thing of which the vastness of this war gives us a fairly good assurance, is that no nation will again be trained from infancy to old age to regard war as a high, holy and beautiful process of attaining its manifest destiny to rule the rest of mankind. For generations no statesman will purpose a war, and no monarch will again have the power of hurling his people at neighboring nations. If Germany fails in its present effort, neither Germany nor any other nation will repeat the experiment of 1914.

But the prophets will have no chance to point with pride to the great religious, moral and economic revolutions whose advent they pointed out amid the clash of arms. We have found our soul, the prophets love to tell us. They disagree on some things, and those who have no revelation upbraid the others for not giving us a spiritual interpretation and getting a vision of the future from the carnage of the war, as the augurs pretended to see the future when they were only looking at the viscera of their victims. But all of them agree that we have found our soul. When did we lose our soul? When Mr. Roosevelt was President he was very apprehensive that we had lost our “fighting edge.” Is any one worried now about our lack of a “fighting edge?” Possibly our soul was never lost. We betrayed some evidences of possessing a soul very early in the war.

The charge that we had lost our soul, or, at least, had mislaid it, rests on two facts. One is that we are prosperous. That fatal alliteration of poverty and piety has a fearful hold upon the soul of the prophet. The other is that we did not go to the rescue of Belgium when it was invaded. But Mr. Roosevelt himself did not realize that we ought to have gone to the rescue of Belgium, till March, 1916. He is on record in September, 1914, as satisfied with the course of the Administration, and convinced that we should not have entered the war when our own interests were not touched. And it ought to be forgiven a statesman, if he is very reluctant to plunge his country into war, and declines to put his Government in the position of a knight errant, wandering around the world in search of maidens to be delivered from donjons. And furthermore, as the Monroe Doctrine is the corner stone of our foreign policy, we were properly slow about intruding into a European quarrel, until it became unmistakable that it was much more than a European quarrel—that it was an attack upon civilization and popular Government. We were also justified in assuming that Great Britain, France and Russia, three of the five guarantors of Belgian neutrality, were capable of punishing the two guarantors who violated their pledge, several times renewed by Germany, even up to the day before Germany invaded the country it had pledged its honor to protect.

But our soul, whether it was lost or not, is now in our possession. Let us be thankful that the prophets recognize that encouraging fact. And if our mind is also in our possession, we may look forward to a world not entirely different from the one we have known, but unquestionably less likely to play with firearms, and quite certainly one in which the common people will have much greater control of their political destinies, and one in which no War Lord, with chatter about shining swords and shining armor and mailed fists, will be able to hurl his nation against the others in a desperate effort to establish for himself an overlordship of the world. Nor will any nation ever be likely to rhapsodize over carnage, and feed its sordid soul with thoughts of the territories and indemnities to be got by war, or intoxicate itself with the delusion that it is a race of supermen charged by the Almighty with the duty of forcing its harsh language and its brutal habits upon all other nations.