A PRACTICAL PEACE POLICY

The confusion of thought in which the modern world likes to dwell is nowhere greater than in those things which come within the survey of the peace movement. Even its most enthusiastic supporters are unable to show that their efforts have tended to make wars less frequent than heretofore. Neither can they prove that any nation has yet submitted a single question to arbitration over which it would have gone to war if the Hague Tribunal had not existed. They must honestly acknowledge that wars occur less often now than in the past, partly because a great number of questions, as, for example, those of nationality and of colonization, which formerly led to war have now, to a great extent, been solved, and partly because the civilized nations have reached such a stage in their development that they no longer are inclined to draw the sword for the comparatively unimportant objects for which they were unsheathed at a time when the death and ruin of thousands meant little to the government.

Yet, in spite of the diminution in the number of wars, the preparations for war steadily increase. Half a century ago the taxpayer everywhere paid his customary toll to the armies and navies with great reluctance. Regiments and ships led a very peaceful existence. Then came the three wars of Prussia. A great change came over the military classes. The national leaders, who mostly belong to the classes from which the officers of the fighting forces come, were induced to paint the colors of the international situation in the darkest hues. They called upon the military and naval expert, who gradually succeeded in so perverting the public press that today very few journalists are capable of dealing with international politics without attaching undue importance to things military and naval. Their superficial knowledge of these matters naturally leads them to all kinds of exaggerations. And so it has come to pass that the man in the street is at present everywhere fed with thoughts of ships and cannon, while the governments loudly disclaim all intentions of aggression. In the meantime, the number of persons

directly or indirectly dependent upon the maintenance of the war services constantly grows. The burden of taxation increases in leaps and bounds. The general discontent and restlessness threaten the existence of the privileged classes. The powers that be feel insecure. They look for the support of the existing order to the army and the navy, where timehonored discipline still overcomes the spirit of revolt. The monarchs clearly see that they can only keep their thrones by leaning on uniforms and sermons. They understand that they would seem ordinary mortals in case the war lords and the grand admirals should disappear with the archbishops and the lord chamberlains. Thus all sorts of parasites and sycophants are enlisted on the side that tries to turn the earth into an armed camp.

This in itself contributes to augment the number of the pacifists. Yet the mere fact that the increase of armaments grows in intensity, the more the latter make themselves heard, is a warning which deserves more than a passing consideration. In reality the double connection between the peace movement and the growth of armaments is perfectly natural. As long as the former places itself on a national basis it is bound to attack the national war interests. These have it is true, gradually become international, though with a vengeance. Shipbuilders, armor manufacturers, gun makers, torpedo engineers form at present a sort of international guild, whose interests know no frontiers and who control the most powerful organs of the international press. At the same time the feeling of professional comradeship is growing in all the armies and navies of the world. The officers now look upon each other with far more sympathy than they accord to the peaceful citizens of their countries. Against the pacifists of their own land they display a remorseless hatred. Before the common danger of the peace movement, whose success threatens them with annihilation, the different war interests are indeed obliged to clothe their fraudulent internationalism in the deceiving garb of militant patriotism. Thus the ultra-nationalist revival of the last two decades has really been brought about by the foolish way in which the pacifists have proceeded. The peace movement has as a matter of fact been pouring oil into the fire which it started to extinguish.

To persevere in this mad course can only lead to the most disastrous

results. The preparations for war lengthen the hours and shorten the purse of every worker on the globe. They absorb many of the best technical and organizing brains of mankind, so sorely needed for the rearrangement of the outworn machinery of distribution. And the physical training which the armies and the navies are supposed to give to the young men in reality does more harm than good. It is limited to that fit half of a country's manhood, which least stands in need of it. They are obliged to pass several years in the cities, where they contract habits which in many cases lower their vitality and make them reluctant to go back to the country homes whence they came. During these years they are debarred from marriage, whereas nothing prevents the less developed young males whom the services reject from becoming fathers! The weak, the decrepit and the malformed are not called to the drill walls. Neither do they go to sea.

But the armaments not only limit existing resources and retard the development of new treasures; they also contravene, hamper and trammel individual liberty in an ever-increasing degree. There can, indeed, be little doubt that the terrible recrudescence of State interference which is observable all over the world is just as much due to the immense growth of the preparations for war as to the iniquity resulting from a too great concentration of capital. The connection between these two phenomena is evidently much greater than is generally assumed. At the back of both of them looms the vicious doctrine of national selfsufficiency.

The preparations for war embrace today every possible phase of human activity. They necessitate an ever-increasing extension of the authority of the State, and the wielders of the Iron Fist and the Big Stick are really the natural forerunners of those curious friends of humanity who desire to turn every prospective mother into a slave of the State. Notwithstanding their revered titles, these two, Emperor and President, are the most dangerous of demagogues as they incontinently appeal to the timehonored sentiments and carefully nurtured feelings of the unthinking subject instead of to the free reason of the citizen.

If the pacifists really are in earnest they ought at once to abandon their national platforms and constitute themselves into an independent planetary association. Then, and only then is there some hope that they

could work without arousing the different war interests to renewed activity. As the world at present is constituted such an association can only bring its influence to bear upon mankind at large through the agency of one or two great Powers.

The choice of the pacifists is at the same time extremely limited. Amongst the great Powers there is to-day only one single nation where the war interests are comparatively insignificant. This Power is the United States of America. Its proud resolve to keep outside the quagmire of European conflicts has up till now been easily fulfilled. But there are ominous signs on the international horizon which make it certain that the splendid isolation of the Great Republic is soon bound to be a thing of the past. The ever-increasing interdependence of trade, shipping, and finance, of science and of social legislation, is daily making a planetary fabric of the old European net-work. The severing of but one or two of its intricate meshes affects no longer Europe alone. It is felt all over the globe. After the piercing of the Panama barrier this planetary interdependence of all the different parts of the globe will be still more acutely felt. The United States will come in closer contact not only with Australasia and Asia but also with those European Powers which strive to draw the lands bathed by the Pacific into the orbits of their political combinations. At the same time the northern neighbor of the United States with whom its intercourse is daily increasing stands, so to speak, at the parting of the ways. None can yet tell whether Canada will become a willing satellite of European aspirations and fears of the motherland, or whether she and her sister Dominions will be strong and clear-sighted enough to prevent Great Britain from forgetting that it has a greater rôle to play as the center of a globe-scattered empire, than as one of the historical powers of Europe.

Whether they desire it or not, the people of the United States will thus soon have to make up their minds as to what their policy in the new planetary epoch is going to be. They cannot, as in the nineteenth century, simply leave the Eastern Hemisphere alone. In the twentieth century the policy of the hemispheres is doomed. Our era demands a planetary policy, and both our era and our planet have great things to expect from the United States.

It would perhaps be rather difficult, though by no means impossible,

to prove that the general discontent of the present day is everywhere greater than it ever has been; but the assertion that the prevailing social discontent is for the first time in human history of a planetary import needs no demonstrations to be accepted as an incontrovertible fact. Neither will anybody try to deny the appalling truth that mankind grows more dissatisfied the more its power over natural resources is extended. This in itself is a warning that the civilization of which we so wantonly boast is in great danger.

To an open and unprejudiced mind it is not astonishing that such should be the case. It is a long time since the fatal separation of politics and ethics began. The former have always, as Bismarck said, belonged to the science of possibilities; the latter have so far never been adjusted to the possibilities of science. And though science to-day is more universal than ever, the absence of ethics in politics was never more conspicuous than to-day. This, of course, applies particularly to international politics, while the inherent goodness of man is still from time to time able to assert its humanizing influence in the affairs of the commonwealth.

The tremendous counteraction between internal and external politics is nowhere understood. If the voices which cry out when the ethics of the community are trampled under foot by local politicians are few and feeble, those who heed the actions of national leaders are as rare as they are mute. Dishonesty and unreliability which would disgrace private individuals are tolerated in political life. They are almost looked upon as public virtues in international dealings. Any one who knows and remembers the official and the secret history of the international politics of the last ten years would, as a private individual, turn his back on and refuse his hand to most of the heads of state and the leading ministers of Europe. The exalted positions which they occupy naturally bring their craft and their insincerity to bear upon the nations at large. And the evil influence is perhaps more pernicious in a self-governing nation where every citizen, in a measure, is responsible, than in an autocracy where he has nothing to say. Thus it is difficult to see from what quarter redress could come.

The United States has so far a rather clean or, at any rate, the cleanest record in this respect. But her morality in international behavior is