An extra-planetary observer of the superficial movements of earth's inhabitants would have been considerably puzzled during the last few weeks. He would have noticed a reaction of amazing rapidity and of vast dimensions. For some years the war-clouds have been lowering more darkly on the horizon; the air has been heavier and feverish; the tension and dread of the lurid flash have shown themselves in a thousand ways. The nations have spent two-thirds of their blood and sweat and genius in arming themselves against each other, and have paraded their arms and armour in each other's sight, in “reviews” and “naval displays,” with the proud menace of mediaeval knights. Rulers and statesmen have lightly fingered messages that were well calculated to inaugurate the great Armageddon. And, suddenly, the Press passes from the topic of universal war to the glad message of universal peace. Floods of literature and oratory are poured out to convince us that disarmament is practicable, and that the knell of militarism has sounded at last.
Of the startling pronouncement of the Tsar which has occasioned this transformation there are many opinions. In a world which is so thoroughly imbued with Christian principles as the Church Congress assures us we are, one would expect the document to be taken at its surface value. The Congress, consistently, and many other equally guileless bodies and individuals, do accept it as a sincere and fervid expression of the young monarch's sentiments. In more worldly spheres the opinion does not seem to be very widely shared. The Tsar is an autocrat, it is true; but even Russian autocracy has sadly degenerated. One cannot think that the Tsar, in his first fit of self-consciousness, would write in the teeth of the able, not very sentimental, bureaucracy that presides over the destinies of his country. Possibly Count Muravieff indulged him in what he considered to be a harmless “cracker.” Other negligible opinions are: that the Tsar wanted to “go one better” than the Kaiser in advertising; that the Russian war-chest was depleted by the construction of the Siberian railway; that it was another Muscovite attempt to hoodwink English statesmen, etc.
The general impression in political and journalistic spheres is that the document has a political significance. Russia is not in the habit of disseminating sentimental literature. But what that significance may be is far from clear. That is one of the humours of the New Diplomacy. Take a document, especially a Russian document, at its surface value, as the honest Englishman is inclined to do, and you may look for complications. Hence, we have the interesting spectacle of the Tsar's “noble and straightforward” appeal being subjected to a microscopic scrutiny in every civilized capital, and yielding a curious collection of results. The political considerations which follow in the next and the fifth chapters may be useful in deciphering it.
But, whatever may be the value of the document which has occasioned the present agitation, the question of disarmament is the serious topic of the hour. The advocates of peace have found it politic to assume, at least, that the sentiment is sincere, and they are infusing a new vigour into their Propaganda, with a view to influencing, or imparting a touch of sincerity to the coming Council of Peace. Their familiar arguments are re-arrayed, and are enforced by the still thrilling horror of recent events. Our artists and word-painters have singularly shrunk from depicting the ghastly features of war: Mrs Butler rather proclaims its glories. But the battles of Manila and Santiago, and Omdurman, have brought us to some sense of the repulsiveness of our present method of settling international disputes. The sudden call that lights the flame of agonizing suspense in tens of thousands of families, the terror of a climate that breathes cholera and typhus and dysentery and death into the strongest and bravest; the solemn irony, more pitiful than an Homeric picture, of contending nations imploring the assistance of the same god: every great religion of the world teaching the universal brotherhood of men, and sending its ministers to bless their efforts to slay each other with all the perfection and rapidity of modern machinery. Then the lound blast, echoing from the empty vault of heaven, and the lurid flame, and the quaking, reddened earth, and the shock of maddened troops, and the thud, thud, thud…of the falling, and the red rivulets growing broader, until heaven mercifully puts out its light, or there are no more “brothers” to butcher.
Milton’s poor picture of a war of supernatural powers is child’s play today. Then the roll with its ominous gaps; the triumphant discovery that they have widowed 10,000 women; the ghastly, groaning wards, the laconic dispatch, the report, and the deep, silent agony that shoots through the land as the picture is conjured up, and photographically, even kinetoscopically, depicted, of the familiar faces, clotted to the ground, upraised to the silent stars.
And we are reminded that nothing is more fatal to the gospel of the brotherhood of men than war and the anticipation of war. It will be many centuries yet before we reach that delightful condition of moral automatism which some of our philosophers promise us. Nor must we trust to an omnipotent evolution to effect it. Things evolve in so far as they are acted upon: evolution is not a force. Human character will develop in so far as we train it and change its traditions and environment. How can we hope to cultivate humane feelings and social connection when we are armed to the teeth against each other, and prepare daily to blast each other out of existence? There is a grim humour about the fraternizing of Greeks and Turks on the hills of Thessaly, the games of the English and the Afridi, the symposia of Spaniards and Americans. The wound of the defeated leaves a scar that lasts for ever, or is only cured by a more successful carnage.
We are reminded of the appalling waste of energy and talent which is involved in the support of militarism. An undying vampire, people say, it sucks one half of the life-blood of humanity. France has more than 500,000 men, in the flower of their age, continually in arms. A vastly larger army is absorbed, all life long, in feeding, clothing, transporting, and equipping her soldiers. The outbreak of war would suck almost the blood from her heart. Look at bloodless, exhausted Spain, or Greece. The English wars against Napoleon imposed a debt of £581,000,000 on succeeding generations. What would a European war cost today? And translate the figures into human brain and muscle. The late war — a feeble vision of what is to come — is said to have cost America 250,000,000 dollars. We are told to imagine, for one bright moment, the total abolition of war and standing armies, and conceive the energy which would be directed to the beautifying of the garden of earth. The gods must smile at the grim contest between armour-plate manufacturers and projectile manufacturers, between the compounders of explosives, between systems of espionage, of attack, and of defence.
On the other hand, war has its advocates. Not only case-hardened military men, but even peaceable scholars, subscribe to the gospel of war. Mr. Frederic Harrison, the distinguished representative of the Religion of Humanity in England, took the chair at a lecture, a few months ago, in which Dr. Maguire strenuously advocated the cause of militarism. One can follow the reasoning of an historian on such a point. Every nation has become great through war, and has hopelessly degenerated and sown the seeds of corruption as soon as peace was established. The fate of Assyrians. Persians, Romans, and Moslems is a pertinent and an eloquent witness. Kingsley ably depicts the process in the case of the Goths in Hypatia. War is a superb factor in the development of strength, bravery, and endurance. One wonders how those qualities, of whose vital importance history so sternly admonishes us, would be developed in an age of universal peace. If you abolish war, they say, you do so at the price of atrophy of the sinews of modern civilization. In any case, the military training has a specific value quite apart from the grim school of the battlefield. The national physique has an enviable distinction in those races which have compulsory service. Even morally the advantages are great. Said Carlyle to Kingsley when the Volunteer Movement began—“Tis a good thing for all that number of men to get themselves washed and cleaned and used to punctual habits.” The military system, especially in the great national armies, brings a large proportion of the “lower orders” into contact with the intellectual aristocracy of the community every year; and not only into contact, but into an ideal submissiveness and docility which give a vast power to mould and develop and educate.
Such are the arguments with which the Peace Societies and their critics appeal to rulers and to subjects. That such considerations, long familiar to all educated people, are little likely to influence the designs of rulers and statesmen, few will doubt—apart from the subscribers to those Peace Societies which have written to congratulate the Tsar on his graceful surrender to their efforts. Nominal autocracy still lingers amongst forms of government; the “representative” character of certain republics and limited monarchies is open to serious question. Still, the practical agitator directs himself to the conversion of the masses. Academic bodies, sitting at Turin, and gravely impressing upon each other their academic arguments— even quarrelling as to what measure of pacification they shall recommend,— are in small danger of influencing the course of events.
If the only difficulty lay in the apathy of the people — the usual bête noire of the reformer — the success of the present agitation would be assured. There is more rhetorical fire and more persuasive power in the horrors and burdens of war than in any evil that ever cried for redress. But the people are not indifferent. Those who seek the basis of militarism merely in an indolent accept ance of tradition (which is responsible for one-half of our institutions) are hopelessly incorrect. The people are responsible for the military system they groan under today, and they are keenly interested in it. And it would be equally incorrect to seek the basis of the system in the sentiments of the people. Certainly we cannot ignore the emotional element of the problem, the wave of sentiment— a veritable tidal-wave in time of war—that surges through the crowd at military events and military spectacles. The instinct that has been planted deep in the human frame by, perhaps, 100,000 years of carnage cannot be eradicated in a decade nor a century. Still, if war and militarism rested on a purely emotional basis, the problem would be far from hopeless. It would be merely a work of education, in which the power and the perfection of the modern press would be of incalculable service. Sentiment may be silenced by sentiment.
But what the advocates of disarmament have failed to recognize, in their academic speeches and aerial resolutions, is the fact that this determination of the people has its raison d’être in the tangible and very considerable profit they derive from the military system. The Peace Congresses are held too near the clouds. It is consoling to take human affairs in the abstract and argue that, militarism being evidently the huge Moloch of modern civilization, its dethronement will bring back an infinity of energy to its legitimate channel—the raising of the standard of individual happiness. It is a very pretty and an incontestable theory. But in the actual conduct of life, great streams of energy cannot be diverted and converted with quite the ease that M. Passy seems to think. Rigidity, and stability, and a serene and venerable changelessness, may be admirable qualities of an economic system ; but they absolutely exclude such measures as the abolition of militarism. We talk of our industrial system. Our industries do not form a system, and most of us violently protest that they never shall. They are a vast congeries of not only isolated but mutually hostile elements. That is as it should be, of course; but it is obvious that it precludes any such transformation of the industrial world as is involved in the idea of disarmament The military system is so deeply rooted in our economic “system”, it constitutes so enormous a proportion of that system and is so important both to capital and labour, that no power is strong enough to tear it out. The ensuing chaos is appalling to contemplate. Theoretically there only needs some fairy-power to redistribute or redirect the abandoned stream of capital and labour. But there is no such power. The State cannot do it. One would think we were living in a socialistic community to listen to the airy suggestions of some reformers. No; the paralysis of the economic world would be appalling, and the people — bourgeoisie and proletariat — will prefer to bear the burden of militarism rather than face industrial anarchy. It will tell its academic advisers to work out the economic consequences of disarmament first.
And there are political considerations which would of themselves preclude any degree of disarmament at the present day. The ultra-humane feelings of the peacemakers seem to prevent them from appreciating the real condition of the political world. The unceasing growth of Socialism has presented some European rulers with a political problem of the highest importance. The peacemakers seem to think that the question of disarmament is quite unconnected with it. Journals of high standing, in furthering the agitation, declare that Europe was never nearer a state of political equilibrium. They speak with some diffidence of France. As if France only had a grievous thorn in her side! Every country in Europe has an acute territorial difficulty, quite as troublesome as the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. This will be abundantly clear if we take a broad survey of the political world, before proceeding into the economic aspect of the question.