ev,-. -^0^ ^ o H/ -V^' ^^. A .f -^^0^ :^ .^' » « o - ,^* O^. " * ' ^ • ' A°' ^^. * o Vo ' «,^'' "O ^ '♦ -^^^o' ^^J-' -^ P. ^oV^ THE GAME OF EMPIRES A WARNING TO AMERICA BY EDWARD S. VAN ZILE, L.H.D. WITH PREFATORY NOTE BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & CO. 1915 '^ A^ COPTKIGHT, 1915, BT MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY New York All rights reserved Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co. New York APR 29 ie!5 ©G1A401008 U4> f Theodore Roosevelt Thirty East Forty-second Street New York City January 8th, 1915. My dear Mr. Van Zile : I am heartily glad that you are writing on the subject of the need that the United States should prepare against War. Preparedness for War is in reality preparedness against War. There is nothing more important for our people to understand than that sooner or later disaster, shame and disgrace will come to us if we do not keep our- selves in shape to guard our own vital rights — and it is well to remember that the right to national self-respect is as vital as any material right. Preparedness against War ren- ders it likely that if it should come it will not bring disaster and disgrace. Moreover, such preparedness is the only pos- sible method by which the United States can be made an agent in producing the Peace of Righteousness. Impotence is never impressive; and though it is a bad thing to arouse the emotion of fear in others, it is an infinitely worse thing to arouse the emotion of contempt. China is entirely peace- ful and is unable to defend herself; and therefore China is wholly unable to be of the slightest use on the side of inter- national peace. The United States will be as impotent as China on the side of peace if she permits herself to sink into the same condition of helplessness. With hearty wishes for the success of your volume, (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt. E. S. Van Zile, Esq. 7 rOEEWOED Historical perspective is, of necessity, a prerogative pos- sessed only by posterity. The ultimate significance of con- temporary events is a secret the answer to which lies con- cealed in the more or less remote future. The time has not come, of course, when an authoritative history of the most stupendous conflict the world has known, an international war that has involved all but one of the so-called great powers of the planet, can be written. It is reasonable, per- haps, to go even further than this and to assert that such a work, earnestly demanded though it may be by future gen- erations, will never be within the range of human attain- ment. History is written by Man, not by Superman, and must of necessity be marred by the limitations, prejudices and mental bias of those who produce it. Despite the unquestionable truth of the above proposi- tions, however, it is apparent that there may be temporary value, perhaps something of permanent significance, in an effort to present to the public, bewildered and appalled by a titanic world-tragedy, an account of the apparent causes of the first, possibly the last, universal war, and an outline of the leading events, diplomatic, military, naval and polit- ical, that have sprung, directly or indirectly, from the assas- sination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on the 28th of June, 1914, as these present themselves to the mind of an American who has been something of a student of his- tory and who is devoted to American national ideals. 9 10 FOEEWOKD It is not implied, of course, that perfect symmetry can be given to a production of this character by thus choosing, somewhat arbitrarily, a given date as a point of departure. The causes that underlie the War can be traced almost as far back as any investigator chooses to go. The battle of Waterloo, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the recent Balkan wars, and various other critical periods in modern European history, offer themselves as foundation stones upon which the historian might reasonably base his work. But if perfection of fonn is not possible, if the roots of the present conflict are too numerous and remote to be traced to their final origins, if, as is apparent, the ultimate outcome of the greatest of all wars can not be, in all its bearings, forecast, it still remains possible to clarify the chaotic welter of recent events in Europe by a process of elimination that brings into view, to American eyes at least, something approaching a desirable historic perspec- tive. If, in the effort to obtain this perspective, we come upon revelations that, in their cumulative force, seem to be of grim signifioance to the people of the United States, the following pages may justify themselves to even the indiffer- ent or the too optimistic American. CONTENTS Prefatory Note by Theodore Roosevelt Foreword CHAPTEE I, Diplomacy's Downfall 11. The Fashions of Mars III. Made in America IV. Corsica versus Galilee V. Paleolithic Survivals VI. Hasheesh for Warriors VII. The Spiritual versus the Material VIII. Germany's God and Japan's IX. Altruism, Democracy and Arms X. The Head Usher and His Assistant XI. The Peace That Never Was XII. Christianity at the Bar . XIII. The Armor of Righteousness XIV. The Immorality of Weakness XV. Valor versus Avoidance , XVI. The Only Hope for Peace XVII. Isolation and Its Perils . XVIII. The Stone op Sisyphus . XIX. The Religion op Steadfastness 11 7 9,10 15 39 59 75 93 109 123 139 157 173 189 207 219 231 245 259 271 283 293 "Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones, Whose table earth — whose dice were human bones." — ^Byron. CHAPTER I DIPLOMACY S DOWNFALL THE GAME OF EMPIRES CHAPTER I diplomacy's downfall Among the many traditions associated with the founding of the City of Rome was one to the effect that the god Terminus, who presided over bounda- ries and whose power and glory were symbolized by a large stone, was the only minor deity who refused to acknowledge the superiority of Jupiter. "A fa- vorable inference was drawn from his obstinacy," says Edward Gibbon, "which was interpreted by the Augurs as a sure presage that the boundaries of the Roman power would never recede." That the con- fidence of the Romans in the potency of the rebel- lious Terminus was misplaced it is hardly necessary to state, for Mars, with or without the sanction of Jupiter, has been always mischievously busy in un- doing the work of the God of the Boundaries, whose stone appears to be, as the centuries pass, as un- stable as that which provides eternal punishment for the crimes of the avaricious Sisyphus. 15 16 THE GAME OF EMPIEES The modern heirs to "the grandeur that was Rome" have been, like the ancient Latins, betrayed by the fickle deity who alternately makes and un- makes the maps of the world. Repeatedly in the last few centuries have the powers of Europe, through their representatives assembled in solemn conclave, endeavored to place the God of the Bounda- ries under bonds to keep the peace, but as he was treacherous to those who first paid him homage so has he been unfaithful in more recent times to diplo- matists who have endeavored, with more or less hon- esty of purpose, to use the power of Terminus as a bulwark against the ever-threatening menace of the god Mars. For wherever the God of the Boundaries establishes a stone a new casus belli exists in posse, and toward it envious eyes, quick to note a desirable place in the sunshine, are turned. Midsummer 1914 found the nations of Europe confronted by the most stupendous and appalling crisis in the history of mankind. The hideous pos- sibilities lurking in the changes of boundaries caused by the recent Balkan wars were only vaguely sus- pected by the masses of the people, but to rulers, statesmen, diplomats and others closely in touch with what might be called the remorseless logic of instability, the havoc that Mars had just played with the important, but always impermanent, work of Terminus presented itself as fraught with novel and DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 17 imminent peiils to the peace of the world. The rapidity with which, following a state of compara- tive calmness in Europe, the war of wars, despite the most frantic efforts of diplomacy, forced a large part of the human race into a condition of active hostilities is the most amazing, if not the most deplorable, feature of a cataclysm the full horrors of which only posterity will be able to appraise. On July 20, Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, wrote as follows to Sir H. Rumbold, Brit- ish Councilor of Embassy at Berlin: "I asked the German Ambassador today if he had any news of what was going on in Vienna with regard to Servia. He said that he had not, but Austria was certainly going to take some step, and he regarded the situa- tion as very uncomfortable." Less than three months later the losses in killed, wounded and miss- ing in the war whose approaching shadow had ren- dered Prince Lichnowsky "very uncomfortable" had been estimated conservatively at a million men. Russia, Germany, France, Austria, England, Servia, Japan, Belgium and Montenegro, with armies num- bering in all nearly eighteen million men, were in a state of war, and other nations were mobilizing while endeavoring, more or less hopelessly, to maintain their neutrality. That Sir Edward Grey had good reason on July 20 to suspect that events of serious moment to Servia 18 THE GAME OF EMPIRES were taking place at Vienna is apparent. Gavrilo Prinzip, one of several Servian conspirators disgrun- tled at the recent, and unusually ephemeral, achieve- ments of the God of the Boundaries, had placed his name on June 28 on the list of the world's most noted assassins. Unknown before that date outside of a small circle of agitators scheming for a "greater Servia," he had sprung at a bound into world-wide prominence and had assured for himself an unen- viable immortality as the murderous youth whose crime served as a torch to explode the European powder-mine. The assassination of the successor to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and of his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, at Sara- jevo, Bosnia, will be recognized by posterity as a tragedy productive of more slaughter and misery, directly and indirectly, than any single event in recorded history. Why the god Terminus, who be- trayed Rome and who has been responsible for nearly all the wars that the human race has fought, is to be held as an accessory to Prinzip's crime is shown by the young assassin's confession. "Although I was born in Bosnia," said Prinzip after his arrest, "the big Servian idea has always existed in me since my earliest childhood. I considered it unjust that a foreign power should be established in Bosnia, where the Serbs, on account of their numbers and their commercial and economic position, should take part DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 19 in the govemment. It pained me that Austria should oppress us, for she is the old and eternal enemy of Servia. I also knew that the first place among those who were hated by Serbs was occupied by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I knew that he was the sworn enemy of all Servian aspirations, and that he had sworn to destroy Servia and the Servian dynasty. I hope that the fatal revolver shots will open the way to the Servian army to march here to occupy Bosnia, for this land is destined by its in- clinations and traditions to belong to Big Servia." Fatal revolver shots indeed ! Millions on millions of men engaged in the ghastly work of destroying European civilization, tens of millions of helpless, hopeless women and children struggling against pov- erty and death, fair cities in ruins, whole countries ravaged and made desolate, war on land and sea, under the sea, in the air, rendered, through the achievements of modern science, more devastating than heretofore — these are the dire offspring of young Gavrilo Prinzip's disapproval of the game that Terminus is forever playing with the boundary- stones. There are many today, and in all coming time there will be others, who place Prinzip upon a pedestal as a patriot. But was not the Archduke a patriot ? Is not the German Kaiser a patriot ? Love of country, upon which the God of the Bounda- ries relies in the pursuance of his mischievous 20 THE GAME OF EMPIKES activities, is a seemingly universal human passion to which both the autocrat and the anarchist, in fol- lowing their respective and antagonistic aims, appeal at times with equal success. In the embattled armies of Europe may be found men of every reli- gious creed, of every color, of every political affilia- tion, men loyal to autocrats, men devoted to democ- racy, to anarchy, to socialism, fighting and dying for the only passion that, in the last analysis, makes them all brothers. Unreasoning devotion to a cer- tain country and a certain flag underlies, in well- nigh each individual case, the motive power that has driven both the man with the hoe and the man with the coronet forth to fields where modern weapons mow down victims inspired by the same incentive that made patriots of both the ancient Roman legionary and his barbarous opponent. If civilization, so- called, should eventually perish, blown to pieces by lyddite, upon its monument should be carved a tat- tered flag and a boundary-stone, not cubical but spherical. It is true, of course, that when mobilization began in July, 1914, in certain countries of Europe, there were indications, here and there, that terrorism is sometimes necessary to make this passion of patriot- ism universally effective when the mysterious pow- ers-that-be have declared war. "Rather than fight against my Slav-brethren," exclaimed a reservist of DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 21 Slav origin at Salzburg, "I would level my rifle against my commanding officer." He was tried at once by a court martial and condemned to be sum- marily shot. In Fragile three Bohemian reservists were executed because they refused to fight against Slavs. In Buda-Festh a sectarian of the ISTazarenes was condemned and shot because religious scruples forbade him to go to war. In France and Germany there were, at the outset of the conflict, many So- cialists who at first disjDlayed an inclination to place their philosophical antagonism to war above their loyalty to their respective countries. But pressure from their comrades and the police combined pres- ently to break down their efforts to remain consis- tent, and the interesting fact confronts us that the armies of Europe are today full of Socialists amazed to find themselves fighting not to bring nearer an. economic and social millennium but from the same motive that inspired the Roman legionaries or their savage foes. The God of the Boundaries, backed by a firing-squad, quickly puts an end, at great inter- national crises, to religious, racial or philosophical prejudices that deny the ancient but ever rejuve- nated creed that it is a man's bounden duty to offer his life when his country requires the sacrifice. Upon June 28 Gavrilo Prinzip fired the shot that was to call Battle, Rapine, Famine, Disease and Death to the colors. Three weeks later Prince Lich- 22 THE GAME OF EMPIRES nowsky regarded the situation as "very uncomfort- able." There is something grimly humorous in the diplomatic restraint of the German Ambassador's choice of words. Nowhere in the historical archives of the race can be found documents even remotely approaching in human interest the published letters and telegrams that were exchanged by the European ambassadors and their subordinates during the piti- fully few weeks that elapsed between the assassina- tion of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the invasion of Servia by the forces of Austria-Hungary. These diplomatic interchanges have been given to the world under the title of the White, the Orange and the Gray Papers. Posterity will bind them in Red. Diplomacy, long devoted to the praiseworthy ef- fort of preventing the vagaries of the God of the Boundaries from precipitating a world-wide war, realized at the outset that it was confronted sud- denly, almost unexpectedly, by a problem more dif- ficult of solution, and more iconoclastic if not solved, than any international complication that had hith- erto startled and tested the well-nigh limitless re- sourcefulness of the European chancelleries. For the crisis that had arisen, involving the issue of war or peace in a large portion of the civilized world, had to be, under existing conditions, controlled, if con- trolled it could be, by Emperors, Kings, Ambassa- dors, Ministers, Chancellors, Prime Ministers, Sec- DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 23 retaries for Foreign Affairs and their assistants. If representative bodies, Reichstag, Parliament, Duma, Chamber of Deputies, were to have a part in the endeavor to save the world from an impending cata- clysm, of unprecedented possibilities for destruc- tiveness, it was evident that their role would be not unlike that of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. As for the people at large, it was for them, if a war, universal or restricted, should become unavoidable, to provide the men, the money and the mourners. Close study of the diplomatic interchanges in Europe from the latter part of July to the first few days in August force an unprejudiced student to several unavoidable general conclusions. "There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Neither this generation nor posterity will be able to convict any individual, or group of indi- viduals, of full responsibility for the overthrow of the pillars that upheld, less securely than had been supposed, the temple of European civilization. The heir-apparent to the Austrian throne had been as- sassinated by Servian conspirators. The reigning house of Austria naturally demanded redress. Ser- via, humbly enough, agreed to conform to the demands of Austria in so far as they did not deprive her of a future national existence ; accepting, with two seemingly justifiable exceptions, all the terms of Austria's ultimatum and suggesting that the de- 24 THE GAME OF EMPIKES mands to which she could not accede be submitted to arbitration. Russia's interests, and, of course, her sympathies, were on the side of Servia. The house of cards, erected by European diplomacy after the second Balkan war had played ducks and drakes with the boundary-stones, was tumbling down, and bade fair to bury the peace of the world under its flimsy ruins. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, en- deavored vainly to save the situation. His proposal that a conference of the four great powers not im- mediately concerned in the questions at issue be- tween Austria and Servia — namely, France, Ger- many, Italy and Great Britain — be held at once was based upon common sense and momentarily seemed to promise a method of escape from the impending world-tragedy. As we look back upon it now, Sir Edward's appeal to reason, his invocation to a mod- em deity, the God of Arbitration, takes upon itself the nature of a challenge to so-called Civilization to vindicate itself, to prove at the most awful crisis in the history of the race that mankind has grown sufficiently enlightened, sufficiently elevated above the ancestral cave-man, to defend and conserve the higher human attributes that have seemingly been the acquisitions we have fondly attributed to a process called, perhaps too hastily, human progress. For if ever, in the troublous struggle of the race to DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 25 what have appeared to be higher planes of being, a crisis that pointed both upward and downward had been reached it confronted mankind in the last weeks of July, 1914. The upward pathway led to peace or, at the least, to a localization of the war between Austria and Servia. Downward the crisis pointed to a conflict so widespread, so potent in destructive- ness, so full of unknown and unprecedented agencies of disaster, that even the modern successor of the ancient god Mars, today called Militarism, shud- dered at the outlook. Sir Edward Grey's effort to save Europe from becoming a himian slaughter-house proved futile. France and Italy cordially agreed to support him in his effort to use arbitration as a poultice to heal the blows of racial, national and dynastic hatreds, but Germany, employing the language of diplomacy to conceal her thoughts, placed an insurmountable bar- rier in the path of the only remaining project that gave to diplomacy the slightest chance to fulfill its highest mission, namely, to keep Mars quiet while Terminus plays with the boundary-stones. London, Paris and Rome approved of a conference that might prevent the fire that Prinzip's "fatal shots" had started from becoming a general conflagration. Ber- lin split diplomatic hairs and refused to conform to Sir Edward Grey's proposal upon the basis that the form of procedure he suggested was not adapted to 26 THE GAME OF EMPIRES the exigencies of the case at issue, and that Austria should not be haled before the tribunal of Europe in a manner that placed her upon the same level as a Balkan state. Whatever might happen to modern civilization, a reigning Hohenzollern felt obliged to defend the imperial dignity of a reigning Haps- burg. At this, the greatest crisis that the race has yet confronted, it is interesting to observe that no com- munications passed between the legislative bodies representing the various peoples whose lives and pos- sessions were hanging upon the issues under discus- sion by rulers and diplomatists. Parliamentary ac- tion, conforming to precedent, consisted, both on the Continent and in Great Britain, in eventually ratify- ing, officially, drastic measures that the impotence of diplomacy had made inevitable, and in voting war supplies to monarchs, closely related by blood, whose divine right to speak the final word that plunged millions of men into war had been again made mani- fest to the eyes of a self-deceived generation. His- torians have dwelt entertainingly, and more or less convincingly, upon the amazing progress made in Europe during the last century by Democracy. They have, in many cases, pointed to the seemingly incontrovertible evidence that democratic tendencies are antagonistic fundamentally to militarism. But Democracy as a force, side by side with Diplomacy DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 27 as a fine art, failed woefully to avert what, it is to be fondly hoped, is to be known for many genera- tions as the war of wars. What power, then, defiant of Diplomacy and disregardfnl of Democracy, was siifiiciently great to plunge civilization into what is practically a universal war ? Can it be possible that Autocracy, Hereditary Monarchy, is so potent in the twentieth century that it could give the fillip, at the most crucial moment in the career of mankind, that should determine the all-embracing issue of war or peace ? In connection with this astounding query, for such it is when thus baldly put, various telegrams that were exchanged by certain royal personages on the last days of July, 1914, have taken their place as unrivaled in grim significance among all the mes- sages that have clicked across international wires since the ingenuity of Morse made telegraphy prac- ticable. If their phraseology has caused laughter in a world not at present given to merriment, that fact does not detract from the overwhelming effect of the proof they furnish that the attitude of Louis XIV toward the state is assumed by certain reigning monarchs today, an attitude placing them, at a great world crisis, in a position in which they can use diplomatists, deputies and democrats to further their own personal ends. The King is not dead! Long live the King! 28 THE GAME OF EMPIRES On July 30, Prince Henry of Prussia telegraphed to the King of England in part as follows: "Have informed William (the German Kaiser) of what you kindly told me at Buckingham Palace last Sunday, who gratefully received your message. William, much preoccupied, is trying his utmost to fulfill jSTicky's appeal to him to work for maintenance of peace and is in constant telegraphic communication with Nicky, who today confirms the news that mili- tary measures have been ordered by him equal to mobilization, measures which have been taken al- ready five days ago. We are furthermore informed that France is making military preparations whereas we have taken no measures, but may be forced to do so any moment, should our neighbors continue, which then would mean a European war. If you really and earnestly wish to prevent this terrible disaster, may I suggest you using your influence on France and also Russia to keep neutral, which seems to me would be most useful. . . . Believe me that William is most sincere in his endeavors to maintain peace, but that the military preparations of his two neighbors may at last force him to follow their ex- ample for the sake of his own country, which other- wise would remain defenseless." In answer to this His Majesty of England at once sent the following dispatch : ''Thanks for your tele- gram. So pleased with William's efforts to concert DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 29 with Nicky to maintain peace. Indeed, I am ear- nestly desirous that such an irreparable disaster as a European War should be averted. My Government is doing its utmost, suggesting to Russia and France to suspend further military preparations if Austria will be satisfied with occupation of Belgrade and neighboring Servian territory as a hostage for satis- factory settlement of her demands, other countries meanwhile suspending their war preparations. Trust William will use his great influence to induce Aus- tria to accept this proposal, thus proving that Ger- many and England are working together to prevent what would be an international catastrophe. Pra}^ assure William I am doing and shall continue to do all that lies in my power to preserve the peace of Europe." On July 31st, the German Kaiser, signing him- self "Willy," telegraphed this message to his cousin "Georgie," King of England: "Many thanks for your kind telegram. Your proposals coincide with my ideas and with the statements I got this night from Vienna, which I have had forwarded to Lon- don. I just received news from Chancellor that official notification has just reached him that this night Nicky has ordered the mobilization of his whole army and fleet. He has not even awaited the results of the mediation I am working at and left me without any news. I am off for Berlin to take 30 THE GAME OF EMPIEES measures for insuring safety of my eastern frontiers, where strong Russian troops are already posted." Behold the amazing interplay of antagonistic forces : Democracy, an increasing power in Europe, as in the world at large, is not well disposed toward war; Diplomacy deprecates it, but Despotism de- crees it. England's king, who is not an autocrat, is having trouble with his subjects; seems, in fact, to be threatened with a civil uprising. His neutral- ity appears to be assured as a matter of prudence, if not of necessity, if Cousin Willie assists his ally, Francis Joseph, to punish ISTicky for backing Servia against Austria. It will be necessary, of course, for Willie to overwhelm France quickly that he may have at his disposal sufficient forces to confront IsTicky's troops in the East when their slow mobiliza- tion has made them more or less formidable. Meanwhile it is best, perhaps, not to trust too thoroughly to Cousin George's inability or disinclina- tion to fulfill his obligations as a member of the Triple Entente and a pledged defender of Belgian neutrality. In fact. King George seems to have a most reprehensible way of obeying very lofty and altruistic motives. To put France in her place, and get his armies back in time to teach Nicky the lesson he needs, it is necessary for Willie to make use of Belgium, gently but firmly, as if her territory had already become a part of the German Empire. The DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 31 Kaiser's Chancellor knows how to state the matter with forceful bluntness, does he not? "Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity," says von Beth- mann-Hollweg to the Reichstag on August 4th, "and necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied Luxemburg, and perhaps they are already on Bel- gian soil. Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dic- tates of International Law. . . . The wrong — I speak openly — that we are committing we will en- deavor to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody who is threatened as we are threatened, and is fighting for his highest pos- sessions, can have only one thought — ^how to hack his way through." But when a nation, with the laudable intention of finding its divinely appointed place in the sunshine, from whence it may disseminate culture and spir- ituality for the benefit of a world that is, like Bel- gium, too thickly populated with barbarians, sets out to "hack its way through" it is essential for success that there should be no misapprehension at the out- set regarding all the factors that will affect the ulti- mate outcome of the venture. It may be true, as the Chancellor asserted, that necessity knows no law, but necessity, before it rushes into action, should always know the facts. It is now apparent that Germany's warlike precipitancy was based upon several suppo- sitions that proved to be ill-founded. That Belgium 32 THE GAME OF EMPIRES was either too weak or too frightened to fight, that England was too disturbed regarding Ireland and India to fulfill her treaty obligations to Belgium, that Russia would be slow in mobilizing, and that Italy would construe liberally her duty to the Triple Alliance were convictions held by the Kaiser and his advisers that illustrate how easy it is for men to believe what they passionately wish to believe. Bel- gium resisted, England rushed to war, supported by the Irish and the Hindus, Russia mobilized with great rapidity and Italy, technically correct in her attitude, announced her neutrality. It must not be inferred from the above, however, that England's procedure was left by Germany wholly to chance. The latter made to Great Britain, just before actual hostilities had begun, what Prime Min- ister Asquith has labeled ''infamous proposals." The neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed by the European powers, including Prussia, in 1839. Sir Edward Grey, now that war seemed to be in- evitable, had asked Germany and France, frankly and pertinently, what attitude they intended to take toward their solemn obligations under an ancient but still valid treaty. The answer of France was em- phatically to the effect that she recognized her duty toward Belgium and would abide by it. Germany dodged the moral issue involved in Sir Edward Grey's query. If England would stand aside, Ger- DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 33 many promised to compensate Belgium eventually for allowing her to get through to France without excessive "hacking," and agreed to reestablish Bel- gium's independence at the end of the war. Assur- ances were also given to England that German de- signs against France were not inordinately grasping and that French colonies seemed to offer more tempt- ing opportunities for Germans to find desirable places in the sunshine than France itself. There are those who assert, in connection with German diplomatic activities at this time, that she offered to Italy a bribe consisting of Nice and Savoy in return for active support in the approaching conflict for the spread of German culture. If "infamous proposals" were made to England, is it unreasonable to believe that such were also made to Italy ? On August 3rd, Sir Edward Grey delivered a parliamentary speech, destined to become historic, in which he declared that on moral, political and diplo- matic grounds it was Great Britain's duty, in defense of the sacredness of international treaties and the rights of neutral states, to enter upon a justifiable war. On July 28 Austria had declared war against Servia. On August 1st Germany had declared war against Russia. Diplomacy's house of cards had been overthrown and the survival in the world of hereditary autocracy had become responsible, in the last analysis, for the precipitation of an interna- 34 THE GAME OF EMPIKES tional conflict of greater magnitude than mankind had hitherto experienced. It was asserted above that no one man, nor group of men, can be held wholly responsible for the world tragedy that so quickly followed the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. If it be true, as many partisans are in- clined to maintain, that the German Kaiser had it in his power to prevent this universal war, in which he and his allies are fighting against tremendous odds, the indictment lies not against an individual but against a system, not against an autocrat, a prod- uct of heredity and environment, but against a peo- ple, a nation, that has permitted in the twentieth century the continued existence of a fundamentally despotic form of government that, despite its ap- parent recognition of representative forms, was able, at a crisis affecting the very bases of civilization, to give dominance to that reactionary force known by the general term Militarism. "If it C9sts me my throne, I will bury the world under its ruins," said K'apoleon to Mettemich, in a moment of passion, but in a calmer mood he remarked : "I have always been of the opinion that the sovereignty lay in the people." The influence of modem scientific modes of thought applied to the study of history leads us today to the conviction that for what is called the Napoleonic era the French nation was responsible. With his people supporting him, an autocrat can have his DIPLOMACY'S DOWNFALL 35 way. Without them, he goes into exile. He who today condemns only the Kaiser for the war of wars is too severe upon an individual and too lenient to a nation whose recent prophets have been Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi. CHAPTEE II THE FASHIONS OF MABS CHAPTEE II THE FASHIONS OF MAES Historical parallels are sometimes extremely en- lightening, despite the fact that the temptation to carry them too far in detail always besets a student of the past, and frequently leads to erroneous con- clusions regarding contemporaneous events. If, however, one fully comprehends the errors that may creep into the comparative method of treating his- torical periods, it is possible to avoid them; to so safeguard our investigations into the records of pre- vious generations as to make them of value in our endeavor to throw light upon the permanently sig- nificant events of our own time. The somewhat de- pressing truth that human nature has changed little, if at all, during the ages in which mankind has been engaged in making its self-revelation serves as a sta- ble foundation-stone upon which to base a judgment of passing occurrences and even to rest a prophecy regarding the immediate future. Before going into details, therefore, respecting the tragic occurrences that followed the downfall of 39 40 THE GAME OF EMPIRES Diplomacy in July, 1914, it may be worth while to glance at the situation in Europe just a century ago, a situation that, taken broadly, emphasizes the grain of truth in the assertion that history repeats itself, and convinces us that until man becomes by evolu- tion superman there can be but little that is really new under the stars. For the year 1814 found an aggressive autocrat, addicted to the habit of "hack- ing his way through," at war with a coalition of European powers determined to check his ambitions. N^apoleon — the incarnation of last-century militarism — had won, to the eyes of the Allies of that day, too large a place for his people in the sunshine. The reductio ad dbsurdum of Hereditary Autoc- racy had been exhibited, to a world seething with new ideas, by Louis XVI. The reductio ad absur- dum of Government by the People had been dis- played to the disgusted eyes of a Corsican lieutenant by the sans-culotte of Paris. Crowning himself Em- peror of the French by the divine right of genius Napoleon overran Europe, indifferent to the toll of human life his victories cost, and persuading his subjects, and sometimes even the minds of his op- ponents, that widespread slaughter was necessary to the upbuilding of an all-inclusive European Empire that, under his despotic sway, should result in what he called "European regeneration under monarchical forms." The sacrifice of innumerable human lives THE FASHIONS OF MARS 41 to his purpose was not a matter of great moment to JSTapoleon. "In spite of all the libels, I have no fear whatever about my fame," he wrote at St. Helena. "Posterity will do me justice. Had I succeeded, I would have died with the reputation of the greatest man that ever existed. I have fought fifty pitched battles, almost all of which I have won. Europe was at my feet." To Metternich, who said to him in 1813, "It rests with your Majesty to give the world peace," ISTapoleon replied, with a haughtiness worthy of one born to the purple, "My honor first, and then peace. You cannot know what passes through a sol- dier's mind. A man like me does not count the lives of a million men." In a recently published book by Miss Anne Topham, entitled "Memories of the Kai- ser's Court," the writer, who acted as a governess to Emperor William's children, speaking of her im- perial employer, says: "Sometimes he falls into ISTapoleonic attitudes, and occasionally attempts to pinch the ear of a particular friend." It will be necessary presently for us to turn our attention to the stupendous armed conflicts that have made the war of wars a fascinating study to the expert in tactics and grand strategy, and a waking nightmare to the layman who fails to appreciate the fact that human slaughter is, under certain circum- stances, a fine art and worthy as such of critical consideration. On August 4, 1914, Sir Edward 42 THE GAME OF EMPIEES Grey received from Brussels a dispatch to the effect that German troops had entered Belgian territory, that Liege had been summoned to surrender by a small party of Germans, eventually driven off, and that a war that was to affect, directly or indirectly^ every man, woman and child on earth had been ac- tually begun. Battles were presently to be fought that make l^apoleon's greatest campaigns look in comparison like outpost skirmishes. Where a cen- tury ago a few hundred thousands of men were con- fronting each other on the battlefields of Europe, millions of combatants in August, 1914, were rush- ing toward each other to engage in prolonged strug- gles on battle-fronts of a length hitherto unknown to war. That we may, perhaps, the better comprehend the amazing progress that has been made since the era of the Corsican Ogre in the gentle art of human slaughter it may be worth our while to dwell for a moment upon the details of one of IN'apoleon's typi- cal battles. The splendid achievements of man's genius during the last century in rendering warfare constantly more complicated and many-sided become pleasingly apparent by thus comparing one of 'Na,- poleon's simple little masterpieces of war with those titanic and prolonged struggles that make such bat- tles as the Mame or the Aisne convincing proof that during the last century there has been an improve- THE FASHIO^^S OF MARS 43 ment in warfare's methods of destruction highly creditable to modem civilization. Mars, who sets the fashions in military weapons, is as fickle a god as Terminus. The battle of Wurschen, described somewhat in detail in the following official report, while not one of N^apoleon's greatest victories, is a fair example of the many engagements that resulted from his long- continued efforts to carry French culture to all parts of Europe. In this case, Napoleon's battle-front was a little over ten miles in length. The average battle- front in the present war of wars can be visualized, perhaps, if we imagine an army with one of its wings resting on ISTew York City, its center on Al- bany and its other wing on Utica. Compared with the battle of the Marne the battle of Wurschen, then, was an insignificant affair, but its details are of value to us in our effort to come upon the perspec- tive for which we are striving. "At five o'clock in the morning of the 21st of May, 1813, the Emperor took up his station on a hill three-quarters of a league beyond Bautzen. At eleven o'clock the Duke of Ragusa advanced 2,000 yards and opened a terrific cannonade. The Guard and the reserves, infantry and cavalry, were masked and had convenient debouches for advancing to the right or to the left as. events might develop. The U THE GAME OF EMPIRES enemy was by this means kept in doubt as to the real point of attack. "In the meanwhile the Prince of the Moskowa (Marshal ISTey) had driven the enemy from the vil- lage of Klix, and pushed everything in his front steadily back to Preilitz. At ten o'clock he carried that village; but, on the enemy's reserves being thrown in, the Prince of Moskowa was driven back. "The Duke of Dalmatia got into action at one in the afternoon. The enemy, who had discovered all the danger with which they were threatened by the turn the battle had taken, attempted to check the Duke of Dalmatia's attack. The crisis of the battle was clearly at hand. By facing the left the Em- peror, in the space of twenty minutes, with the Guard, the four divisions of Latour Maubourg and a great number of guns, reached the flank of the enemy, which was the center of the Russian army. "The enemy were obliged to weaken their right to repel this new attack. The Prince of the Mos- kowa seized this instant to resume his forward move- ment. Turning the allied army, he pressed on toward Wurschen. It was now three in the after- noon, and with the army still quite uncertain as to whether it had been successful, and while a terrific fire raged along a line of three leagTies, the Emperor announced that the battle was won. "The enemy, seeing that their right was turned. THE FASHIONS OF MAES 45 beat a retreat, and soon that retreat turned to flight. At seven in the evening the Prince of the Moskowa and General Lauriston reached Wurschen. The Em- peror slept by the roadside, surrounded by the Guard." There can be little doubt that the Emperor's slum- ber that night was deep and dreamless. He had accomplished a fine day's work, putting to rout a large army of Prussians and Kussians between the hours of five in the morning and seven in the even- ing and had again exhibited his unrivaled genius as a master of strategy. And he called this action a battle ! What if ISTapoleon, reincarnated, should find himself today suddenly in command of the French armies now led by General Joffre ? He who asserted that the winning of fifty odd battles had been an achievement that appeared to be in the restrospect comparatively simple and easy would be, in the first place, appalled by the astounding size of modern armies, the length of the battle-fronts and the dura- tion of time required to produce definite results. "The great art in battle," said ISTapoleon at St. Helena, "is to change the line of operations during the course of the engagement ; that is an idea of my own and quite new. The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers ; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. The most diffi- cult thing is to guess the enemy's plan, to sift the 46 THE GAME OF EMPIEES truth from all the reports that come in. The rest merely requires common sense; it's like a boxing- match, the more you punch the better it is. It is also necessary to read the map well." While no exception can be taken in a general way to Napoleon's views as an expert regarding the fine art of winning battles, it is apparent from the above- quoted propositions that the evolutionary process has been, as is the way with it, changing the simple into the complex in the realm of warfare since those glorious days when the Little Corporal's common sense made a slaughter-house of Europe highly cred- itable, considering the primitive weapons and meth- ods at his command, to his military genius. The most expert stage-coach whip of a century ago would be as helpless as a child if, come back to earth from the grave, he should be placed in the cab of a loco- motive and told to display his skill as a propeller of vehicles. Common sense wouldn't be of much serv- ice to him. The genius that had made him the whip of whips in the Georgian era would bum without avail in a locomotive cab. Our reincarnated Na- poleon, placed in command of a modern army, while delighted, we may be sure, at the variety and ef- fectiveness of twentieth century weapons, would be impotent in his efforts to make use of his simplified strategy on a battle-front extending from the Eng- lish Channel to the boundaries of Switzerland. To THE FASHIONS OF MAES 47 begin a battle at sunrise and get happily to sleep as a victor shortly after sunset was a possibility to a Napoleon but is not to be compassed by a Von Moltke or a Joffre. What is true of the Napoleonic battles compared with those of today applies with almost equal force to the conflicts of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war. A few hundred thousand combatants have been replaced by millions, decisive engagements whose duration formerly was not often greater than, at the longest, a week now run into months, battle-fronts short enough in other days to be swept by a commander's eyes are now more or less matters of conjecture at headquarters, conjec- ture based upon long-distance messages. Com- manders worn with the tedium of a stubborn battle get leave of absence for a week and return to the front, recuperated, to resume their activities in the same battle. Waterloo would have been a mere epi- sode on the flank in the battle of the Aisne, not given much space, if any, in the official dispatches. When, therefore, on August 14, Sir Edward Grey received word from Brussels that German troops had entered Belgian territory, he had sound reasons for the horror which he felt, and voiced, at the calamity that had befallen civilization. But neither the British Foreign Secretary nor the leading mili- tary experts of Europe, apprehensive though they 48 THE GAME OF EMPIEES were regarding the dire possibilities that appeared to lurk in the approaching war, realized fully how widespread was to be the coming conflict, how stub- bornly fought were to be its battles, how hideously large was to be the "rake-off" taken by Death from this game of Empires, "whose stakes are thrones, whose table earth, whose dice are human bones." Bernhardi, a high-priest of Militarism, saw with a clear vision the trend of events and will forever rank high as a prophet, but even to him, as to his master, the Kaiser, the colossal character of the struggle pre- cipitated by Gavrilo Prinzip's "fatal shots" must have come as something of a surprise. In fact what we have been calling the war of wars might justly be named the war of the unexpected. The outcome, as it was, of the unlooked-for failure of Diplomacy, it displayed at the very outset a ten- dency to provide a startled world not only with rea- sons for despondency but also for astonishment. The world, and especially the German Kaiser and his ad- visers, had taken it for granted that the Walloons, called by Napoleon the finest fighting men in Europe, had been so thoroughly devoted for several generations to the gentle, thrifty ways of peace that the old Adam in them was dead, not merely sleep- ing. But a strange thing happened at Liege. Shop- keepers, under the influence of that mysterious, po- tent and well-night universal passion called patriot- THE FASHIONS OF MARS 49 isnij developed over night into heroes whose doughty deeds will go down to posterity in song and story. Hard-working, plodding, unimaginative Walloons, long forgetful of the fact that they were descended from a race famous in the annals of war, rose in their might and gave to an astonished and admiring world an exhibition of daring and self-sacrifice against the overwhelming forces of an unprincipled invader that has placed the name of Liege upon that immortal honor list where Americans are proud to find their Concord and their Lexington. On August 7, 1914, M. Poincare, President of the French Re- public, sent the following telegram to the King of the Belgians: "I am happy to announce to your Majesty that the Government of the Republic has just decorated with the Legion of Honor the gallant town of Liege." Reactionary, mediaeval, somewhat bombastic, do you say? Perhaps. But we shall discover, as we follow the course of the war of wars, that it is responsible for many curious revivals not perhaps without value to an age that had sacrificed many lofty ideals upon the materialistic altar of commercialism. Krupp guns are the latest achieve- ment of the God of the Ordnance but, strange as it may seem, recent battles have demonstrated the value of the mediaeval breast-plates as a protection at long range against even the very latest style of bul- lets. Wireless telegraphy is invaluable, of course, 50 THE GAME OF EMPIRES to those who lead armies to-day, but never before in the history of war has the carrier pigeon been em- ployed to better advantage than by General Joffre. D'Artagnan, Porthos, and Athos have been fighting side by side with Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd in the trenches on the Aisne and in Flanders, and it has been rumored that Sir Galahad and Don Quix- ote have been seen leading cavalry charges on the extreme flanks of the Allied armies. The stubborn resistance of the forts around Liege to the reckless onslaughts of the Kaiser's astonished but relentless forces was of some importance from a military standpoint. It must be borne in mind that the Germans were in a hurry, under the necessity to hack their way through to Paris — where the Kaiser is said to have made a dinner engagement for the 17th of September — in time to get back to trounce the Russians who talk wildly, under the influence, no doubt, of vodka, of dictating terms of peace to Ger- many and Austria from — was there ever such an absurd dream? — Berlin! It was annoying, unbear- able, to be forced to lose time and thousands of men in teaching this detestable city of Liege, with its forts, field-works, trenches, mines, barbed-wire en- tanglements, that, as our admirable von Bethmann- Hollweg says, necessity knows no law. It was neces- sity, was it not, that compelled us to rush through Luxemburg? But Luxemburg was wise. Luxem- THE FASHIONS OF MAKS 61 burg knows her place. It is true, of course, that the Grand Duchess Marie Adelaide endeavored to block the pathway of our army by driving her motor- car lengthwise across a bridge, waving a copy of the Treaty of Berlin in our faces and threatening to telegTaph her protest to — of all men — the Kaiser! But she did not pull a revolver from her belt and shoot at our front file. The Grand Duchess and her subjects were annoyed — naturally enough — but not hysterical, not dangerous, not mad enough to lay down their lives to assert — how absurd it sounds ! — the divine right of neutrality. But those infernal Walloons! They denied the self-evident proposition that at a crisis threatening the very existence of German militarism — for were not France, Russia and England mobilizing their armies, dispatching their fleets to destroy us and our only ally ? — the signatures of dead and gone statesmen to a scrap of paper are of no real significance. They did worse than this. They fought us like incarnate devils. Our mass formation — expensive in lives but psychologically necessary to German troops — failed to put the fear of God and the Kaiser into the hearts of these barbarous Belgians, indifferent to our crying necessity to save time in our praiseworthy effort to place Deutschland ueher Alles. We gave them repeated opportunities to surrender their old- fashioned but remarkably powerful forts without 52 THE GAME OF EMPIKES further loss of their lives and ours. But they seemed to prefer death to what they foolishly considered disgrace and continued stubbornly to exact from us a sacrifice in men and time that was most exasper- ating. The men we could afford, perhaps, to lose, but the time squandered in bringing Liege to terms was costly — how costly only the future can deter- mine. Fortunately for the cause of culture Mars, the deity who dictates the changes in fashions that are constantly adding to the variety of death-dealing weapons, so creditable of late years to the ingenuity of civilized man, had provided the exponents of militarism-in-action with a new and splendidly de- structive engine of war. The Krupp siege gun is designed to make the strongest forts, even though these have been erected to defend the neutrality of small states and the sanctity of international treaties and are manned by heroes defending their country from wanton invasion, look eventually like the ruins that demonstrate the might and majesty of a high- power earthquake. Kietzschke, Treitschke and Bern- hardi have accomplished a most valuable work in presenting to the intellectual world the philosophi- cal bases upon which men of the highest culture may rest their conviction that might makes right, but when the time comes for putting belief into action Krupp comes into his own and a 42-centimeter how- THE FASHIONS OF MARS 53 itzer can make more converts to the Deutschland ueher Alles creed than any book, or books, yet writ- ten. The arguments used by the siege guns can be answered only by guns of greater power, and so, in the end, the forts of Liege were forced to abandon the debate, silenced finally by shells against whose devastating might even the wonderful valor of Wal- loons fighting for their honor and their homes could not prevaiL But Liege has done a great, a stupendous, an im- mortal deed. The Belgians are destined to pay dearly for the check given by Liege to the carefully devised designs of the German General Staff, a check that jeopardizes at the outset a comprehensive plan of action that has required many years to per- fect; but Belgian valor has aroused the admiration of the world and has won for the cause of the Allies many adherents in America who, had it not been for the heroic defense of Liege, which at the outset of the war of wars made clearer than could any diplomatic interchanges the simple moral issue in- volved in the great struggle, might have been men- tally bewildered by the adroit arg-uments that have been presented of late by German sympathizers in behalf of the proposition that necessity knows no law, that everywhere and always might makes right. Military experts tell us now that the check given to the German invaders by the Walloons of Liege 64 THE GAME OF EMPIRES had no great influence upon the final outcome of the earlier campaigns of the war in the West ; that, in fact, the advantage that might have been gained by the Allies from the unexpected and stubborn resistance of the forts surrounding Liege was thrown away by the French commanders. However this may be, there can never be room for doubt regard- ing the tremendous moral influence, world-wide in its effects, of the challenge that the heroes of Liege gave to armed expansionists whose excuse for in- vading a neutral state was as old and weak as their siege guns were new and strong. Alas for Belgium ! For her devotion to the propositions that two and two make four, that right is right and wrong is wrong, that even in a ma- terialistic age there are certain ideals worthy of preservation, that death is preferable to dishonor, she has suffered a punishment so hideous that the details thereof have horrified a world grown of late years somewhat indifferent to tales of human wrongs and sufferings. Philosophy, Literature, Sci- ence and Art have been working together in Ger- many, as allies of Militarism, to hypnotize a power- ful nation into the belief that when the hour of destiny has struck whatever the strong may do to the weak is justified by the alleged needs of that same powerful nation. In the name of Culture — aye, in the name of the THE FASHIONS OF MAES 55 Almighty — Belgium must be chastised for her temerity in defying the cohorts of enlightenment, in a way that shall serve as an eternal warning to lesser peoples who neglect the teachings of Nietzsche and fail to realize what Krupp has accomplished for the higher civilization. What a Corsican bandit once did to Prussia shall be made to look like the work of a predatory amateur compared with the blight that must fall upon Belgium for her refusal to admit that the Word of the Kaiser and the Word of God are one and the samel CHAPTER III MADE IN AAIEEICA CHAPTER III MADE IN AMERICA Terminus, always erratic, had gone insane and Mars was preparing joyously for the time of his evil life. The God of the Boundaries had turned the earth into a golf-course and was knocking the houndary-stones wildly about the planet with a war- club. Jupiter, once all-powerful, had been deposed by the minor gods, who wantonly make mischief and humorously call it Progress. Men rushed to battle praying to God, Jehovah, Christ, Buddha, Brahma, Mahomet or the Virgin Mary, and the crowned heads of a generation that secretly mocks at kings and openly obeys them uttered blasphemous petitions for victory. War declarations became epi- demic. Late in July Austria had declared war on Servia. Germany, Russia, France, Montenegro, Bel- gium, Great Britain and Japan issued their chal- lenges to their respective foes in the order named and in November Turkey succumbed to the Berserker rage that had turned the Temple of Civilization into a madhouse. Widespread credence was given 59 60 THE GAME OF EMPIRES to the rumor that the plumbing of the Peace Palace at the Hague was out of order. Before resuming the thread of our narrative — as a novelist might say — a thread upon which must be strung presently the blood-red beads of battles more appalling than those man's savage, barbarous and semi-barbarous past had begotten, it may be ad- visable to dwell for a moment upon the mental at- titude of the average American toward the cataclysm that had so suddenly overtaken not merely a few nations but practically the race at large. In- credulity, horror, protest and apprehension were, it is safe to say, mingled in about equal parts in the mind of a citizen of the United States as nation after nation, autocracy, limited monarchy, republic, plunged into the whirlpool of the first of all world- wars. Perhaps, too, we Americans were tempted to indulge in egotistical reflections as we gazed, at a seemingly safe distance, upon the horrors that had befallen our fellowmen across the seas. Terminus, the rascally God of the Boundaries, had been re- markably kind to us at the outset of our national career by protecting our right and left flanks by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. With our front and rear in no danger from stronger nations, we were placed geographically in a position which per- mitted us safely to pursue our experiment in self- government, our effort to prove to a doubting world MADE IN AMERICA 61 that the voice of the People is the voice of God. The misfortunes of our neighbors are, if we are honest enough to admit the truth, among our most precious possessions. We Americans may be superior to the rest of the world but, after all, we are still men, not supermen, and subject to the weaknesses of human nature. With all Europe and parts of Asia and Africa at war the fact that the United States, alone of all the great powers of the world, maintained a neutral position seemed to each individual Ameri- can to testify to the inherent superiority of our ideals, our institutions and our national conduct; to put us, as it were, in the position of a thorough- going gentleman surrounded by bloody-minded row- dies. What Terminus had done in our behalf in respect to boundaries we had acknowledged by tak- ing advantage of our "splendid isolation" to be- come the one nation on earth to which, when a world- war broke forth, the combatants might turn even- tually for mediation, for an impartial umpire who should do at the end of the war of wars what he should have been called upon to do before that war began. This feeling of superiority upon the part of Americans was intensified by the efforts of the bel- ligerents, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, to plead their respective cases at the bar of our na- tion, admitting by this procedure that the friend- 62 THE GAME OF EMPIKES ship of the United States had become, by a com- bination of tragic circumstances, the greatest prize that could be won by any one of the warring powers. The administration in control at Washing- ton had been busily engaged in turning our nation's swords into plowshares and our spears into prun- ing-hooks. We had been entering into peace treaties with many countries, both great and small, with a calm and splendid idealism that was blind to the menace of Armageddon and had eyes only for the millennium. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and our Secretary of State delivered a lecture upon the Prince of Peace while Europe mobilized her stupendous armies. Our hearts and our money went out to stricken Belgium, while Japan seized islands in the far East from Germany within easy striking distance of the Philippines. We were forced to submit to a war tax because Gavrilo Prinzip had murdered an archduke, but there still remained those among us, thousands and hundreds of thousands, who continued to nourish the feeling of national egotism referred to above, and to cherish the belief that it was our country's destiny in the future al- ways to make peace, never war. Mukden, Lule Burgas, the Marne and the Aisne had no message for the majority of our countrymen, no warning more timely than could be found in the battles of Julius Csesar. But the Balkan wars overthrew the MADE IiN" AMERICA 63 balance of power in Europe and the war of wars is now destroying the equilibrium of the world. A neutral nation truly wise to-day would be engaged in sharpening its weapons of offense and defense instead of signing scraps of paper that, as ex-Presi- dent Roosevelt has so ably shown, are, with no sanc- tion of force behind them, worth "literally and ab- solutely nothing in any time of serious crisis." The above is not written in any spirit of depreci- ation of the fundamental ideals upon which our American civilization is based. Kever before have our underlying national principles appeared more admirable, more worthy of every sacrifice for their preservation, than in these dark days when the utter collapse of democracy in Europe and the brutal dominance of hereditary autocracy shock us with the revelation that mankind's struggle toward higher planes of being has been less successful than we Americans had so fondly believed. In its last analy- sis Americanism, as Washington and Lincoln un- derstood and interpreted it, is to-day shining like a good deed in a naughty world. The faith of our forefathers, who denied the divine right of kings, and of our fathers, who cut the cancer of human slavery from the bosom of our republic, in the basic principles underlying our American governmental fabric is as strong in American hearts in the twen- tieth century as it was in the eighteenth or the nine- G4 THE GAME OF EMPIEES teenth. It has been the fashion among our native sociological and historical writers of late years to deny this proposition, to assert that plutocracy has destroyed the devotion of our people to the old ideals of democracy, that the power of concentrated wealth has rendered the world's greatest experiment in government by the people a disastrous failure. But the present attitude of the American nation toward the European conflict, the horror that is felt in this country at the fact that this war of wars could have been precipitated without the consent of those most closely affected, namely, the people of the various warring nations, that hereditary autoc- racy could decide the course, at the greatest crisis in the history of the race, which civilization must take is proof positive that the Americanism we have been taught to revere is still, despite the assertions of carpers and pessimists, a living, potent force, an influence that may yet save the world from the recurring catastrophes that result from autocratic usurpation. Not by fasting and prayer and prat- ing of the blessings of peace, however, can Ameri- can democracy fulfill its lofty mission to an abused and suffering race, but by strengthening itself with those material weapons which, soulless as they are, can turn the scale at great crises in favor of Progress or Reaction, Freedom or Tyranny, human Hope or human Despair. MADE IN AMERICA 65 And these weapons to which I refer, like the ideals for and against which they are now being wielded by embattled millions, were made in America. The democratic creed to which we Americans confoim has been outraged by despotic power in Europe and that very power is employing for its preserva- tion those modem engines of destruction that owe their origin to American ingenuity. As a nation we resent and deny the bald, uncompromising as- sertions of Treitschke and von Bernhardi that war is both moral and necessary and that only by and through war can a nation fulfill its highest possible destiny. Nevertheless, we must as a people bear the blame, if blame there be, for providing the warring nations of to-day with their most effective weapons. Mars, who seems to have, like Terminus, a grim sense of humor, has found in a democracy, theoret- ically and practically antagonistic to war as an in- stitution, the inventive genius that has made his twentieth century activities as a destructive deity more horrible and devastating than at any former time. Government by the people is no more a Yankee notion than is the super-dreadnought. The propo- sition that all men are created free and equal is not more distinctly American than is the revolver or the machine-gTin. The contention that "the square deal" should prevail in diplomacy was made 66 THE GAME OF EMPIRES in America, as were the submarine and the aero- plane. This nation holds that the arguments ad- vanced to sustain the claim of German militarism to public approval are fallacious, but the smooth- bore 42-centimeter howitzer bj which modern forti- fications have been rendered obsolete is a product of American inventiveness. On land, on sea, in the air and under the water the war of wars, decreed by kings and ministers hating American ideals, is being fought with American weapons. Treitschke, Bern- hardi and their royal master, William II, would find but little to admire in the achievements of our great- est writers, philanthropists, statesmen, poets and educators, but to Colt, Gatling, Winchester, Hotch- kiss, Wright, Holland, Maxim and Ericsson the Ger- man war lords grant their tribute of admiration. Is not a Maxim "silencer" of more value to the cause of civilization than Edison's diamond-disc phono- graph ? Let Yankee genius put music into packages if it so wills, but where it shines brightest to-day in the eyes of German civilizers is where the howitzers thunder or the submarines dive or the aeroplanes soar and terrify. It is not difficult to understand, as we go over the list of American inventors, from Robert Fulton to Wilbur Wright, how easy it has been for a peo- ple not devoted to the creed of militarism to trust to the ingenuity of our inventors to save us from MADE m AMEKICA 67 disaster in the time of need. We seem to take it for granted that whenever we may be threatened by a Merrimac the good god Mars will send us a Monitor. Is not a nation sufficiently inventive to provide a world at war with practically all the weap- ons it employs in its ghastly game of human butchery safe from the perils that menace less highly gifted peoples ? "Coast defenses," said the eloquent Kepre- sentative Lumpkin, of the Freshwater, Ind., dis- trict on the floor of the House recently, "are, as the tariff used to be, a local issue. They might pos- sibly be needed to defend our Eastern summer resorts at some time in the remote future, but such a contingency does not warrant us in making an appropriation at this depressing crisis, when the high cost of living goes hand in hand with a disas- trous shrinkage in the pork barrel. I assure the nation, and especially my own constituents, greatly in need of a new postoffice, that if danger should threaten this country from abroad we are possessed of sufficient ingenuity to defend ourselves from its encroachments. In fact, I may tell the American public, in the strictest confidence, of course, that a fellow-townsman of mine has invented a high ex- plosive that could blow an enemy's battle-fleet into atoms at the touch of an electric button. This ex- plosive, I am glad to be able to state, will render our enormous coast-line absolutely unapproachable. 68 THE GAME OF EMPIEES and will enable this House hereafter to confine its attention wholly to the pressing needs of our in- terior towns, cities and waterways.'^ In the chaotic welter of ideas and deeds that are now distracting our American minds, fevered as they cannot help but be by a world-conflict whose iconoclasm can only be surmised, one fact stands out clear and incontrovertible: If German Militar- ism is right American ideals are wrong, if our ideals are right German Militarism is wrong. And from this fact springs a conclusion that is unavoid- able, namely, that national ideals, whether they be reactionary or progressive, depend for their develop- ment upon strength and become but a mockery through weakness. Belgium cherished certain ideals — and they were sufficiently high and praiseworthy — ^but to-day to the millions of starving Belgians the need for food has become the all-important feature of existence, and the lofty dreams of a high-minded and heroic people have vanished in the smoke of burning cities. That "government of the people, for the people, by the people" should not perish from the earth the price of life demanded by Gettysburg had to be paid. In other words, the noblest ideals that the soul of a nation can cherish may require, at great crises, the employment of those foul, diabolical, de- testable weapons of war that destroy human life MADE m AMERICA 69 by machinery and are now making a human slaugh- ter-house of Europe. This is essentially different from the basic proposition upon which Treitschke and Bernhardi rest their contention that war is of itself moral and uplifting. "Even victorious wars can only be justified," said Prince Bismarck, "when they are forced upon a nation," a remark for mak- ing which the modern German militarists have found it hard to forgive the man of Blood and Iron. But it is advisable for Americans to reflect, at this appalling crisis in human history, that even justifiable war, forced upon us against our will, can not be waged victoriously unless we have had the foresight and energy to prepare for the same kind of unpleasant contingency that has recently over- taken the neutral states of Luxemburg, Belgium and China. For be it known and carefully considered in this country that, though the war of wars is being fought with American weapons, it was precipitated by the antagonism cherished by European reaction- aries for the ideals upon which our institutions rest. Bernhardi frankly voices the fear and de- testation nourished by Gemian Militarism for Ger- man Social-Democracy. He says: "Germany has become an industrial and trading nation; almost the whole of the growing increase of the popula- tion finds work and employment in this sphere. 70 THE GAME OF EMPIKES Agriculture has more and more lost its leading position in the economic life of the people. The artisan class has thus become a power in our State. It is organized in trade unions, and has politically fallen under the influence of the international so- cial democracy. It is hostile to the national class distinction, and strains every nerve to undermine the existing power of the State." Germany, from the point of view of the militarists, was nourishing a viper in her bosom, a viper that was growing stronger and more menacing through inspiration de- rived from the startling fact that under democratic institutions the United States has become a world- power. American ideals transplanted to Germany threatened to overthrow eventually the Hohenzol- lems and the system upon which their power rested. As Bernhardi shows, the most effective method of checking the growing influence of democratic ten- dencies in Germany was through the consolidating influences of a foreign war. It was wiser, was it not, more patriotic, to turn Krupp guns and Zep- pelins against the English, French or Russians than to use them to mow down German revolutionists ? And if German militarism must perish in the end, certainly destruction from outside is to be preferred to annihilation from an internal explosion! War is, of course, an affair of the physical world. It is waged by calculations based upon resources MADE IN AMEKICA 71 in men, money, guns, ships, forts and other ma- terial necessaries of conflict. But underlying and responsible for all wars is a clash of ideas. The cave-man fought his antagonist because he was im- bued with the idea that in preempting a certain hole in the ground he had established a property right that was to be defended even at the cost of life. His gloomy den represented to him what "a place in the sun" means to a modem nation. His predatory opponent was under the influence of the idea of expansion, the idea that a neighbor's cave was to be captured, if possible, at the earliest op- portune moment. And each in his own way, the cave-man on guard and the cave-man aggressive, was a patriot, for the patriot both defends his own or adds to it when occasion serves. War, then — any war — ^has both a material and an immaterial basis. It is a clash of conflicting weapons and of conflicting ideas. Admitting this, we may go fur- ther and assert that study of any war in the his- tory of the race will convince us that, in the last analysis, one combatant represented Reaction and the other Progress. Especially is this true of the wars that have been waged on earth during the past few hundred years. In applying the test suggested above to the world- wide struggle that overwhelmed modern civilization in the fateful year 1914, it is not difficult to under- 72 THE GAME OF EMPIRES stand why we Americans, who have given to Mars his twentieth-century weapons, find that as a nation our sympathies, because of certain ideals that we have always cherished, go forth to one allied com- bination of warring peoples as against the other. Fear that the success of Germany, Austria and Tur- key against their numerous foes would involve pres- ently a menace to us has little, if anything, to do with the bias of America at this crisis. We are influenced, as a people in the forefront of modern aspirations, by the conviction that, despite certain curious contradictions in the present alignment of powers, the Triple Entente fights for Progress, while the new Triple Alliance, which has replaced, perforce, Italy by Turkey, wars in behalf of the forces of Reaction. And circumstances have com- bined, at this solemn hour in the life of mankind, to compel us to question the future and to ask in awed apprehension whether, like machine-guns and the practical ideals of true democracy, the salva- tion of civilization is to be made in America. CHAPTER IV COESICA VEKSUS GALILEE CHAPTEE IV COESIOA VEESrS GALII.EB Liege had punctured the tire of the German war- machine but in speed, power and general eiEciency that apparatus displayed marvelous superiority, through August, 1914, to anything of the kind the world had yet known. Invoking God, Glory and Guns, the Kaiser proceeded to punish Belgium for her audacity in defying an army that was in a hurry to perform its first important task in a complicated and daring adventure; upon the outcome of which, German writers had agreed, hung the issue of World- Power or N^ational Downfall. Bernhardi had said: "Since the tactical efficiency and the morale of the troops are chiefly shown in the offensive, and are then most needed, the necessary conclusion is that safety only lies in offensive warfare." At the out- set of the war of wars the German offensive ap- peared to vindicate the fondest hopes of a nation that had staked its destiny in that grewsome game whose dice are human bones. If Willie could even- tually do as well against Georgia and Nicky as he 75 76 THE GAME OF EMPIRES was doing against Bertie, there was every reason to believe that Germany's well deserved place in the Sim would be presently attained. Mars seemed to be kindly disposed and Terminus was busy pre- paring new boundary stones colored red, white and black. But where lay the sympathies of Jupiter, the Omnipotent, no man yet knew. It is certainly amazing how censorious people habitually indifferent to the ideals of the military caste — the commercialized, uncultured, unimagina- tive Americans, for example — are toward certain methods of procedure that have characterized vic- torious armies since the earliest recorded times. Necessity, as our beloved von Bethmann-Hollweg said, knows no law and armies designed to hack their way through to the sunny side of boundary stones are not drilled on rules laid down in books of eti- quette. The mental attitude toward War of nations ignorant of the teachings of ISTietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi is childish in the extreme. The contention that an ancient, and universally admired and beloved, cathedral that gets into the way of the gun-fire of an army on the offensive should be spared for the sake of posterity shows to what extremes unpractical dreamers will go. That uni- versities, libraries and art galleries in cities whose inhabitants are reckless enough to defend their hearthstones are not to be destroyed, as a punish- CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 77 ment to patriotic barbarians and a warning to their possible emulators, is a proposition that could be defended only by carpers and critics grown ansemic through too much peace, prosperity and plutocracy. Why should Americans grumble at the damage done by Krupp guns to the cathedrals of Rheims and Antwerp ? Aren't they building their St. John the Divine, which will have nothing old or musty or outworn about it? Americans have long enjoyed a world-wide reputation for foresight and shrewd- ness. Can they not see that the destructiveness of German cannon may redound eventually to the ben- efit of American architects? How squeamish Democracy makes a nation ! The tales that came to America of the sack of Louvain sent a thrill of horror through a people whose only method of recent years for preserving the manlier qualities has consisted in watching college football games. Many of the most brilliant German con- troversialists endeavored patiently and cleverly to show the too-sensitive Americans how unjust it is to hold an army beset by snipers, and much behind its time schedule, to a strict accoimtability for the actions of its units, but what can be hoped for in the way of reason and justice from a people too stupid to admit that war is of itself inherently moral and praiseworthy ? The German triumphs during the first month of 78 THE GAME OF EMPIRES the war of wars seemed to indicate that Don Quixote would have a comparatively easy task in overthrow- ing the windmills. He who, clad in shining ar- mor, had set out to carry German culture to the dark regions of the earth that they might he changed into sun-kissed abiding places for a superior race had made, despite the misguided efforts of the cour- ageous Belgians to defend their lares and penates, marked progress toward ultimate success during the unforgettable month of August, 1914. On the 4th the first shots at Liege had sent their sinister echoes around the world, aghast at the tragic possibilities those shots threatened to the race at large. Four weeks later Belgian, French and English armies were retreating over the fields of Flanders, Picardy, Artois and Champagne, the Kaiser's troops, mena- cing gray masses, were on the Marne and Seine, and on the boulevards of Paris could be heard the dis- tant thunder of Krupp guns at Meaux and Lagny. In every comer of the earth men thought only, talked only of war. The ease and celerity with which Germany had overrun France in 1870 was re- called, and to the world at large it appeared, at the beginning of September, 1914, that history was displaying an inclination, as it does now and again, to repeat itself. It had taken only a little over six weeks after the declaration of war in 1870 for the Germans to put Napoleon III hors-du-comhat at CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 79 Sedan. In 1866 Prussia had defeated Austria in a month and a half. It was apparent that German soldiers of the twentieth century were as lively on their feet as had been their fathers and their grand- fathers. The famous "goose-step" is a method of exercise that hardens the muscles needed for for- ward marching, and is highly to be recommended for armies that must plant the seeds of culture in the West in a hurry if they are to get back to the East in time to defend the kitchen-garden of the higher civilization from the inroads of Russian barbarians. Don Quixote, then, had put his first windmill out of the fight, and the first week of September found Berlin jubilant and London and Paris de- pressed and apprehensive. The French Government had fled to Bordeaux. Again had it been demon- strated to the eyes of a world tending more and more toward democratic modes of thought that at the outset of great wars autocracy possesses marked advantages over republican institutions. The ma- chinery of popular government, in English, French, Swiss or American form, has not been designed to support the sweeping proposition that War is in- herently moral and uplifting and, in the nature of things, can never become obsolete. To the peo- ples living under republican forms of procedure, armies and navies seem to be, at the best, necessary 80 THE GAME OF EMPIEES evils rather than weapons to be used wantonly for national aggrandizement. But if democratic sys- tems hamper nations in the earlier stages of war, there seems to be abundant reason to believe that they possess staying qualities that should have been, at the greatest of all world crises, a warning to hereditary autocracy, upon which, now as in past ages, the teachings of history seem to make but little impression. The goose-step, the mass formation, and Krupp guns had placed Belgiiun at the mercy of the Kaiser in the first month of the war of wars and had en- abled him to rush an army under General von Kluck to the very outskirts of Paris. The world held its breath in amazement. The maddest military pro- ject ever devised by experts in grand strategy seemed for the moment to be not beyond the bounds of possible accomplishment. With Paris captured, its conquerors could hurry home to Germany to hurl back the oncoming Russians from the sacred boundaries that show where real culture ends and barbarism begins. "Weltmacht oder Niedergang," World-dominion or Downfall hung poised in the balance, Germany's future at stake upon the outcome of Von Kluck's daring movement against the French capital. In five weeks after her declaration of war against Rus- sia, Germany had overrun Belgium and was knock- COESICA VERSUS GALILEE 81 ing peremptorily at the gates of Paris. Her states- men, in endeavoring to justify the violation of Belgian neutrality, had practically admitted that Germany's one chance to perform the miracle she had attempted was to triumph decisively at the very outset of the war. The Germans must destroy the military strength of France, occupy Paris and put the French Republic to ransom, and then transfer their armies, flushed with triumphs in the West, from the Seine to the ISTiemen; to do to Nicky's troops what they had done to the forces of "one Poincare, a Frenchman." And here, among all the strange contradictions and amazing inconsist- encies that have been begotten by the war of wars, we look at this moment upon the most astonishing phenomenon. Both the invading Germans and the French who retreated before them have deified the same earth-born genius, the Corsican, Napoleon, who boasted at St. Helena that neither disaster nor death could destroy his persistent influence in the modem world! "In Europe as a whole, in the twentieth century," says the late J. A. Cramb, Professor of Modem History at Queen's College, London, Eng., "two great spirit forces contend for men's allegiance — Napoleon and Christ. The one, the representative of life-renunciation, places the reconciliation of life's discords and the solution of its problems in 82 THE GAME OF EMPIEES a tranquil but nebulous region beyond the grave; the other, the asserter of earth and earth's glories, disregardful of any life beyond the grave, finds life's supreme end in heroisms and the doing of great things, and seeks no immortality except the immortality of renown, and even of that he is slightly contemptuous. To Napoleon the end of life is power and the imposing of his will upon the wills of other men. Like Achilles or like Ajax, ever to be the first and to outshine all others is his confessed ambition. The law, on the other hand, which Christ laid upon men appears to be the law of self-effacement. The true Christist toils but for others; he prays but for others. He suffers for them; he dies for them. * * * In Europe, I say, this conflict between Christ and IsTapoleon for the mastery over the minds of men is the most significant spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century. You meet with it in England and in America, as in Austria and Spain. You meet with it even in Italy. In Russia Tolstoi's furious at- tacks are a proof of its increasing sway. * * * In the writings of Nietzsche and of the followers of Nietzsche they study the same Napoleonism transforming the principles of everyday life, breath- ing a new spirit into ethics, transfiguring the tedi- ous, half-hypocritical morality of an earlier gen- CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 83 eration. * * * Corsica, in a word, lias con- quered Galilee." Had the Germans seriously bombarded Paris in September, 1914, it is safe to say that l^apoleon's tomb would have fared better than the cathedral of ISTotre Dame. That Corsica had conquered Gali- lee was made evident to the delegates to the Church Peace Conference at Constance, Germany, in August. Eighty-five delegates, representing various Christian denominations, had managed to reach Constance from England, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, ITorway, Bulgaria, the United States and France at the most inopportune moment for their worthy purpose in the blood- stained history of a pugnacious race. The annies of Europe were mobilizing and it became necessary for the conference to adjourn hastily from Constance to London. Before leaving Constance, however, the Christian Pacificists sent a message to the rulers of Europe and the President of the United States, running as follows: "The Conference of members of Christian Churches, representing twelve coun- tries and thirty confessions, assembled at Constance to promote friendly relations between nations, sol- emnly appeals to Christian Rulers to avert a war between millions of men among whom friendship and common interests have been steadily growing, and thereby save from disaster Christian civiliza- 84 THE GAME OF EMPIRES tion and assert the power of the Christian spirit in human affairs." The official account of the sequel to this appeal is grimly humorous. "Under a safe conduct from the Kaiser, who had conveyed by the Assistant Court Preacher his interest in the Conference, and with the special protection of the Grand Duchess of Baden, the delegates passed through the line of bayonets by day and the lurid glare of searchlights sweeping the heavens for hostile airships by night, leaving Flushing just an hour before the German warships menaced the Channel, passed safely over the mines in the Thames, to continue the Confer- ence in London, where the English delegates were saddened by the news that their own land was at war." The European rulers to whom the Christian pacificists had appealed in behalf of peace were at that very moment mobilizing Mohammedans, Buddhists, Shinto-worshipers, Sun-worshipers, Fire- worshipers, Devil-worshipers, Atheists, Infidels, warriors of every creed antagonistic to Chris- tianity, in their mighty effort to prove to a world given to self-deception that the late Professor Cramb was right when he asserted that Corsica had con- quered Galilee. "Had I remained in the East," said ISTapoleon, "I would probably have founded an Empire, like Alexander, by going to Mecca as a pilgrim, where I would have bowed the knee and CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 85 offered prayers — but only if it had been worth while!" To the Hotel des Invalides, where rest the re- mains of the deified Corsican who had dethroned Christ in the hearts of those who control the des- tiny of Europe, came the echoes of Von Kluck's gims in those hot, oppressive days of early Sep- tember. The spirit of ISTapoleon, hovering near a tomb that has become to the modern world what the Holy Sepulchre was to former generations, in- dulged, we may well believe, in mocking medita- tions, marveling at the fatuous imbecilities of hu- man nature, the human nature he so well understood and, in his heart of hearts, so thoroughly despised. The Prussians are at the gates of Paris! To a visitor at St. Helena in 1818 Napoleon had re- marked : "You are examining that big clock ? It was the great Frederick's alarum; I took it from Pots- dam — that was all Prussia was worth." Is it an- other Frederick the Great, or merely a William the Imitator, whose cannon could so easily drop a bomb upon the sepulchre of the deified Corsican? And again, as so often in his amazing career on earth, ISTapoleon in the first week of September, 1914, would have asked, "Where are the English?" The English he hated, and who destroyed him, are they still, a century after Waterloo, interfering with the well-laid plans of an autocratic conqueror who has 86 THE GAME OF EMPIRES had the vision, as had "the godlike Corsican," of ■universal dominion ? Where are the English ? Can it be that they are on Von Kluck's flank, that a German capture of Paris, seemingly practicable on September 2, could be rendered, through English valor, impossible by September 9? "Where are the English? Does that detestable little island of theirs, which, but for the blundering of that naval imbecile Villeneuve, I, l^apoleon, could have over- run and destroyed, still dominate haK the world, blocking at great crises the projects that come now and then through the centuries to the soul of genius ? I did my best to rid the world of those stubborn, blundering, barbarous English! To my Vice- Ad- miral Latouche-Treville I wrote in July, 1804 : 'We have 1,800 gunboats and cutters carrying 120,000 men and 10,000 horses between Etaples, Boulogne, Wimereux and Ambleteuse. If we are masters of the Channel for six hours, we are masters of the world!'" "If we are masters of Paris six weeks from now," William II. had said in the first week of August, 1914, "we are masters of the world." But I^a- poleon never dominated the Channel for five min- utes, much less his necessary six hours, and in the first week of September, 1914, the German Kaiser saw whatever chance he may have had for seizing CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 87 the capital of France slip from his feverish grasp. To the Kaiser, as to ISTapoleon, the English had been the blighting influence that had darkened a dream of universal dominion just at the moment when the elusive goal to which the souls of great conquerors have always striven seemed to be within the clutch of genius. Von Kluck! Immortal name! When posterity shall read the tragic story of a Kaiser and a mili- tary clique who endeavored to hack their way through insuperable obstacles, spilling on their way the blood of millions of men, in the effort to ob- tain that world dominance that was denied to Alex- ander and I^apoleon, and must forever be unattain- able to an individual or a nation, to Von Kluck must be paid the tribute of admiration and sym- pathy. The football player who makes a fifty-yard dash for a touchdown is not to be deprived of the glory due to him if his opponents block the kick for goal. Von Kluck's guns had thundered in Sep- tember in the ears of Parisians appalled at the rapidity of movement of a mighty and seemingly irresistible foe. The roar of his cannon appeared to presage the final and complete triumph of the Kaiser's claim to world-power, the coming of a new Heaven and a new Earth. But the crash of Von Kluck's guns on the outskirts of Paris ushered in 88 THE GAME OF EMPIRES not a German millennium on earth, but rumbled in sullen echoes around the planet as a reluctant salute to a dying hope, a lost cause, the high-water mark in an impossible project that was doomed to failure from its inception. ^'Germany has only one enemy. One nation blocks the way," says Professor Cramb. "That na- tion is England. Not Russia or Austria, unless secondarily, not France, unless incidentally, is Ger- many's enemy: the enemy of enemies is England." If permanently, as the ages pass, Corsica conquers Galilee will it be because England, unfaithful to her highest mission, betrays Galilee? Germany hates England because to-day, as a century ago, the Corsican god, whose worship is the worship of power, sees that still the most glorious symbol of war to which Prussia can point is the great Frederick's alarum-clock. But are the ideals of Germany and England fundamentally the same? Assuredly we Americans are not willing to ad- mit that, beyond all peradventure, Corsica has really conquered Galilee; that the gospel of Treitschke rather than that of Tolstoi, the creed of Militarism, not the Sermon on the Mount, are the dominant spiritual forces that determine, and shall continue to determine, the course of modem endeavor. And we are, as a people, inclined to believe that our English cousins, in offering their lives upon the bat- CORSICA VERSUS GALILEE 89 tlefields of Europe in defense of the sacredness of international treaties have given convincing proof that not Napoleon but Christ reigns in their hearts to-day. CHAPTER V PAL-aEOLITIIIC SURVIVALS CHAPTER V PALEOLITHIC SURVIVALS James Geikie, the noted Scotch anthropologist, is authority for the statement that man has existed in Europe for something like a million years. In the earliest stages of his earthly career the Euro- pean was little more than a beast of prey. A fos- silized jawbone discovered seventy-eight feet below the surface of the sand at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany, has enabled scientists to visualize the pre- Adamite who lived and fought and died between the first and second glacial periods. The man of Mauer possessed an ape-like jaw, massive and with little if any chin, and powerful teeth. The leading characteristic suggested by his distinctly unpleas- ant outward seeming is pugnacity. "Because of the perishability of man," says a reviewer of Dr. Geikie's latest book, "it is only rarely that we may find any part of the man himself surviving from such remote antiquity. Our chief reliance for the establishment of the successive races of the man of pre-history must rest upon the records which man 93 94 THE GAME OF EMPIEES has left more enduring than himself, the fragments of rock which he has shaped to his use." From the relics of palaeolithic man discovered by anthropologists two generalizations regarding pre- historic Europeans have been made possible, one that the man of Mauer and his descendants were fighters, the other that they were artists. Says the authority on this subject quoted above: "So far re- moved from us are early Pleistocene times that our sympathetic interest in the life of palseolithic man cannot but be faint. And yet he was very human: doubtless at the outset of his career a bestially sel- fish and merciless savage, but gradually developing finer traits with the passing of the ages. It is not without emotion that we look at the beautiful art work of the Magdalenian reindeer hunter. And when we remember the conditions under which he lived — exposed to a severe climate and the attacks of many formidable wild beasts, his home a dark cave or rude rock shelter — we may well be aston- ished at his attainments as an engraver, a sculptor and an animal painter. With the simplest of tools and appliances his best efforts rival, if they do not sometimes excel, those of our modern art schools and must ever be a marvel to critics who may have nourished the belief that such attainments are only possible in a civilized community." Palaeolithic man, then, was devoted to both Art PALEOLITHIC SURVIVALS 95 and War. He appears to have been lacking in a sense of humor as he gave himself up with primi- tive passion to bloodshed at one time and at an- other to the pursuit of culture, but his stone vsreap- ons and impressive paintings prove that he was sufficiently many-sided to invent, in time, the mys- terious thing that we moderns call laughter. Whether the man of Mauer poked fun at his battle- axes or his pictures we can never know, but there must have come a time in the career of prehistoric Europeans when some progTessive cave-dweller gazed at his crude weapons and paintings and chuckled to himself, the first of all humorists, at the incongruity between a blood-stained stone hatchet and an uplifting mural decoration. We can in imagination go forward a few hundred thousand years and see with our mind's eye some Geikie of the remote future making excavations in what is now called Belgium. Would he not have much the same experience that has come to the great Scotch anthropologist of to-day in his investigations into the life and habits of palseolithic man? He would come upon fragments of marvelous paintings, remnants of splendid temples — evidently religious in origin — perhaps some priceless tome preserved from decay by some curious chemico-physical chance, or mayhap a quaint gargoyle or an equestrian sta- tue or the tip of some splendid spire that once 96 THE GAME OF EMPIEES pointed heavenward. And in the same stratum of sand, piled high through thousands of centuries, he would find the remains of ingenious weapons of death, rifled gun-barrels or a smooth-bore howitzer, with here and there, perhaps, small iron crosses, causing scientific speculation and controversy. If the anthropologist of a remote to-morrow could be able to identify these relics of Art and War as be- longing to the twentieth century of what was known as "the Christian Era," he would undoubtedly in- augurate a world-wide campaign of excavation that would be rewarded with the upturning of art treasures and war weapons — as prehistoric to him as are the drawings and stone axes of palaeolithic man to us — from beneath the sand deposits in various parts of the earth. And to him would come the same conclusion regarding the man of to-day that we have reached concerning the man of Mauer, namely, that he was both bloody-minded and artis- tic — and utterly devoid of a sense of humor. We Americans are horrified at the world-tragedy that succeeded the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in the early summer of 1914. Perhaps the grim humor of the cataclysm intensifies the shock we have received, through the keenness of our native sense of the ridiculous. In a way it is laugh- able to see Russia and Japan, so recently at each other's throats, lined up as allies to England in an PALEOLITHIC SURVIVALS 97 effort to destroy England's great rival. Can it be possible that Russia and Japan really love England ? "With the help of the Almighty," announced the Ottoman Embassy at Rome on ISTovember 9, "the Turkish army crossed the Egyptian frontier yester- day." Is the Sultan's Almighty the same deity to which his ally the Kaiser so often appeals? Only a century ago on the battlefields of Belgium, Eng- land and Prussia warred together against France. In this war of wars Mars, the most venerable of all practical jokers, has joined France and England together against Prussia. With such amazing in- congruities confronting us, as we survey the vast field of twentieth century warfare, we strive to find some philosophical point of view, some theoretical line of cleavage, some mental and psychological clash explaining, or at least making less inexplicable, this puzzling world-wide conflict which has aligned the greater and lesser powers of the world after a manner that seems to make a mockery of history and to furnish justification for the laughter of the gods. Strangely enough, we can find the enlight- ening vantage-point which we are seeking in the cave of the pala3olithic man. Individuals and nations to-day can be analyzed and judged according to their respective attitudes toward the rival claims made by prehistoric man to our regard. Is the early European cave-dweller 98 THE GAME OF EMPIKES more to be admired for his stone-ax and his powers in wielding it than for his amazingly clever achieve- ments as a sculptor and draughtsman ? The answer that a man or a people makes to that query is de- terminative and enlightening. It is the question that practically every nation on earth was forced to answer during the tragic year 1914, a year that found the himian race divided into two armed camps, in the one the idealists of the world, demand- ing liberty for the individual and testifying to their belief in the light that never was on land or sea; in the other the materialists, the militarists, voicing the claims of the State as against those of the in- dividual and rendering their own arguments ridicu- lous by themselves endeavoring to turn a man into a god. Treitschke and Bernhardi versus Goethe and Heine ! Corsica against Galilee ! The cave- man who made hatchets reincarnated in the twen- tieth century to fight to the death against the cave- man who made pictures ! John Cowper Powys, in his brilliant reply to Miinsterberg, entitled "The War and Culture," elo- quently says: "This terrible war, caused primarily by the natural egoism of races, has become, by the logic of events, and by the invisible pressure of the system of things, a war of Ideas. The Idea of Germany is to force upon the world, by means of an omnipotent and irresistible State-machine, a cer- PALEOLITHIC SURVIVALS 99 tain hard, scientific, unimaginative, and efficient culture. The Idea of the Allies is to protect the individual against the State, the little nations against the empires, and the drama, color, pas- sion, beauty and tradition of the various races of the earth, against a monotonous and murderous uni- formity!" There is variety in the mural sketches of the cave-man, only "murderous uniformity" in his stone-axes. The Idea of Germany and the Idea of the Allies are both of them as old as palaeolithic man, and through countless ages they have been, in some form or another, in deadly conflict. But never before has the struggle between them involved all mankind. When Armageddon has been fought to a finish it will never have to be refought. The time has come upon earth when Idealism or Ma- terialism must alone dominate the planet. In the generations to come is it not imaginable that a race- religion more sublime than any mankind has yet known will turn the city of Liege in Belgium into a Mecca for devout pilgrims? With such reflections in our minds, is it not in- teresting to turn from the theoretical to the prac- tical, to gaze at the battle of the Marne, one of the world's decisive struggles, with eyes whose vision has been clarified by a glance at the fundamental issue involved in the deadly conflict that, as now seems apparent, destroyed for all time Germany's 100 THE GAME OF EMPIKES magnificent but mad project to dominate the world ? On the battle-line of the Marne the cohorts of Ma- terialism were confronted by the cohorts of Idealism and the defeat of the former rejoiced the hearts of the vast majority of Americans, to whom the inauguration of a world-war by the Militarists of Germany appeared to be the most colossal crime of all the ages. As to what, from a military standpoint, hap- pened at the Marne on September 6 and 1, the words of Mr. Frank H. Simonds, author of ''The Great War," a book dealing brilliantly with the earlier campaigns of the fateful autumn of 1914, are clarifying and tell, clearly and concisely, the story of a defeat that was to put the Kaiser's armies, designed to wage offensive warfare, practically on the defensive for many disastrous months: "To use a homely figure, the Allied left from Mons to the gates of Paris had been in the posi- tion of a closing door, it hung on the barrier fortresses to the east, swinging closed on Paris. General von Kluck had endeavored to put a foot be- tween the door and the casing before it closed. By September 3 the crack was far too narrow, in fact the door had swung closed and the great envelop- ing movement, by the narrowest of margins, it appeared, had completely failed. As von Kluck ad- vanced, the armies of von Buelow, von Hansen, PALEOLITHIC SUEVIVALS 101 the Grand Duke Albrecht, and the Crown Prince had kept pace, while the Allied armies facing them had given way, not because of the pressure of the armies in front of them, but because the with- drawal of the Anglo-French on their left exposed their flank. 'Now the left stood on Paris, the right on the barrier fortresses, the center south of the Mame river on a slightly curving line passing through Montmirail, Sezanne, LaFere, Champe- noise. Camp de ]\Iailly, Vitry-le-Frangois, to Re- vigny on the Ornain, just north of Bar-le-Duc. ISTorth of this point Verdun and the barrier fortresses above Toul were now half surrounded by the Crown Prince's army coming West by Stenay, and had been left to their own resources. "Between Vitry and Paris the railway distance is 127 miles; the front of the Allies was rather shorter. On this line they had concentrated an army subsequently estimated at 1,100,000. In ad- dition the garrison at Paris counted 500,000. Against this the Germans did not have above 900,- 000. To succeed it was necessary to throw their full weight upon one point. They selected the center and in the next few days the whole drive was be- tween Sezanne and Vitry, centering at Camp de Mailly, happily for the French the field on which for years their artillery had been tested and their artillerists practiced, l^owhere else in all France 102 THE GAME OE EMPIEES could their shooting be expected to be half so good. "For the Germans there had been several possi- bilities. To besiege Paris was impossible because this would take time, moreover the Allied armies were still unbroken, the Eussians were coming up in the East and carrying all before them, and it was necessary to destroy the Erench and English armies promptly and turn East. To storm Paris was conceivably possible, but promised to be too costly in lives while the Allied armies still stood. There remained the possibility of breaking the Al- lied center between Paris and the barrier forts, cutting the Allied line in half and rolling up both fractions, one on Paris, the other against the Crown Prince and General von Heeringen in Lorraine. "The last was the plan chosen by the German General Staff. * * * General von Kluck's ma- noeuver before Paris was the decisive movement. * * * Suddenly, on September Y, the garri- son of Paris struck east. The Anglo-French force struck north toward Montmuraie and the Marne and for forty-eight hours the fate of von Kluck was in doubt. Fighting desperately he managed to slip between and escape the blades, leaving artillery, sup- plies and wounded behind him. But in the struggle he lost, his ammunition train and his communica- tions were severely compromised. "By tremendous efforts von Kluck won free about PALEOLITHIC SUEVIVALS 103 September 10 and started north at terrific speed. Meantime to the east the desperate efforts of von Buelow had failed. The French center was not to be broken. Pushed back beyond Sezanne and Camp- de-Mailly it stood inexpugnable; as for the right, it was equally adamant. ISTot only had the attack failed, but the rapid retreat of von Kluck opened the flank of the German center. Accordingly it had to get up and go back, and after it the left. * * * So far as one can now judge the Battle of the Marne represented the deliberate and magnificent planning of General Joffre, who calmly permitted the Ger- mans to inundate provinces and ravage cities until by the very greatness of their labors, the privations and the losses in the series of battles they fought, they came upon the final battlefield weary and spent. * *■ * It was the French strategy that prevailed, it prevailed because the French, with their English comrades, were able to retreat for three weeks and strike back in the fourth. The Battle of the Marne could not end the war, but on the fields where Na- poleon won his last great battles and a century be- fore showed himself a supreme master of war, the long course of Prussian victories was at last inter- rupted by the sons of the soldiers who surrendered at Sedan and Metz, aided by the same British dog- gedness which a century before had won Waterloo." Imagine a palaeolithic man in an aeroplane gaz- 104 THE GAME OF EMPIRES ing down upon the panorama of Paris and the battle- fields on her outskirts upon which the fate of the city, perhaps of modern civilization, had been put to the issue of contemporary warfare in the early days of September, 1914, He would have seen beneath him the two things he had known and loved nearly a million years ago. War and Art, raised to the nth power. His chipped-stone axes have evoluted into machine-guns and lyddite shells, into steel bayo- nets and noiseless revolvers. His crude mural sketches have developed into the art treasures and architectural masterpieces that make Paris, from various points of view, the capital of the twentieth- century world. He would have looked down upon the Germans and the Allies slaughtering each other by modern machinery within sight of the towers of I^otre Dame, and into his prehistoric mind there might have crept a hint of the astounding fact that the struggle that had beset his own soul during his earthly career as a cave-man countless ages ago was rending the spirit of mankind to-day. Vaguely had he known in the dawn of man's earthly day that there were within him two antagonistic forces, the one driving him to the slaughter of his rivals with his battle-ax, the other tempting him toward the joy that came to him when he scratched pic- tures on a rock or molded soft clay into the shape of reindeer or bear or brother cave-man. PALEOLITHIC SURVIVALS 105 And there beneath him at the Battle of the Marne our palaeolithic man could have gazed down upon a mighty, concrete manifestation of the same spirit- ual conflict that he, in a crude, infinitely petty way, had known in his soul well-nigh a million years ago. To-day, as in the time of the man of Mauer, the Battleaxe is at war with the Picture, the Ma- terial struggles to destroy the IdeaL CHAPTER VI HASHEESH FOE WAREIOKS CHAPTER VI HASHEESH FOR "WAERIOES Among the many amazing paradoxes that the study of history brings to light there can be found not one that is so tragically humorous or humor- ously tragic as the fact that an impossible dream, an alluring, but fatally foolish, vision of world domination, inspired a deluded nation to exhibit, in the year of Our Lord 1914, to the eyes of an astounded generation the most striking demonstra- tion of military efficiency that mankind has known. A cocaine fiend or an opium smoker who should be- come a I^apoleon of finance would appear to defy all the accepted axioms of physiology and psychol- ogy. But Germany in the twentieth century, a victim to poisonous ideas that acted upon the na- tion like a drug that changes the world of reality into a realm of phantasmagoria, made a god of Ef- ficiency and became more worthy than any people has yet been of that admirable deity. It is a fact worth noting, in this connection, that the prophet and lawgiver who was so largely responsible for 109 110 THE GAME OF EMPIEES Germany's recent exhibition of astonishing pre- paredness, to the minutest detail, for the maddest of all human rainbow-chasing died insane. The hasheesh injected into the veins of his compatriots by the pen of Nietzsche had two seemingly contra- dictory results. It accentuated in a people ex- tremely susceptible to the lure of the imagination a tendency to hitch their wagon to a star, and at the same time it inspired them to make that wagon, designed for an adventure beyond the bounds of hu- man achievement, stronger and better equipped than any vehicle the ingenuity of man had ever con- structed. Germany dreamed of world empire and, with practical common sense, sewed four suspender buttons instead of two upon the rear waistband of a soldier's trousers. Before going on to a glance at the disastrous consequences to Germany of the defeat of her armies at the battle of the Marne, it is worth our while to examine the mental poison distilled by Nietzsche and others that drove a seemingly sane nation into an exploit more insane and, alas, more fatally far- reaching in its hideous effects, than any hare-brained crusade in the heroic and mock-heroic past of man- kind, a past in which Don Quixote often reappears, but never until 1914 as a drug fiend who was as efficient in his foolishness as he was foolish in his efficiency. HASHEESH FOR WAREIORS 111 . In ''Thus Spake Z arathustrd," Nietzsche says: "I do not advise you to compromise and make peace, hut to conquer. Let your labor be fighting and your peace victory. What is good ? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad ? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is being overcome. ]^ot contentment, but more power! Not peace at any price, but war ! Not virtue, but efficiency ! The weak and the botched must perish: that is the first principle of our humanity. And they should he helped to perish! I am writing for the lords of the earth. You say that a good cause hallows even war? I tell you that a good war hallows every cause." Hark to the voice of Dr. Adolph Lasson, Profes- sor of Philosophy in Berlin University: "No one can remain neutral to the German State and peo- ple. Either you consider it the most perfect crea- tion that history has produced up to now or you acquiesce in its destruction — nay, in its extermina- tion. We are morally and intellectually superior beyond all comparison, as are our organizations and our institutions. Our army is the epitome of Ger- man excellence. We have nothing to apologize for. Louvain was not destroyed — only the houses of mur- derers. The cathedral of Rheims is not destroyed. 112 THE GAME OF EMPIEES The French caused the damage. England acts in politics as if we lived in the eighteenth century. Germany has taught the world how to carry on war and politics in a conscientious manner." Hark to Major-General von Disfurth, a distin- guished retired officer of the German army: "There is no reason whatever why we should trouble our- selves about the notions concerning us in other coun- tries. Germany stands as the supreme arbiter of her own methods. It is of no consequence whatever if all the monuments ever created, all the pictures ever painted, and all the buildings ever erected by the great architects of the world be destroyed, if by their destruction we promote Germany's victory over her enemies. The commonest, ugliest stone placed to mark the burial place of a German grena- dier is a more glorious and venerable monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together. They call us barbarians. What of it? We scorn them and their abuse. For my part I hope that in this war we have merited the title of barbarians. Let neutral peoples and our enemies cease their empty chatter, which may well be compared to the twitter of birds. Let them cease to talk of the cathedral of Kheims and of all the churches and all the castles in France which have shared its fate. These things do not interest us. Our troops must achieve victory. What else matters?" HASHEESH FOE WAEEIOES 113 These are not the vaporings of inmates of in- sane asylums or the inchoate utterances of con- temporary cave-men ; they are the calm, studied pro- nouncements of so-called intellectuals, of men who have drunk deep of German culture at its very sources, of men who have helped to make that cul- ture what it stands for in the intellectual world. In the course of their extended and scholarly read- ing, these men, N"ietzsche, Lasson, von Disfurth, and the countless lesser lights of the Nietzschean- Treitschkean cult, must have come upon the origin of our English word "assassin," which means a hash- eesh-in, or hasheesh-eater. The Century Diction- ary informs us that "a. colony migrated from Persia to Syria, settled in various places, with their chief seats on the mountains of Lebanon, and became remarkable for their secret murders in blind obedi- ence to the will of their chief. "Their religion was a compound of Magianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. One article of their creed was that the Holy Spirit resided in their chief and that his orders proceeded from God himself. The chief of the sect is best known as ^Old Man of the Mountains' (Arabic sheikh al-jebal, chief of the mountains). These barbarous diieftains and their followers spread terror among nations far and near for at least two centuries. In the time of the crusaders they mustered to the num- 114 THE GAME OF EMPIRES ber of 50,000 and presented a fonnidable obstacle to the arms of the Christians." The method pursued by the Assassins in developing their military power was simple but effective. They would lure a healthy, vigorous boy into a fondness for the intoxicating joys furnished to its victims by the drug hasheesh and presently the fallen youth would stop at no crime that offered him the means to provide himself with the poison he had learned to crave. His moral nature had been destroyed by a drug but he had been transformed into a valu- able agent for furthering the projects of the Old Man of the Mountain. A pernicious ideal may do to a nation what hash- eesh does to an individual. That drug-begotten dreams did not prevent the Assassins of Syria from becoming noteworthy warriors, history assures us. That the egotism, brutality, and insistence upon world-domination displayed by the most influential German writers of recent years have worked to- gether to make the German military machine a most effective institution the world well knows. But the hasheesh-eaters, despite their martial powers, were after all only pitiful somnambulists following the dream-begotten lures of the night, destined in the lapse of ages to leave no trace behind them save as their memory is perpetuated in one of the most evil of all evil words. Prophecy may be out of HASHEESH FOR WARRIORS 115 place at an unprecedented world crisis when new elements affecting the course of history have en- tered into the greatest of all international conflicts, but is it not possible, even probable, that a century hence the German vision of world-dominion as it inspired the armies of William II, will look to our descendants like a drug-born dream as fantastic and unreal as the wildest chimera that came to the hash- eesh-poisoned Assassins of Syria ? Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, in a letter to the New York Times, dated N'ovember 17, 1914, says: "The present war is the inevitable result of lust of empire, autocratic government, sudden wealth, and the religion of valor. * * * The real cause of the war is this gradually developed barbaric state of the German mind and will. All other causes — such as the as- sassination of the heir to the throne of Austria- Hungary, the sympathy of Russia with the Balkan States, the French desire for the recovery of Al- sace-Lorraine and Great Britain's jealousy of Ger- man aggrandizement— rare secondary and incidental causes ; causes contributory, indeed, but not primary and fimdamental. If anyone ask who brought the ruling class in Germany to this barbaric frame of mind, the answer must be Bismarck, Moltke, Treitschke, ISTietzsche, Bernhardi, the German Em- peror, their like, their disciples, and the military 116 THE GAME OF EMPIRES caste." As the Old Man of the Mountains, in the merry days of the dominant Assassins, would line up the striplings of his tribe and teach them at one and the same time the joys of hasheesh and the manual of arms, so had the German Kaiser made fearless and able soldiers of the youth of his do- minion while they were mentally under the per- nicious influence of ideas promulgated by brilliant writers. What fate does the future hold for the expression, "Pan-Germanism" ? Will it carry with it to posterity, as has the word assassin, the germ- idea of crime springing from an abnormal condi- tion of mind superinduced by a poison? The hasheesh of Militarism had carried the Ger- mans early in September, 1914, to the outskirts of Paris where suddenly the mirage of world-domina- tion had lost something of its semblance of reality to the eyes of martial adventurers, who would have been amazed to learn that, despite their splendid soldierly achievements, they were, at the supreme crisis in a crucial campaign, merely sleep-walkers drugged by an impracticable idea. The Battle of the Aisne, the first shots of which were fired on September 12, was a colossal struggle, unprece- dented in the size of the armies engaged and the extent of territory involved in the combat, in which a mighty host, fit to the smallest detail for the stu- pendous task before them and inspired by the teach- HASHEESH FOR WARRIORS 117 ings of a man who died insane, confronted the allied armies of France and England, actuated by the eminently sane idea that our planet belongs, and shall always belong, to many races and not to one alone. The long and indecisive struggle at the Aisne, which merged eventually into the Battle of the Seven Rivers, to become, after a time, the Battle of Flan- ders, offers, as it displays the horrors and heroisms of modern warfare, a ray of encouragement to the pacificists. In its duration, the varying fortunes that attended the efforts of the entrenched Germans and the attacking Allies, or of the Germans sally- ing forth on the offensive to be met with the strong Allied defense, the possibility is suggested that war may sometime become obsolete through the ingenuity of man in making weapons so deadly that in the future a great battle could end only in a draw. That any higher consideration than this is likely to in- fluence mankind in the near future to make battles as obsolete as are duels in America is not probable, despite the fact that the exhibition that modern, civilized man made of himself at the River Aisne in September of 1914 was sufficiently ludicrous, could one forget the tragedy of the demonstration, to put warfare forever out of existence, provided man could be guided by that God-given sense of 118 THE GAME OF EMPIRES humor which was denied to our palaeolithic progeni- tors. The youthful and vigorous of the most highly civilized nations in Europe were devoting all their energies for days and weeks to an effort to annihi- late the hope of the future, to put a continent, per- haps the world at large, back into a state of bar- barism, the more complete because it had been accomplished by the aid of science. As Mr. Fred- erick Palmer in his brilliant and timely novel, "The Last Shot," so clearly demonstrates, the units of contending armies harbor no inherent antagonism to each other. When the hasheesh of world-domination is temporarily out of his mind, the German private has no hatred for a Belgian, a Frenchman or an Englishman. But when his commander gives the order to kill he overcomes his characteristic good nature and gives way to the Berserker rage that is not unlike what physicians term auto-intoxication, a disturbed physical condition caused by the poisons emanating from undigested food. The toxic effects of mental suggestions made to a susceptible and highly efficient people by Nietzsche, Treitschke and others produced that amazing panorama of human brutality and idiocy that is to be known to posterity as the Battle of the Aisne. We may feel sure that the Old Man of the Moun- tains who, centuries ago, made effective assassins of HASHEESH EOR WAERIORS 119 the joung men of his tribe by means of a narcotic would be interested, were he to revisit the earth, in a report made by the English Official Press Bureau in November, 1914, which runs in part as follows: "Whatever deterioration there may be in the ma- terial which is now being drafted into the ranks of the enemy it must be admitted that the Prussian war machine, acting upon a nation which had pre- viously been inured to the sternest discipline, has ob- tained most remarkable results. * * * It is true that a considerable proportion of the masses recently thrown into the field against the British consisted of hastily trained, immature men, but the great fact remains that these ill assorted levies have not hesitated to advance against highly trained troops. In spite of the lack of officers, in spite of their inexperience, boys of sixteen and seventeen have faced our guns and marched steadily to the muzzles of our rifles and met death in droves with- out flinching. Such is the effect of a century of national discipline. That the men subjected to it are the victims of an aristocratic military caste does not alter the fact that they have accepted that sys- tem as necessary to the attainment of national ideals. However discordant the elements which make up the German Empire, they have by the force of the Prussian war machine all been welded together to be able to fight for the national existence, and it is 120 THE GAME OF EMPIEES evident that for them 'Deutschland uber Alles' is no empty cry." We can picture the Old Man of the Mountains comparing notes with Kaiser William II. in the future in some quiet comer of the abode of spirits and boasting perhaps of the deeds his young as- sassins once performed against the Christian armies battling against pagans to win for the Cross the Holy Sepulchre. And it is not unreasonable to imagine that in the end the dialogue between the Sheikh al-jebal and the German War Lord might readily become a hot debate as to whether hasheesh made from the poppy or hasheesh made from books is the better drug for the turning of healthy-minded young men into man-killers. CHAPTEE VII THE SPIEITUAIi VEBSUS THE MATEEIAIi CHAPTER VII THE SPIEITUAL VERSUS THE MATERIA!, Today, as a century ago, Russia is to non-Sla- vonic Europe a monster, a menace and a mystery. She bore these three aspects to Xapoleon, who paid the penalty of failure for his inability, despite his comprehensive genius, to understand the signifi- cance, from a military standpoint, of Russia's geo- graphical position, trying climate, and inexhaustible resources in providing human food for cannon. The burning of Moscow, though he made it a boast, was not a feather in the great Corsican's cap. In the light of the blazing Kremlin he might have read the doom that was awaiting him as an imperial bandit, chasing the alluring but ever fatal rainbow of universal domination. iN'apoleon discovered, as has the twentieth century world, that Russia knows how to play a waiting game, to learn valuable les- sons from disaster, and, confident in the fulfillment of her seemingly manifest destiny, to pluck victory from defeat and even the spoils of war from military failure. 123 124 THE GAME OF EMPIRES When Don Quixote in August, 1914, mounted his war-horse Rosinante and set out to put the French windmills liors-du-combat in time to spur eastward to charge the Russian sheep, he was laboring under the delusion that the sheep in question would be, as usual, slow in mobilizing. If they were not, if the Russian troops moved against Austria with unprec- edented celerity, would it not prove to posterity that l^icky, not Willie, was to blame for the world's greatest and most unjustifiable tragedy ? On August 2, 1914, M. Sazonof, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote from St. Petersburg to the Czar's Am- bassadors and Ministers in the various capitals of the world: "It is absolutely clear that Germany is already endeavoring to throw upon us the responsibility of the rupture. Our mobilization was provoked by the enormous responsibility which we should have incurred if we had not taken all precautionary meas- ures at a moment when Austria, confining herself to pour-parlers of a dilatory character, was bom- barding Belgrade and proceeding to a general mobilization. His Majesty the Emperor had imder- taken, by giving his personal word to the Emperor of Germany, not to undertake any aggressive act so long as the pour-parlers with Austria should con- tinue. After such a guarantee, and after all the proofs of Russia's love for peace, Germany could SPIKITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 125 not, and had no right to, doubt our declaration that we would accept with joy any pacific issue compati- ble with the dignity and independence of Servia. * * * By the decision to declare war upon us at a moment when the negotiations between the powers were still being pursued, Germany has as- sumed a heavy responsibility." Russia had learned a thing or two in Manchuria about modern warfare from the Japanese. Among the lessons that the Yellow Peril had taught to the Slav Peril was the necessity for celerity and sobriety if an army is to achieve victory in the twentieth century. The fact was — and the ultimate outcome of the war of wars will demonstrate its importance — that Germany and Austria were about to embark upon the maddest of all military adventures against nations whose armies had had, as the troops of Em- perors William and Francis Joseph had not had, experience in actual battle. Russia, England, France and Servia could put soldiers into the field at once who had been under fire in Manchuria or South Africa, Morocco or Turkey, who had abandoned mass formations, never employed the goose-step and under- stood how to carry themselves when subjected to the fire of modern guns. Why the German General Staff was astonished at the rapidity of Russia's mobilization and the effi- ciency presently displayed by the Czar's armies in 126 THE GAME OF EMPIKES action is a question hard to answer. That experience is a competent teacher in the affairs as well of war as of peace should have been a fact known to the Kaiser's military advisers. But a board of experts who were amazed at the exhibition the Walloons gave at Liege of splendid fighting qualities, and which doubted the prowess of England and the martial spirit of France and refused to believe that open order is essential in modern attacking movements, is evi- dently doomed at all times to unpleasant surprises. One of the first and most sigTiificant of the many shocks that were being nourished in the womb of time for the Kaiser and his advisers will be known in history as the Battle of Lemberg. To a world appalled at the comparative ease with which the German armies had overrun Belgium and triumphed in Il^orthwestern France, placing Paris itself in grave jeopardy, the victory of the Russians at Lemberg, Galicia, over the main field army of the Austrians on September 1 came as a flash of light in a grow- ing darkness. As it was the first real triumph that the Allied cause had won, and as its military impor- tance and moral effect were pronounced, the destruc- tion of five Austrian corps by the Russians at Lem- berg will be remembered when engagements in the war of wars involving larger armies will be prac- tically forgotten. One effect produced by this in- itial triumph of the Czar's troops was to cause the SPIRITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 127 world at large to ask the question whether civiliza- tion, if anything should be left thereof, would be the more benefited by the coming of Pan-Slavism than by the ultimate domination of Pan-Germanism? Was the war of wars presenting to mankind merely a choice between two gigantic evils ? Beset as it was by all kinds of "perils," yellow, brown and vari- ous shades of white, an overwrought and somewhat hysterical generation grew constantly more nervous as the martial prowess of the Russians throughout the autumn of 1914 suggested the possibility that Western Europe might presently become wholly Slav. In this connection it is worth while to quote cer- tain striking utterances made in November, 1914, by the Empress of Russia to a newspaper correspond- ent: "Have you noticed," queried her Majesty, "how the war has welded the people into unbreak- able unity? As long as the war lasts there will be no political parties in the lands over which the Czar rules. The Labor Party is going hand in hand with the other parties. Poles, Finns and Jews have become Russians. . . . From the Arctic to the Black Sea and from Vladivostok to the Baltic you will find one united Russia which can and will be vic- torious." As was illustrated by various suggestive facts presented in a former chapter, the prehistoric passion called patriotism, exhibited in a primitive 128 THE GAME OF EMPIRES way by a palaeolithic cave-man defending his hole in the ground from attack, is, in the last analysis, the one universal human motive that made it pos- sible for hereditary autocracy to precipitate in the twentieth century a world-wide war. Dulce et decor est 'pro jjatria mori! It is not improbable that Horace smiled in his toga as he wrote the immortal line that so music- ally presents a poetical untiTith. It may be praise- worthy, perhaps, to drown in a trench or to be blown to pieces by a shell for the flag of one's country, but it surely cannot be sweet and pleasant. But Mars, who fashioned new weapons for the great red year 1914, seemed to be making a world-wide ex- periment in the twentieth century to see how far a seemingly unconquerable and practically omnipresent human passion would carry a race that has for count- less ages tossed boundary stones about the planet in a game that could not be played unless men be- lieved, as the Latin bard asserts, that it is a rather jolly and extremely handsome thing to die for one's country. Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism and Pan- Islamism are merely forms of palseolithic patriotism raised to a higher power and acting, whenever the opportunity offers, upon the offensive. And the passion upon which these futile efforts at national, racial or religious world-domination are based is the very passion that makes them abortive. No single SPIRITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 129 race can ever rule the earth until it alone has a monopoly of that patriotic fervor that drives men so courageously to death on the battlefield. The pa- triotism of Belgium tripped up Don Quixote faring forth in shining armor on his war-horse to tilt at the French windmills. And while Galieni's patriots rallied to defend Paris from the peripatetic patriots who followed the raiding von Kluck, Russian pa- triots were defeating Austrian patriots at Lemberg — while Mars chuckled joyously, Terminus lost track of his boundary stones and Jupiter remained in hid- ing, deaf to the prayers of countless widows and orphans. But to return to the Empress of Russia and her message to a world at strife. "If the war is pro- longed," said the Czarina, "and very costly in life it will be the defenders of justice and not the prom- ise-breakers or neutrality violators who will at last attain victory." Russia is thus officially placed upon the side of the defenders of justice. Her Majesty the Empress has said it. Russia is in arms against promise-breakers and neutrality violators. The al- leged monster, menace and mystery is, it is to be seen, not a monster, is no longer a menace and is a mystery only to those who have not read the inspir- ing words of the Czarina. There is no Slav Peril. If Constantinople falls into the paw of the great white bear, that long-desired key to empire will 130 THE GAME OF EMPIEES be in the grasp not of a ravenous brute but, praise be to the God of Battles, to a defender of justice. Willie, as the Czarina implies, is a promise-breaker and a neutrality violator but Nicky, at the greatest of all world crises, is hot and pugnacious for the sanctity of treaties and, under the stress of uplift- ing emotions, is convinced that Poles, Finns and Jews are, and ought to be, Russians when Russia is in need of men to die for the ten commandments, the golden rule — and the Golden Horn. If there appears to be a note of sarcasm running through the above is it not, at least to American readers of these side-lights on the war of wars, jus- tifiable ? With all our pity and sympathy for the victims of the world-tragedy of 1914, there cannot but be in the hearts of the people of the United States a feeling of bitterness toward both the mon- archs of the Old World and their deluded, hypno- tized subjects for inflicting upon contemporary civi- lization, so-called, a condition that makes the very word civilization a mockery. Behold the hypocrisies, the inconsistencies, the blasphemies of rulers and peoples engaged in this pitiless, unjustifiable war of wars ! German scientists experiment with a drug that produces what is called "the twilight sleep," rendering child-birth painless, while to their ears comes the roar of guns from battle-lines upon which millions of men are engaged in the pitiless work of SPIRITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 131 mutual slaughter. Professor Kochen, winner of the Nobel prize for surgery in 1912, presents to a world at war two years later the philanthropic drug coag- ulen, which instantly stops the flow of blood when applied to a wound and is destined, experts assure a blood-glutted generation, to save the lives of count- less combatants on the battlefields of to-day and to-morrow. European genius is making a ridicu- lous exhibition of itself. It is engaged in both the destruction and the preservation of human life. It is displaying amazing ingenuity in rendering war more deadly than heretofore, while at the same time it removes the curse of Eve from child-bearing and minimizes the perils from gunshot wounds. It makes a charnel house of a continent the while it boasts of new triumphs in antiseptic dressings. Mankind seems to have become a kind of universal Dr. Jekyll- Mr. Hyde, in whom both the best and the worst in human nature are infinitely exaggerated, furnishing new and powerful arguments to both the optimist and the pessimist, and leaving him who is neither the one nor the other dazed and unconvinced. A noted English statistician was quoted in the American newspapers published on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, 1914, to the effect that the war of wars after a duration of less than four months had cost Europe nearly five million men in the vigor of youthful mankind. It is reasonable to imagine 132 THE GAME OF EMPIEES that any nation displaying its gratitude to the Al- mighty for blessings recently conferred must have been shocked by the figures mentioned above. Some- how the turkeys consumed in the United States on November 26, 1914, seemed to be curiously flavorless and the sermons delivered from countless pulpits upon the morning of that day were most amazingly contradictory. The pillars of European civilization had been overthrown by the shots from a Servian patriot's revolver. But the material damage done by Gavrilo Prinzip, appalling as it is and immeas- urably great, will not be as interesting to posterity as the conflict precipitated at Sarajevo, Bosnia, in June, 1914, in the realm of ideas, beliefs, creeds, religions, philosophies, national aspirations and indi- vidual spiritual longings, convictions and doubts. The real war of wars is, after all, being carried on between Haeckel, the master-mind of Materialism, and Sir Oliver Lodge, the master-mind of Spirit- ualism. If the immortality of the soul is but a figment of man's imagination, as Haeckel asserts, then Ger- man Militarism can find no difficulty in justifying itself. Why should ephemera3 be called upon to comport themselves as if they were, and believed themselves to be, immortals? If materialism is in fact the ultimate truth, then has a nation or a race but one duty, and that is to itself, to find its place SPIRITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 133 in the sun and maintain itself therein as long as possible. If the materialistic philosophers have the better of an ancient and never-ending debate, noth- ing can be said against Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slav- ism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Americanism, Pan-Anglo- Saxonism, Pan-Mongolianism, or any other move- ment having for its purpose the betterment of con- ditions for certain species of human ephemeridsB anxious to enjoy to the full their momentary gambol in the sunshine of physical existence. From the standpoint of the materialistic, four or five million human insects were destroyed in Europe in the summer and fall of 1914 to the end that German flies or Slav flies or Latin flies or Anglo- Saxon flies might buzz a bit more merrily in the sunny days to come. If the aggressive and victori- ous Roman flies of a glorious epoch in European history had, at the height of their Pan-Csesarism, set aside a day for national thanksgiving we can imagine that their devout gratitude to Jupiter might have been voiced somewhat as follows : "We, unconquerable Romans, hold within our hearts no real belief in thee, oh Jove, the Omnipotent, but, for the sake of appearances, we express to thee our gratitude for our continued success in destroying the swarms of barbarian flies that have recently beset us and we beseech thee to continue to smile upon us from on high, to the end that our buzzing 134 THE GAME OF EMPIEES may be heard to the end of time in all comers of a world that rightfully belongs to the flies that are strongest on the wing. Why we, who are omnipo- tent on earth, feel impelled to offer prayers and oblations to gods in whose existence we have no belief is a mystery that we cannot solve, it^everthe- less, we who are about to die salute both Csesar, whom we see, and Jove, whom we do not see. If we are inconsistent in so doing, be it remembered that we, after all, are nothing but ephemeral flies, who have won by our prowess earth's fairest spots in the sun but are still unsatisfied, and feel within us an inexplicable and utterly absurd inclination to pay our homage to a spiritual power that we know does not exist." It is noteworthy that in the year of Our Lord 1914 a generation that was sufficiently materialistic to plunge into a war of a magnitude that makes the campaigns of the Roman legions appear insig- nificant was inclined, as were the skeptical but also superstitious cohorts of Csesar, to make public ac- knowledgTQent of man's subserviency to an Almighty God. Even the invasion and destruction of Belgium were accomplished in the name of the Deity, who was publicly and frequently invoked by the High Priest of Militarism, the German War Lord, to bless the Krupp guns that were engaged in dissemi- nating culture at the expense of historic churches SPIEITUAL VERSUS MATERIAL 135 and cathedrals. Russian priests raised ikons aloft and despatched millions of devout warriors to fight and, if need be to die, for the Lord. The religious fanaticism of Islam was aroused to the danger- point and a Holy War was preached in the East to the end that Allah and his Prophet might at length prevail against the heathen dogs, who worship Christ and Him Crucified. In every quarter of the civilized and semi-civilized world — a distinction, by the way, that seems somewhat absurd at present — temples, churches, altars and priests gave indications of an unprecedented religious activity in a world that, for the first time in the history of the race, was engaged in an effort to make the slaughter of man by man universal. It was reserved for us Americans, who have al- ways boasted of our possession of a keen sense of humor, to introduce a grimly laughable element into ft situation that kings and priests and devotees had made sufficiently ludicrous without our assistance. The Yankee humorist who originated the famous query, "Where was Moses when the light went out ?" was evidently still in existence and up to an old trick upon a larger scale. In newspapers, maga- zines, pulpits, clubs and homes the discussion of the question whether we Americans, through the in- fluence of the war of wars, had lost our faith in God waxed hot and bitter. An enormous amount 136 THE GAME OF EMPIEES of printer's ink was expended in a nation-wide de- bate the absurdity of which our boasted national sen- sitiveness to humor did not, strange as it may seem, make clear to us. For the incontrovertible fact is that of all the varied activities of man upon earth war is the most ancient. The cave-man believed in both supernatural phenomena and in the effective- ness of his battle-ax. In the twentieth century the human race as a whole is exhibiting, on an enor- mous scale, its faith in something that is not ma- terialistic and in its continued addiction to war- fare. The fact that the war of wars is the most stupendous conflict in the history of the race has no bearing upon man's belief or non-belief in God. If war produced always an increase in the number of atheists, there has been sufficient warfare in for- mer ages to destroy religion. But the truth is that atheism flourishes more vigorously in times of peace than in periods of human stress and strife. If we Americans have lost faith in a petty, anthropomor- phic deity, we have gained in its place a conception of the Almighty more worthy of a universe that is both material and spiritual, and of a maker thereof, than a God who could become a reductio ad absurdum because Man is still brutal enough to indulge in war. What is being destroyed upon the blood-red earth to-day is the so-called divine right of kings, not man's belief in divinity itself. CHAPTER VIII gekmany's god and japan's CHAPTEK yill Germany's god and japan's As mankind has advanced in civilization, pro- gressing, that is, from retail to wholesale slaughter, from localized to general wars, from crude to com- plex weapons. Mars and Terminus in their bloody games with the boundary stones have given to ISTeptune a constantly increasing participation in their grewsome pastime. To own the earth it is first necessary to dominate the seas. A Bismarck and Von Moltke can start a nation upon the path- way toward greatness, but its lofty destiny cannot be fulfilled without the genius that accomplishes upon the high seas what military supremacy achieves upon land. Even a comparatively small island- nation, whose military power is not formidable, may dominate a large part of the globe if it always maintains a navy large and strong enough to rule the waves. It is hard, of course, to make a people normally devoted to commerce, civic progress, sci- ence, music and other worthy pursuits comprehend at all times the necessity for constantly increasing 139 140 THE GAME OF EMPIRES naval expenditures. Those infernal Social-Demo- crats have a rooted objection to being taxed for dreadnoughts and cruisers, battleships and subma- rines. But how can a War Lord achieve world domi- nation in the twentieth century if he is only half armed? J^ew places in the sun should not be ac- quired and held by an army unless its triumphs are to be eventually rendered of permanent value by naval victories. That German Militarism actually indulged for two generations in a dream of world conquest will take its place eventually as the most astounding and unbelievable fact in recorded history. But while posterity will marvel at the absurd grandeur of a vision that was eventually to cost the world the most appalling price that mankind has ever paid for the criminal ambitions of its rulers, our descendants will be also amazed at the complete preparedness for conquest upon both land and sea that Germany displayed during the earlier months of the war of wars. We have seen how the Kaiser's marvelous soldiers overran Belgium and carried their banner to the very outskirts of Paris in August and September, 1914. It is necessary, if we are to force the leading events of the war of wars into the illuminating perspective at which we aim, to glance for a moment from land to sea to note the endeavors of the Kaiser's naval arm to take an GEKMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 141 important part in a conflict that authoritative Ger- man writers had assured the world must result in universal domination or complete downfall for their nation. By the time the Battle of the Aisne had devel- oped into the Battle of Flanders the war of wars had furnished to Neptune, as it had to Mars, the most interesting experience in his protracted career as a deity. German commerce had been driven from the seven seas but not without a struggle that took a heavy toll from the Mistress of the Ocean and her allies, white and yellow. By the middle of November, 1914, Great Britain's losses on the water included the following naval vessels, of various types : Amphion, Eyrion, Speedy, Pathfinder, Oceanic, Pegasus, Ahoukir, Cressy, Hogue, Ardmownt, HaiuJce, the submarine E-3, Hermes, Audacious, Good Hope, Monmouth, the submarine D-5, Niger and Bobilla. Russia had lost the Pallada, Jem- tchug and Pruth, Japan the Takachiko and the Tor- pedo Boat 33, while France had sacrified the Zelie and Mosquet. But despite all this, it appeared that Germany's employment of sea power to obtain world domination was to be a vain and costly experiment. Her naval base at Kiao-Chau, China, fortified at an enormous cost, had, after a protracted and coura- geous defense, surrendered to the Japanese. The Kaiser's islands and colonies in various parts of 142 THE GAME OF EMPIRES the world had been seized by Great Britain or one of her allies, and his main battle-fleet remained inoperative under the protection of the powerful fortifications at Heligoland. German submarines had achieved, it is true, notable triumphs, but the fact was clear that four months after Germany had begun war against the Triple Entente, supported or hampered, as the case might be, by Austria, the Kaiser had been deprived of various Oriental places in the sun, his armies were spending more time on the defensive than on the offensive, his naval forces seemed to be hemmed in, and Russian armies were winning victories against him that forced him to think of the Czar not as Nicky but as Nicholas. The German disaster at Kiao-Chau was of greater significance than the world at large, hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic interplay of great events in Europe, at first realized. The history of the rise and fall of the Kaiser's power in the Chinese province of Shan- tung is illuminating in many ways, showing as it does in miniature both the merits and defects of methods of procedure based upon the propositions that might makes right and that efficiency covers a multitude of sins. In 1897 two Roman Catholic priests of German birth were murdered by a mob in Shantung. In November of that year a German squadron, en- forcing Germany's demands for reparation, put into Kiao-Chau Bay and hoisted the red, white and GERMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 143 black flag over the town of Tsingtao. In the treaty presently signed by China and Germany the latter power obtained a "sphere of interest," two hundred square miles in extent, that has been called by well- informed writers "a key to Empire." Rohrbach in his book entitled "The German Colonies," in speaking of this act of aggression on the part of Germany, says: "In order to appease the sensi- bilities of the Chinese, the arrangement was looked upon simply in the light of a lease for ninety-nine years." Rapidly under the influence of German efiiciency Tsingtao became a model modern city, strongly fortified, ruled by Prussian oSicers, its com- mercial importance growing by leaps and bounds, and its destiny as the concentration point, on the coast, of the vast system of trunk railways now building in China seemingly assured. In harbor works alone, Germany expended $30,000,000 in ten years. A ring of twelve modern forts was erected to defend this most desirable sunny spot, from which the glorious cause of Teutonic world domination could be effectively forwarded. The brigandage and piracy that prevail in the twentieth century have discarded the antique em- blem of a black flag with skull and cross-bones and perform their lawless mission upon earth under a new banner upon which are inscribed words of lofty import — Efiiciency, Sanitation, Public Safety, 144 THE GAME OF EMPIEES and the like. Cleanliness may be, indeed, next to godliness, but for some generations past it has served as an ally to, and an excuse for, military ag- gression, the forerunner of commercial expansion. To cleanse and rebuild, to ornament and fortify, to enlarge and strengthen a key to empire in the far East is to fulfill, is it not, the manifest destiny of a materialistic power that is under obligations to itself and to posterity to plant the seeds of culture in every quarter of the globe ? And a treaty signed with Asiatics is, of course, only a scrap of rice paper. The practical difficulty confronting every effort at world domination recorded in human history lay in the fact that nations or races that have set out upon the Great Adventure, whether under an Alexander, an Attila, a Napoleon or a William II were defying, from the very beginning of their aggressions, one of the few human passions that can be called uni- versal. Desirable, even undesirable, places in the sun cannot be gTabbed by a peripatetic armed power without running foul of that love of country that is alone responsible for the fact that this globe has not in the past been wholly overrun by some mar- tial, unprincipled, ambitious race. When Germany accomplished her coup de main at Tsingtao in 1898 the most patriotic people in the Far East, the Japa- nese, felt themselves again outraged by a power GERMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 145 against whicli they had for three years nourished a burning grudge. Japan had demanded, as a legiti- mate reward for her success in the war of 1895 against China, Port Arthur and the Liaotung Penin- sula; and Germany had been instrumental in de- priving the victor of her seemingly rightful booty. In 1914 the war of wars, destined to settle many old scores the while it begets new ones, offered to Japan an opportunity to cross swords with Germany for the possession of Kiao-Chau Bay and Tsingtao, the center of dominion over vast territories, and millions of people who have become, because of military weakness, mere pawns in the game of Em- pires whose dice are now, as throughout former ages, human bones. The German forces at Tsingtao rep- resented to the keen eyes of the far-sighted Japa- nese the White Peril, against the Russian mani- festation of which they had fought and prevailed at Mukden. At the outbreak of the war of wars, Japan hastened to fulfill her treaty obligations to England with a precipitancy that was defended, di- rectly and indirectly, by her spokesmen as an indi- cation, at a time when the world had been shocked by German contempt for so-called scraps of paper, of the Mikado's reverence for, and loyalty to, inter- national obligations. The suspicions of Europe and America regarding the ambitions of Japan and her inclination toward expansion were allayed, for a 146 THE GAME OF EMPIRES time, at least, by her repeated assurances that what- ever islands, ports or territory might be seized by the Japanese during the progress of the war of wars would be returned to their rightful possessors at the end of the great conflict. Forgetful of the fate that had befallen Corea, and optimistic as always, we Americans turned our backs upon the Ear East and kept our eyes riveted upon Europe where, as it seemed to us, the future trend of what was to be left of modern civilization was to be determined. Our sympathies as a nation were with the Allies and to the side to which we inclined was not Japan giving most effective support? But the war of wars has been productive of events in the Far East of lasting significance to America. Whatever may be the effect of the great conflict upon the dominant nations of the earth, it is certain that Japan will be richly rewarded for her loyalty to the scrap of paper that attaches her, for the time being, to the fortunes of England. There are many points of resemblance between the methods and ambi- tions of Germany and those of Japan. They have both taken their high place among the dominant powers of the world through military achievements of a comparatively recent date. The German Em- pire, founded after a successful war of aggression, is not yet fifty years of age. Japan's amazing progress practically dates from her triumphant clash GERMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 147 with China in the last decade of the nineteenth cen- tury. The German Emperor and the Japanese Mikado claim, and are accorded by their subjects, a divine right to rule the destinies of their respective peoples. It is to the great god Efficiency that both the Germans and the Japanese pay the homage of enthusiastic worship. Through this potent and, in a sense, most praiseworthy deity, the Kaiser and the Mikado have been enabled to place themselves in a position to exert an influence upon the trend of twentieth century events not seemingly warranted by the numerical standing of their respective nations. That there is anything in the militarist creed as expounded by Treitschke and Bernhardi with which Japanese statesmen would not agree is to be doubted. Close study of the leading historical events of the last half century leads, indeed, to the conjecture as to whether the Japanese are the Geraians of the Far East or the Germans the Japanese of Europe. Preparedness, to the minutest detail, for war, both on land and sea; devotion to the cause of national expansion at any sacrifice, including the so-called rights of neutrals ; blind loyalty to the belief that the Kaiser, or Mikado, can do no wrong; physical courage and endurance that are Spartan in their excellence; reaction in beliefs going hand in hand with progress in martial equipment ; vastly enlarged domination or eventual downfall awaiting the sue- 148 THE GAME OF EMPIKES cess or failure that shall result from to-day's strug- gles — all these, and other less obvious resemblances, emphasize the essential likeness between the German and the Japanese attitude toward earthly affairs to- day. And this attitude is based practically upon Haeckel's materialistic conviction that earthly af- fairs are the only kind to which sensible men should devote their attention. If there is, perchance, a spiritual world, let homeless Coreans and Belgians dream about it beneath the pitiless stars. Their dreams may cheer them up ! If to a certain type of American rainbow-chaser the great god Efficiency, to which the Germans and the Japanese bow down, seems to be of the earth earthy he may be entitled to his point of view, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that our posterity may hold him and his kind responsible for dire disasters that may overwhelm the United States in the not very distant future. That the outcome of the war of wars, whatever it may ultimately be, will bring increased menaces and perils to our coun- try is so apparent that he who denies this self-evi- dent fact is either mentally incompetent or wan- tonly indifferent to the nation's welfare. In Octo- ber, 1914, ex-President Roosevelt addressed the stu- dents of Princeton University to the following effect : "It is the country's duty to put itself into such shape that it will be able to defend its rights if GERMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 149 they are invaded. I myself have seen the plans of at least two empires now involved in the war to capture our great cities and hold them for ransom, because our standing army is too weak to protect them. I have seen plans prepared deliberately to take both San Francisco and New York and hold them for ransoms that would cripple our country and give funds to the enemy for carrying on the war." The war of wars was precipitated by a flash of lightning out of a comparatively clear sky in the early summer of 1914. One of its incidental effects was to divide Americans into two factions, the one gazing clear-eyed at an evil world as it is, the other claiming to see an approaching millennium just beyond the eventual surcease of hostilities that had so suddenly involved nearly all the nations of the earth. The scope, the horror, the unprecedented iconoclasm of the great conflict suggested to the pacificists the pleasing idea that war raised to the nth. power would so stultify itself to the eyes of out- raged humanity that its very hideousness would doom it to extinction. They argued that a final war of practically universal extent had long been inevitable and was a condition precedent to a world- wide state of peace that should prevail for all fu- ture time. They were inclined to look with consid- erable equanimity upon the conflict in Europe be- cause it proved on a larger scale than heretofore 150 THE GAME OF EMPIRES the inherent absurdity of war as a method of set- tling international disputes, and to their minds seemed to point to universal disarmament sooner than might reasonably have been expected had the war of wars been indefinitely postponed. That war as an institution seems to be subject to the all-em- bracing law of evolution, progressing from the simple to the complex, beginning with the clashes of indi- vidual cave-men and going on through the ages to wars involving continents and races is an idea so shocking to the peace-at-any-price people that they willfully blind their beaming eyes to the bloody panorama that the history of the twentieth century, begun but a few years ago, already presents to the gaze of man. It is extremely easy for a busy people, rightfully detesting war, resentful of the belligerency of other nations, and engaged upon the fascinating task of developing new markets opened to American enter- prise through the misfortunes of the Old World, to forget the lessons of the past and to blind themselves to the menaces of the present. But the fact is that only a century ago our national capital was in the hands of a foreign foe, despite the warnings of Washington and others against the perils that at- tended any entanglement upon our part in European affairs. The efforts of a JSTapoleon to dominate the world could not, even in the days when Europe was GERMANY'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 151 practically six or eight times further away from us than it is to-day, fail to involve us in war. Since the dark hour when our English cousins drove Presi- dent Madison from our seat of government, our nation has been involved in many wars, for no one of which were we, from a military standpoint, even remotely prepared. Possessing nationally a happy- go-lucky temperament and the optimism of a gam- bling people who have always won the stakes we have been obliged to risk in the game of war, we to-day subconsciously take it for granted that we shall be, as heretofore, fortunate enough to triumph in the end over any enemy that may have the audac- ity to test our reserve fighting strength. The question as to the guilt or innocence of any one man, or group of men, in connection with the overthrow of the pillars of European civilization in the summer of 1914 is, and always will be, of academic interest, but it is not the most important feature of the war of wars to the people of America. The suddenness of the great catastrophe, the indif- ference of those who brought it about to all the diplomatic and other safeguards against war that so-called human progress had devised, the exhibition it presented to an astounded and horrified world of the fact that the planet upon which we live is al- ready, from one point of view, overcrowded and that strength rather than righteousness is still in- 152 THE GAME OF EMPIRES voked by the rulers of tlie world, to the end that the strong may supplant the weak in the sunny spots on the globe, should combine to open the eyes of Ameri- cans, blind to the full sig-nificance of an unprece- dented world tragedy, to their duty to themselves, their country and posterity. The harshest things that can be said against war are unquestionably and eternally true, but the man who inveighs against the injustice and wanton diabolism of cyclones and, living on a western prairie, fails to dig a cellar be- neath his house exhibits a well-defined streak of fatuous idiocy. The great god Efiiciency, to whom the Germans and the Japanese pay homage both in time of peace and in time of war, is a deity whose worship is advocated more and more, as the years pass, by American men of affairs. Efficiency has of late revolutionized business methods in this coun- try. But we have as yet restricted the benign in- fluence of this most admirable deity to activities for the pursuance of which the nation's peace is abso- lutely essential. If war should come to us in the twinkling of an eye, as it recently came to Europe, we would find ourselves abandoned at the most cru- cial crisis in our history by the power we have em- ployed for gain and refused to use for protection. We Americans rightfully consider ourselves worthy rivals of the Germans or the Japanese in the arts of peace. Surely it cannot be that we are destined GEEMAI^Y'S GOD AND JAPAN'S 153 to resemble Coreans if the madcap Terminus, ren- dered more than ever insane by recent havoc with the boundary-stones, should inspire Mars to hurl the United States into the maelstrom of war. CHAPTER IX ALTKUISM, DEMOCKACY AND ARMS CHAPTER IX ALTEUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS In his introduction to Roald Amundsen's book telling the story of the great Norwegian explorer's discovery of the South Pole, Fridtjof Nansen speaks generously of his successful rival's achievement in the following memorable words : "A victory of hu- man mind and human strength over the dominion and powers of N^ature; a deed that lifts us above the gray monotony of daily life; a view over shin- ing plains, with lofty mountains against the cold blue sky, and lands covered by ice-sheets of incon- ceivable extent; a vision of long-vanished glacial times; the triumph of the living over the stiffened realm of death." What a contrast the exploit of Amundsen, or the equally heroic feat of Peaiy, offers to the selfish adventures of a Napoleon to whom a province purloined from its legitimate inhabitants is worth the price of a million lives, or to the achieve- ments of the German commander who recently de- stroyed a Belgian city and grimly asserted that all the cathedrals of the world were valueless compared 157 158 THE GAME OF EMPIRES with the life of one Prussian grenadier, a grenadier being useful for the furtherance of a new Napoleon's plans for world dominion. Amundsen and his cour- ageous colleagues, and Peary and his brave band, have faced death in its most hideous fomis to place the Norwegian flag at the South Pole and the Stars and Stripes at the North Pole. Their splendid hero- ism is of value to the world at this dread crisis as an illustration of that undying Quixotism that dwells in the soul of man, and has both its good and its evil manifestations. Demonstrated by a Columbus, a Magellan, a Stanley, a Peary or an Amundsen it results in "the triumph of the living over the stiffened realm of death." Shown by a military bandit its outcome is the victory of the stiffened realm of death over the living. The pathways of the world's great explorers are marked by the grave- stones of heroes who perished in the effort to broaden and enlighten the mind of man, to acquaint the race with the glory and extent of its earthly heritage. Where the feet of the globe's relentless conquerors have passed rest the bones of those who fell not that the light of knowledge might be further inten- sified in the human soul but, forsooth, that the god Terminus might again rearrange his unstable boundary-stones ! As we glance at the situation in the war zones of Europe two months after the historic date of August ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS 159 4, 1914, upon which unforgettable day Great Britain sent an ultimatum to Germany demanding that Bel- gian neutrality be respected and Germany declared war on France and Belgium, we find that the evil side of the Quixotism that is in man's make-up had been strikingly in evidence, and that the youth of Germany, under the hasheesh of poisonous ideals, had freely given their lives for the indefensible cause whose watchword is Deutsches iiher Alles. The Great Adventure, for which a nation that is not inherently adventurous had been, under the influence of the witchcraft of militarism, preparing for years, was not working out on the lines prescribed by the Gen- eral Staff. It had been so easy, comparatively speak- ing, to put Paris and France under subjection in 1870! It had begun to look in October, 1914, as though the German diplomatists and military com- manders who had planned to dim the glory of a Bismarck and a von Moltke, had actually brought about a situation that was to enhance for all time the fame of the Iron Chancellor and the Iron Captain. "On October 4, 1914," says Mr. Frank H. Simonds, "it was Allied, not German, armies that were advancing in France. As on September 4 the world was talking of the fall of Paris, so on October 4 it was the probable approach of German retreat from France which occupied the attention not alone of IGO THE GAME OF EMPIEES the Allies but of neutral observers. * * * What had opened as a daring, magnificent, unrivaled effort to end a vs^ar in the first v^^eeks of conflict with a brief and irresistible drive, had fallen now to the level of a campaign, in size, in extent of territory, in numbers engaged, unequaled in history, but still a campaign, like other campaigns, before Waterloo, Sedan and Sadowa had nourished the belief that nations could be crushed in weeks, even in days. So in a larger sense October 4 might be accepted as the date which saw the close of the first phase of the Great War, the interruption, perhaps temporary, perhaps final, of German expectations, but at least the termination of the period in which she had hoped to win quickly, the extinction of the dream which had dominated her military operations from Liege to the time when the Battle of the Aisne be- came the Battle of the Seven Eivers." "The extinction of the dream!" Mr. Simonds's expression is well chosen. But the dream to which he refers has been of much longer duration than he suggests in the context. And when a nation, or an individual, is under the influence of a dream facts become distorted, the worse appears the better reason, and the real world becomes a phantasmagoria in which neither logic nor reason prevails. In an interview granted to an American journalist by the German Crown Prince in November, 1914, the heir ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS 161 to the Kaiser's throne said: "I have faith in the sense of justice of the American people once we can get to them the actual facts and the actual truths back of this conflict. I know that up to this time it has been impossible for them to thoroughly under- stand our situation, but I believe that when the truth is known to them the love of fair play, which has always characterized the acts of your countrymen, will result in a revulsion of sentiment in our favor." That revulsion has not come, will never come. The Crown Prince was mistaken in his assertion that the people of the United States in November, 1914, were not in possession of all the facts essential to a just verdict regarding the responsibility for the war of wars, the most gigantic and inexcusable crime in the world's history. Every opportunity had been given by the leading newspapers of America to German statesmen, diplomatists and writers to present to American readers every arg-ument, philo- sophical, historical, legal, military, social, practical and sentimental, that could be advanced by human ingenuity to vindicate Germany's invasion of Lux- embourg and the outcome thereof. The Crown Prince makes one admission that has been widely accepted as indicating a certain clearness of vision upon his part that, under different circumstances, might have led him to see the truth as we as a nation 162 THE GAME OF EMPIEES see it. "It seems to me," he is quoted as saying, "that this whole businet^ is senseless, unnecessary and uncalled for." In this His Royal Highness is most emphatically right. If he had gone a bit fur- ther and denounced the war as criminal madness, without justification on any ground, he would not have overstated the case against German militarism. Just before the outbreak of the American Civil War a citizen of Charleston, S. C, was approached by a stranger who asked to be directed to "the Insane Asylum." Pointing a finger to the north anc. then to the south, the Charlestonian remarked: "All roads in this city at present, my friend, lead to the Insane Asylum." Every step taken by Germany after the outbreak of war between Austria and Servia hurried the European powers into the abyss of a general war, "senseless, unnecessary and uncalled for," as the Crown Prince accurately" described it. "But Germany was left no choice in the matter," he goes on to say. "From the lowest to the highest, we all know that we are fighting for our existence. I know that the soldiers of the other nations probably say, and a great many of them probably think, the same thing with regard to their own existence. This does not alter the fact, however, that we are actually fighting for our national life." That in November, 1914, Germany, through the varying fortunes of war, had been placed in a posi- ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS 163 tion in wkich. a defensive struggle for continued national existence had become necessary is not to be denied, but the general contention made by the Crown Prince in behalf of his country must stand or fall npon the answer to this query: "Was the national life of Germany in jeopardy when the Kaiser's troops entered Luxembourg on August 2, 1914?" In a general way, it may be said that to the mind of the average American a defensive war is justifiable, an offensive war is not. If it had be- come necessary, in order that her national existence might persist, that Germany in August of the dread year 1914 should overrun Belgium, attack France and assist Austria in destroying Servia the position taken by the Crown Prince, and his fellow-militar- ists, is entitled to our sympathetic consideration. But, as was said aforetime, "facts are stubborn things." All efforts to persuade America to believe that from the outset of the war of wars Germany acted wholly upon the defensive, desirous only of maintaining her national existence, have proved un- availing. That posterity will reverse the verdict given by the people of the United States against GeiTnany during the autumn of 1914 is not at all probable. In fact it is as unthinkable as the pos- sibility that coming generations will vindicate the Old Man of the Mountains of Syria for giving hasheesh to the youth of his martial tribe that they 164 THE GAME OF EMPIEES might fight, with the drug-begotten courage of fanat- icism, against the Christian crusaders seeking the Holy Sepulchre. The unjustifiability, the suddenness, the cumula- tive horrors of the war of wars have terrified and appalled mankind and have turned every neutral country on earth into a tempestuous debating society hotly discussing the one problem upon the solution of which the future of civilization seems to depend. Is war a necessary and inevitable evil, the roots of which are inherent in human nature, or is it an artificial institution that can be rendered obsolete by man's ingenuity in overcoming the obstacles that confront him in his struggle upward from cave-man to superman ? Above the uproar of this widespread discussion, through which pierce the hysterical voice of the ultra-pacificist and the harsh tones of the alarmist who cries out wildly for a larger army and a stronger navy, can be heard the calm counsels of common sense asserting that the fundamental ques- tion at issue cannot be answered at present and that it behooves a sane and reasonable nation to look existing facts squarely in the face and to see to it, at the least, that the governmental appropria- tions its legislators make for the needs of the army and navy shall be honestly and wisely expended. To the people of the United States, shocked by the hor- rors of a world-war that might so easily have been ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS 165 avoided, came the startling revelation, in the fall of 1914, that the efficiency of our navy, demonstrated a few years ago to an astonished world by our battle- fleet's circumnavigation of the globe, had been, some- what mysteriously, destroyed. An administration to which target-practice of any kind was obnoxious had managed to weaken our naval arm at a time when, above all others in our history, its power was of value to strengthen the influence over a warring world of the most influential of all existing neutral nations. Deny it though the extremists among the pacificists may, the fact remains, at this stage in man- kind's slow development, that preparedness for war is frequently the best guarantee for peace. It is a more or less open secret among those Americans who know the inside facts regarding our recent national history that when our impres- sive and highly efficient battle-fleet sailed to the Far East some years ago our relations with Japan were strained to an extent not fully appreciated by the public at large. Whether hospitality or hostility awaited our fleet in Japanese harbors was a question that no one in authority at Washington could an- swer. But the exhibition our battleships gave in the Ear East of inherent power and immediate pre- paredness settled the issue of war or peace, and a crisis that might easily have involved us in hostili- ties with Japan was safely passed. It has recently 166 THE GAME OF EMPIRES come to light that one of the most vociferous and prominent of the ultra-pacificists in this country has both his city and his country house protected by burglar-alarms. He believes in defending his own property from attack through the agency of the po- lice. But he refuses to recognize or admit the fact that our army and navy hold the same relation to our national possessions that the police-station occupies toward his own individual belongings. The circum- navigation of the globe by a powerful naval force, or a parade through city streets of a well-drilled and efficient regiment of police, may testify to the un- pleasant truth that this is still a lawless and far from wholly civilized world, but their restraining effects' upon disturbers of the peace are of more practical value than all the salt the pacificists have yet been able to cast upon the elusive tail of the millennium. Of all the smaller powers in Europe to-day there is but one that occupies a position that is safe and, in a sense, enviable. Switzerland's long existence as a successful republic makes the national life of the United States appear like an experiment in self- government of a duration comparatively insignifi- cant. The exploits of William Tell, the Swiss George Washing-ton, date back to the early years of the four- teenth century. Since that period Switzerland has been to the world in a small way what the United States are to-day on a large scale, a peace-loving ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AND ARMS 167 democracy, frequently threatened by war and now and then involved therein. On August 3, 1914, the Swiss Federal Council ordered the mobilization of the entire army of Switzerland as a precautionary measure. Two days after this order had been issued, the little republic had 300,000 men at their posts ready to defend the neutrality of their country. Says Mr. M. Widner, an authority on the subject: "The accomplishment of this feat won the admiration of even the much engaged belligerent nations, for it furnished eloquent proof of Swiss military discipline and efficiency. Had the Swiss mobilization been carried out with less promptitude it is very doubtful whether the territory of the little Alpine Republic would not have been invaded right at the beginning of German-French hostilities." Let us suppose, for the purposes of comparison, that Switzerland, at the outbreak of the war of wars, had been for several years under the influence of a pacificist administration, during which period the efiiciency of the army had been destroyed, its modern rifles figuratively turned into pruning-hooks or, perhaps, Alpine stocks. Suppose the Swiss had been so impressed by the contention that warfare and democracies have nothing in common, that prepared- ness for hostilities merely invites hostilities, that the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments become dead letters wherever the manual of arms is in use — 168 THE GAME OF EMPIKES so impressed that they had joined with their tem- porary leaders in turning an effective defensive force into an impotent shadow of an army, in what condi- tion would Switzerland be to-day? As it is, the martial strength of the doughty little republic has placed it in a position to serve a high purpose to an afflicted world. It has become an asylum for the oppressed, a white refuge for fugitives from the scarlet zones of relentless war. The oldest democ- racy on earth, because of martial strength main- tained only for defensive purposes, is the one spot in Europe to-day upon which American eyes can rest with thorough satisfaction and approval. Swit- zerland's altruism, democracy and preparedness to repel invasion combine to offer to the United States an example worthy at this crisis of our imitation. We may claim, of course, that as a nation we are as altruistic and democratic as the Swiss. Fur- thermore, we are told, we are geographically in a much safer position than the Alpine Republic, sur- rounded, as it is, on all sides by warlike nations inclined, in some cases, to look upon solemn inter- national treaties as mere scraps of paper. We are assured by alleged experts that invasion of this coun- try by a foreig-n foe is to-day a physical impossi- bility. But woe shall- come to us if we trust im- plicitly in these blind leaders of the blind. The time may be nearer than seems probable at this ALTRUISM, DEMOCRACY AN^D ARMS 169 moment when mankind shall have become suffi- ciently civilized to do away with war, but before that period arrives the United States, unless all historical precedents are misleading and all warn- ings of the present mere illusions, must confront, armed for conflict, certain prospective enemies who are fundamentally antagonistic to us, to our ideals and to our possession of various outlying places in the sun. What is Armageddon, now that it has been revealed to us in all its horrors? It is an armed conflict between Progress and Reaction, be- tween the ideals of Autocracy and the ideals of Democracy. That the great war of 1914 will put an end forever to the gigantic struggle between two radically antagonistic forces influencing the fate of nations is beyond the bounds of possibility. The powers that distrust, defy and would destroy democ- racy die hard and before they pass from earth for- ever will they not shoot at least one Parthian arrow at a nation that has denied from its birth the basic propositions upon which the Gods of Reaction base their claims to earthly domination? The dreamer who turns an American sword into a pruning-hook at this crisis in the career of mankind may receive a crown in the life to come but what he deserves on earth is — well, to put it mildly, a course in recent history. CHAPTEE X THE HEAD USHEE AND HIS ASSISTANT CHAPTER X THE HEAD USHEE AND HIS ASSISTANT Shakespeare was not as competent a dramatist as George Bernard Shaw. We have Shaw's word for this. But either Shakespeare or Shaw is a better playwright than the gods Jupiter, Mars, JSTep- tune and Terminus who collaborate in writing the comedies and tragedies for which they make our planet the stage and the nations the dramatis per- sonce. When they set out in the year 1914 to pre- sent for the first time upon the earth a colossal world-tragedy, for which the nations taking the lead- ing roles had been rehearsing for generations, they found themselves in possession of splendid material for obtaining dramatic effects but as the play pro- gTessed it was seen that the collaborating deities responsible for it lacked the technic that their ex- perience should have provided. The tragedy was impressive in its content, its bloody effects were startling, but it was marred by anti-climaxes and at times, to the eyes of the spectators, the action dragged tediously. It became evident after a time 173 174 THE GAME OF EMPIRES that while the vagaries of man as an individual, or in the mass, might provide the gods with the raw material of drama it was beyond the power of the celestial playwrights to give an artistic sequence to the events of the world-tragedy they were staging in so crude a way that it was constantly sinking to the lowest type of melodrama. The music of the spheres may be above criticism, but it is certain that the play-writing of the gods is distinctly amateurish. Upon the peak of Olympus the slaughter of a mil- lion men may score a hit, as the phrase goes, but when the effect produced is immediately followed by the slaughter of another million the gods betray themselves as bunglers, ignorant of the first princi- ples of dramatic construction. When the Congress of the United States convened at Washington early in December of 1914 the. great- est of all world tragedies had been occupying the earth's stage for over four months. The best that could be said of it at that time was that as a spec- tacle it had been the most impressive that mankind had yet produced for the entertainment of the Olym- pians. The piece had been designed to display to the audience the love of the villains and the heroes for the goddess Commerce, who is a coy heroine, bestowing favors only upon the cleverest or the strongest, and who is used to the sight of blood and is not shocked thereat. As the tragedy devel- HEAD USHER AND HIS ASSISTANT 175 oped, the villains openly voicing their belief in the doctrine that Commerce should belong to those pow- erful enough to capture her, and the heroes express- ing lofty, unselfish and altruistic sentiments in the endeavor to appeal to their auditors' sympathies, it had become apparent that even the noncombatant audience was to play a leading part in the drama with which the high gods were glutting their appe- tite for gory exhibitions. The Head Usher in that part of the auditorium in which sat the United States naturally called the attention of his nation, through the medium of his message to Congress, to the world tragedy upon which the horrified gaze of neutral nations had been fixed since the signal for the curtain-raising had been given by the pistol shot of Garvilo Prinzip. The Head Usher assured his people that they occupied the best seats in the house and were in a position to watch the play calmly, and to derive from it various lessons worth even a truly good nation's acquisition. Faithful to his obligations as a Head Usher, he warned his hearers against the dangers of panic and chided those who might be inclined to yell "Fire" when the only conflagration in sight was across the foot-lights. "We are at peace with all the world," he proclaimed impressively. "No one who speaks counsel based on fact or drawn from a just and candid interpretation of realities can say that there 176 THE GAME OF EMPIRES is reason to fear that from any quarter our inde- pendence or the integrity of our territory is threat- ened." In effect the Head Usher advised his people to keep their seats, watch attentively the world tragedy being enacted, and gain from what they looked upon a new horror of war and the conviction that the play-writing gods on Olympus would never cast the United States as either a hero or a villain in any of earth's future bloody melodramas. But, with startling and incredible inconsistency, the elo- quent Head Usher went on to point out to his audi- tors the fascinations, graces and charms of the very heroine whose allurements had involved the dramatis personce of the play upon which he was commenting in the toils from which tragedy springs. "To speak plainly," remarked the Head Usher, turning his back to the stage, "we have grossly erred in the way in which we have stunted and hindered the development of our merchant marine. And now, when we need ships, we have not got them." In other words, for the pursuit of the heroine. Com- merce, for love of whom the leading actors in the European tragedy are sending before our eyes mil- lions of supers to death, we as a nation are unpre- pared. It is incumbent upon us to kidnap the god- dess at once, while her other lovers are engaged in the grewsome occupation of maiming or destroying each other, confident in our greater worthiness as a HEAD USHER AND HIS ASSISTANT 177 suitor and in our geographical freedom from peril from jealous rivals. The words of the Head Usher were received with considerable applause by a na- tion to which the varied charms of Commerce have always appealed. There was indeed in the hearts of a majority of his audience a feeling of regret and shame for the fact that we had allowed our ships to rot at their anchorage while Fate was pre- paring an opportunity for a people, once notable for maritime achievements, to again become argo- nauts sailing forth in quest of the golden fleece. There was among the many to whom the Head Usher addressed his words of worldly wisdom a large per- centage to whom came the determination to take advantage of the splendid possibilities for prosperity that the overthrow of European civilization offered to the energy and ambition of the New World. The tragedy of the Vistula and the Seven Rivers gave to the tired business man of America thrills that he had never known before and stirred in his soul a patriotic enthusiasm for demonstrating to the world that a nation of shopkeepers is not always to be caught napping. Anti-militarism! That was the seductive catchword that would appeal to Com- merce, the faultless heroine who had been outraged and betrayed by the protagonists of the European tragedy. "Our swords have grown rusty. As a nation we have never admired them in their sym- 178 THE GAME OF EMPIEES bolic significance. Now is the time ripe for turning them into pruning-hooks and reaping for ourselves the harvests that our afflicted rivals have been forced to neglect!" But there was one sentence in the Head Usher's address to the representatives of the nation that sent a chill of apprehension through the minds of the more thoughtful of his hearers. "Now when we need ships," he had said, "we have not got them." As a people, he intimated, we had been lacking in foresight. What we had once possessed in abun- dance, namely, well-manned and efficient merchant vessels, we had lost through an indifference to our higher commercial welfare that seems to be in the retrospect somewhat inexplicable and wholly deplor- able. Supposing, reflected a good many very wide- awake Americans, the Head Usher had been obliged to say to us: "Now, when we need battleships — or cruisers or submarines or coast defenses — we have not got them." "So much the better," our good- hearted and well-meaning pacificists would answer. "If we aren't armed, we cannot fight. Love is the strongest force in the world. Let us meet our antag- onists, from whatsoever direction they may menace us, with outstretched hands, gentle words and earn- est assurances of our distingTiished consideration." As that inspired advocate of peace, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, predicts, our shamefaced foes would at HEAD USHER AND HIS ASSISTANT 179 once throw down their diabolical weapons, compre- hend for the first time the error of their aggressive ways, and implore us to absorb them in that blissful and immaculate higher civilization that makes the United States the one desirable haven upon earth for the oppressed of all nations. A sense of humor, the most enlightening of all mental gifts, is never possessed, no matter how intellectual he may be in a general way, by an ultra-pacificist. The Head Usher's assurance to the people in the auditoriima that the world tragedy upon which they were gazing should not fill them with apprehension nor cause them to examine too closely the theater's safety devices was echoed presently by his Chief Assistant, whose ideal of statesmanship consists in preaching the beatitudes and the ten commandments to a world the larger portion of which seems at pres- ent to have forgotten the existence of these sacred precepts. The contention of the Chief Assistant was to the effect that if an external foe menaced the audience a million men, technically ignorant but heroically self-sacrificing, would respond at once to the Head Usher's call for help, the latter being en- gaged upon the lofty endeavor of conferring so many benefits upon the people in the auditorium that a large percentage of them would gladly offer their lives on behalf of their flag and country. Is it not more than probable that the credulity of posterity 180 THE GAME OF EMPIEES will be severely taxed when it reads tlie alleged utterances of the Head Usher and his Chief Assist- ant at the present crisis in the history of this na- tion? And that is by no means the worst of the situation by which the United States is confronted to-day. If coming generations of Americans have nothing more to bring against the present adminis- tration than its addiction to the phraseology of a Pecksniff and the mock-heroic deeds of a Tartarin our descendants will be in better case than now seems to be at all certain. But a chill of apprehension is felt by many Americans, who comprehend some- thing of the full significance of existing world prob- lems, when they realize that at the most perilous crisis in our history our foreign relations are in the control of men who, however admirable they may be personally and however noble may be the mo- tives by which they are actuated, are capable of dangerous inconsistencies in their handling of prob- lems that arise in our intercourse with other nations. To make a war against Mexico which was not wholly war in the endeavor to maintain a peace which was not wholly peace was to exhibit upon the part of the administration a mingling of fimmess and weak- ness, a conflict of purpose, a lack of logical con- sistency, that could result only in ultimate disaster. Among the many minor problems that must con- front the historians of the future, in dealing with HEAD USHER AND HIS ASSISTANT 181 what are to us recent events, the occupation of Vera Cruz by American troops and their subsequent with- drawal will be one of the most insolvable. They may even express their mingled amusement and amazement at the fact that an unprecedented com- bination of tragic occurrences in the world at large had placed an administration that had made a pitiful bungle of its diplomatic activities, in more than one direction, in an attitude of watchful waiting for the time when the warring powers of a distracted world should call upon it to undertake the most difficult and gigantic task of arbitration that the criminal vagaries of man's recurrent militarism had ever rendered necessary. Men who had found the internal squabbles of Mexico too complicated for their abilities as peacemakers were, in all probability, to be called upon to adjudicate eventually an inter- national quarrel the like of which the world had not hitherto known. The gods who had staged the world tragedy of 1914 seemed to be planning to fol- low their bloody war-play by a diplomatic farce comedy. Satiated with horrors, the Olympians craved a chance to laugh. The effect of the Head Usher's address to his audience was not wholly satisfactory to him or to his Chief Assistant. Of a sudden it seemed as if prac- tically all the people of the United States, to use a bit of slang, had come from Missouri. They were 182 THE GAME OF EMPIRES not panic-stricken by the hideous melodrama that they had been watching on the European stage, but they desired to be shown at once how, under certain imaginable circumstances, their country was to pro- tect itself from possible efforts upon the part of an aggressive antagonist to take advantage, in the near or distant future, of our exposed position, naval un- preparedness and habitual military weakness. By the pacificists of the nation, the curiosity of the gen- eral public regarding these matters was declared to be untimely, ill-advised and tending ultimately to an apparent attitude upon our part toward war that might eventually invite war. They refused to admit the existence of the gulf that yawns between a police- man and a gunman. They denied the seemingly self- evident fact that a deadly weapon is a Dr. Jekyll or a Mr. Hyde according to the purpose for which it is employed. The right of a householder to de- fend his home from a burglar they admitted, but the obligation of a nation to arm itself against pos- sible invasion they denied. We have seen how Hereditary Autocracy had been sufficiently powerful in the twentieth century to bring about the greatest war in history. We have seen how in 1914 despotism had prevailed over democracy in Europe to the end that millions of men should perish on the battlefield. The inexcusable criminality of those responsible for the cataclysm had HEAD USHER A^B HIS ASSISTANT 183 both appalled and angered the people of the United States. More than ever before had War become ob- noxious to us, and forms of government that ren- dered the will of the people negligible at great crises repellent. It vt^as not an opportune moment psycho- logically for office-holders, temporarily occupying the high places at "Washington, to attempt to balk the will of the American people. A peace-loving nation, generously endowed with common sense, looked out upon a warring world, put back indefinitely in its progress toward the millennium, and demanded to know at once how the many millions it had been taxed for national defense had been expended. Was there a foundation in fact for the assertions of the alarmists to the effect that our navy had deteriorated, our army was hopelessly inadequate, our ammuni- tion depleted to the vanishing point and our coast and harbor defenses either non-existent or obsolete? The American people were willing to admit their Head Usher's premise that they were at the moment at peace with all the world, but they found it hard to accept the implications thrown out that we had no special reason to anticipate trouble in the future. Perhaps no nation that ever existed is so quick to forget the significant episodes in its history as we Americans, who possess as a people both the virtues and the faults characteristic of youth. To the young the present and the future possess a fascination not 184 THE GAME OF EMPIEES exercised by the past. Nevertheless the catastrophe that had befallen Europe recalled to the minds of the present generation of Americans various unpleas- ant revelations that had come to them, in recent years, of our historic tendency to bungle our mili- tary operations whenever a sudden crisis has made them inevitable. "Pro Bono Publico/' who wields a trenchant pen at times, wrote as follows to an in- fluential metropolitan newspaper: "In the war of 1812 the United States had great numbers under arms when the British, with only about 1,500 men, captured and burned Washington. It is admitted that the war of 1861 could have been put down at the battle of Bull Run with about 5,000 trained regTilars. The Spanish- American war was a disgTace to us. How many thousands died in the United States from neglect, starvation and disease ? What about Shafter's army trying to land at San- tiago without the aid of small boats, and why did we not have even a military map of the surrounding country ? How many know that hundreds died after the battle of San Juan Hill because we had not doc- tors, blankets, whisky enough, or even the bare neces- sities of life? In the recent mobilization of troops on the American border it took us nearly three weeks to assemble 16,000 men, and what are 16,000 ? l^ot sufficient to carry water for the Allies." When a Japanese army was dispatched to Corea HEAD USHER AND HIS ASSISTANT 185 some years ago, its officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, received a gift of silk handker- chiefs from the Mikado. If one of these officers happened to be captured by the enemy nothing tes- tifying to Japanese efficiency was to be found upon his person. But if his captors had taken the pre- caution to plunge his silk handkerchief into a pail of water they would have found that upon both sides of the Mikado's gift were inscribed detailed military maps of Corea, furnishing to an invader every item of geographical information necessary for aggressive celerity. There are those who assert that permanent mili- tary efficiency, even though our people demanded it, is not possible under our American form of govern- ment. If this be true, the outlook for the future of the United States is not as bright as it should be. But we have acquired the ingenuity, self-restraint and common sense necessary for applying efficiency to various lines of commercial, industrial and manu- facturing endeavor. The genius of our inventors has made modern warfare the diabolically devastating thing that it is. Can it be possible that at some future international crisis, when our very existence as a nation may be in jeopardy, a governmental fabric the product of American originality, idealism and practical initiative, a fabric that has withstood the external and internal shocks of a century's cru- 186 THE GAME OF EMPIRES cial tests, shall prove inadequate to the demands made upon it ? The answer to this question depends upon whether we as a people succumb eventually to the influence of rainbow-chasing visionaries or give heed to the pertinent warnings of clear-eyed statesmen who look out upon this chaotic, blood-stained modem world with a gaze that comprehends both the mean- ing of the present and the menaces of the future. CHAPTER XI THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS CHAPTER XI THE PEACE THAT NEVEE WAS Germany, Austria and Turkey! How could the most deluded adherent to the cause of German Mili- tarism imagine that a triple alliance actually rank with the odor of all that is most offensive in reac- tionary traditions and ideals could win the sympathy of any large number of Americans? Kaiser, Em- peror and Sultan — behold a trio whose credentials we refuse to recognize, whose right to rule is based upon propositions our national founders denied and who represent to our minds not modernity but mediaevalism ! It has been pointed out to us that the Allies, in arms against this unprogressive trinity, pay homage to a Czar, a Mikado and several Kings and are no more entitled, therefore, to the good wishes of the American people than their opponents. This contention is not altogether unreasonable, but it was not effective in overcoming the inclination of the average American, from the very outset of the war of wars, to desire, despite our technical neutral- ity as a nation, the final overthrow of a triple com- 189 190 THE GAME OF EMPIEES bination whose success was essential to the eventual establishment of German world-dominion. By the middle of December, 1914, it seemed im- probable that the dream of universal conquest the mental hasheesh injected into the minds of Germans by the writings of Treitschke, Bemhardi and others had begotten could ever become a reality. The Allies were regaining ground they had lost in France, Bel- giimi and Alsace, the Russians, despite serious blun- ders and defeats, were holding their own against the Germans and their allies in Poland and Galicia, the Servians were gaining victory after victory over the* Austrians, and Turkey was doing little, if anything, to place Deutsches uher Alles. The combined fleets of England and Japan had put a check to German aggression on the high seas, and the Kaiser's colonial possessions had been snatched from his grasp. That the severe illness that came to His Majesty early in December was accompanied by extreme mental depression is not at all astonishing. That von Kluck, not many weeks agone, had actually knocked at the gates of Paris must have seemed to the fevered Kaiser like a misrepresentation of delirium. Meanwhile the neutral nations of the world were pondering deeply many problems bearing upon the immediate future. It had begTin to look as if the menace of German Militarism, iconoclastic though it had been in its recent manifestation, was no longer THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 191 a threat and peril to the world at large, that its most devastating effects might still be confined to unhappy Belgium. The outcome of events, however, had led to an increased interest, to the minds of all thought- ful observers, in the possibilities of the future as that future should be influenced by the final success in the war of wars of one antagonist or the other. That a struggle of such stupendous magnitude could continue indefinitely was of course impossible. "Whatever principles may govern individual friendships," says the late Professor Cramb, "alli- ances between nations and States are governed by self-interest only; they are valid only so long as mutual fears or mutual desires persist in equal force. For the friendship of nations is an empty name; peace is at best a truce on the battlefield of Time; the old myth or the old history of the struggle for existence is behind us, but the struggle for power — who is to assign bounds to its empire, or invent an instrument for measuring its intensity ?" "The friendship of nations is an empty name!" Is the present apparent friendship between England and Russia, between England and France, between England and Japan anything more than this, any- thing more than an empty name ? Those American day-dreamers who see in the probable elimination of German Militarism as a permanently disturbing in- fluence in international politics the possibility of a 192 THE GAME OF EMPIRES lasting world-peace may live long enough to realize that "the struggle for power," in some pernicious form or other, is forever making mischief in a world that is fundamentally much less highly civilized than it appeared to be before that enlightening month of July, 1914. Of course some time in the near future some city, small or great — possibly Washing- ton — is to become associated for all time with a peace treaty of historic importance. It will assume a prominent place upon that list upon which are now to be found the names of Utrecht, Ghent, Amiens, Berlin, London, Portsmouth, IST. H., and other centers at which arbitrators have gathered in the past that a new treaty might come as a poultice to heal the wounds of recent warfare. And as the war of wars has made all former wars seem com- paratively insignificant, so will the peace conference to which it leads become the most important tribunal of the kind the world has yet seen. More clearly than ever before, the absurdity of the methods of procedure that nations have adopted in their erratic vibrations from peace to war and from war to peace will be made manifest to the eyes of men. Diplomacy breaks down, war ensues and eventu- ally demonstrates anew its futility, and arbitration becomes the last resort, instead of the first, of the belligerents. This ridiculous process, practically as old as so-called civilization, is not creditable to the THE PEACE THAT IN'EVER WAS 193 boasted ingenuity of man. We admit tliat diplomacy lias never been effective in preventing vp^ar, that war has never succeeded in vindicating its reasonable- ness as a method of settling international quarrels, and that peace treaties have never been of any- thing more than temporary value in checking the predatory inclinations of the more powerful nations. The year 1914 witnessed the most unexpected and deplorable collapse of diplomacy in the history of the race. It was followed by the most stupid, unjus- tifiable, bloodiest, most devastating and all-embracing war by which our planet has ever been reddened. The inherent futility of both diplomacy and war had been again demonstrated to a weary and dis- heartened world. Was it to witness anew the cus- tomary absurd sequel to an international war, namely, a peace congress at which nothing is accom- plished save a readjustment of the boundary stones of Terminus, in the baseless hope that that malicious god may eventually abandon forever the game he plays to make occasions for Mars ? There is at least one encouraging feature of the war of wars that suggests the possibility that, de- spite the struggle for power whose bounds and in- tensity Professor Cramb despaired of measuring, the approaching effort of Civilization to find a perma- nent safeguard against recurrent warfare may not be altogether futile. We have seen an alliance be- 194 THE GAME OF EMPIEES tween a large number of nations whose ideals, in- terests, forms of government, and even racial charac- teristics, were fundamentally diverse made effective in the complicated activities of war. If, for exam- ple, Japan and Russia, formerly at war with each other, can forget their past differences and fight to- gether for the same cause and against the same foes is it not possible, if the people of those countries had their way, that they might unite for permanent peace instead of for occasional war? The peace congress that is to follow the war of wars must recognize the fact, of course, that the friendship of nations — that is, of governments, not peoples — is an empty name. It must devote itself to the task of analyzing and comprehending the "struggle for power" that underlies all wars. It must turn a deaf ear to those clamorous pacificists who will point to the recent overthrow of the pillars of European civilization and assert that war, like the frog that overinflated itself, has destroyed itself through ex- cess. To thoroughly understand, and to find some method of controlling, the seemingly universal appe- tite of ascendant states for increasing ascendency is the stupendous task that must be assumed by a peace congress whose deliberations will be of a sig- nificance unparalleled in the grimly interesting record of international debates resulting heretofore in only temporary pacificism. THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 195 Ex-President Koosevelt, who, among other things well worth being, is a constructive statesman, has comprehended in all their bearings the difficulties of the problem that confronts the world's peacemakers and has suggested tentatively a possible solution of the vital question that arises from the eternal strug- gle for power, the question upon a successful answer to which depends the future trend of civilization. International agi'eements have been shown to be, for generations past, of no permanent value as safe- guards against war. The struggle for power is as destructive to the good faith of nations as is so frequently the competition for wealth to the honor of individual men. In the world of business the penalties prescribed by law for the violation of legal contracts are necessary, in the present state of civi- lization, for the protection of commerce from a con- dition of chaos. When sometime in the dim and distant future every man's word shall be as good as his bond these penalties may pass into innocuous desuetude, but for the present, as in the past, punish- ments and forfeits are necessary to compel the un- principled to fulfill their signed obligations. That England in 1914 entered into the war of wars to emphasize the sanctity of an international agree- ment does not alter the fact that Germany wantonly and cynically abrogated that same agreement on the ground that it was a mere scrap of paper, of no 196 THE GAME OF EMPIKES significance to a signatory impelled by necessity. If the peace agreements between the warring powers that have made the year 1914 the bloodiest a bel- ligerent world has ever known shall carry with them no other guarantees of fulfillment than have been incorporated in the international treaties of the past, the price in blood and treasure that mankind has been recently called upon to pay will have been ex- pended in vain. The war of wars has demonstrated the fact that the genius of man has been successful in constantly raising the art of human butchery to higher planes of achievement. Will the sequel prove that that same genius is incompetent to give to peace treaties the same measure of efficiency that it has provided for modern weapons of war? Is progress forever to prevail in the sanguinary realm of de- struction and reaction in the domain in which the activities of peace conferences prevail ? If the cata- clysm of 1914 has taught mankind a much needed lesson, if, as the optimistic assert, civilization and progress are not mere chimeras, the most important outcome of the war of wars must be the discovery and enforcement of some method of making an interna- tional agreement binding upon all the nations enter- ing into it. In other words, the struggle for power between the rival nations of the earth must be not only measured but controlled, it must become, as has electricity, not a menace to, but the servant of, man. THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 197 The late Professor Cramb implied that this struggle for power the ingenuity of man could find no way to dominate. To the more optimistic mind of ex- President Poosevelt a solution to this most insistent and important of all human problems seems to be within the range of human attainment. In a pre- vious chapter it has been shown that the destructive- ness of modern warfare is almost wholly due to the ingenuity of American inventors. Do we not there- fore as a nation owe a tremendous debt to civiliza- tion that can bo paid only by the genius of American statesmanship giving to an afflicted world some method of international arbitration that shall bo as novel and effective in making peace permanent as "Yankee notions" have been in rendering war hide- ous ? Posterity might forgive us for Maxim's noise- less gun if Roosevelt's international police project should prove to be successful. But if governments alone, not the governed, are represented at the great- est of peace congresses, no permanent advance will be made by humanity. Of the three significant phases that characterize any international conflict, namely, the efforts of diplomacy preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the war itself, and the arbitration that follows it, only two are comprehensible to the calm mind of a thinl^er unheatcd by the passions that war begets. The activ- ities of diplomacy and of peace congresses come 198 THE GAME OF EMPIRES within the scope of the average understanding, but there is an eternal, hideous, ghastly mystery inherent in warfare that mocks at all efforts of the human intellect to fathom it. During the past few gen- erations there has come into general use a phrase that at its advent seemed to possess at least the shadow of a raison d'etre. We have been accustomed to speak of "civilized warfare" as a comparatively modem institution that illustrated, by comparison with the lawless activities from which it originated, the gradual progress of the race upward, an inclina- tion upon the part of man when he reverted to sav- agery to carry down with him a few of the praise- worthy characteristics he had so painfully acquired in his struggle toward the higher planes of endeavor. Civilized warfare was in theory a method whereby men could carry on the bloody game of human butch- ery according to generally accepted rules that were supposed to eliminate a few of the horrors that traced their origin to the diabolical depravity of our remote ancestors, who are known to have been merciless toward innocent noncombatants. The fact seems to be that man is a self-deceived hypocrite. He has never been, so to speak, man enough to choose be- tween civilization and warfare, to frankly acknowl- edge the inherent antagonism between human butch- ery and human advancement, but his efforts have been turned toward a compromise between the two THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 199 that becomes grimly ridiculous when put to a crucial test. This crucial test was provided in the year of Our Lord 1914 by the war of wars and to a horri- fied race was revealed the damning fact that the efforts of man's ingenuity to throw so-called civilized safeguards about the activities of belligerent nations had been tragically futile. Among the various scraps of paper that had been thrown into the world's rubbish heap was one upon which had been recently inscribed The Hague Conventions. Though the non-existence of so-called civilized warfare came as a shock and a surprise to deluded optimists, no astonishment at the fact that war is, more than ever heretofore, the fine art of demon- strating the inherent savagery of man was felt by the Militarists of Germany. There was not, there had never been, any altruistic nonsense about their War Lord. To the German expeditionary force sent to China in July, 1900, the Kaiser had delivered the following exhortation : "When you meet the foe you will defeat him. ISTo quarter will bo given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thou- sand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation in virtue of which they still live in historical traditions, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance 200 THE GAME OF EMPIRES at a German." In a general order to his troops issued at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 19, 1914, the Kaiser said: "It is mj Royal and Imperial com- mand that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill, and all your valor as my soldiers, to exterminate first the treach- erous English and to walk over General French's contemptible little Army." For fourteen years twentieth century civilization had been nourishing a viper within its bosom. It bore the name German Militarism and its time had come to sting the modern world. It waged war wantonly, remorselessly, according to the orders is- sued by its War Lord. There came a time in the early winter of 1914 when women, children, and ancient churches in England were subjected to the same devastating fury that had had its evil way in the preceding Autumn with noncombatant humans and harmless cathedrals while the cohorts of German culture overran Belgium. As Hugo Mllnsterberg so naively remarks, "War is War!" In other words, there is no such thing as civilized warfare. Are we Americans a nation of dreamers whose vis- ions, though radically antagonistic to the chimeras that have made German Militarism what it is, are leading us astray from the paths that a sane, clear- eyed, practical nation should follow? It seems to THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 201 be actually incredible that the lessons of the past and the warnings of the present should be wholly with- out effect upon the minds of a large number of our most intelligent fellow-countrymen. That between the attitude toward war of a Treitschke on the one hand and of a Tolstoi on the other there is a golden mean, the reasonable position to be taken under ex- isting world conditions by the most peacefully in- clined of nations, should be apparent to every thought- ful American. Worldwide and permanent peace is infinitely preferable to recurrent wars, but the former is a dream that can be realized only when universal democracy prevails on earth, while the latter remain actualities with which even President Wilson and Secretary Bryan have been forced to deal. If the lofty role of arbitrator to a warring world is to be thrust upon the United States it is to be fondly hoped that our peacemaking achievements may be of more practical and lasting value than any that the world has hitherto known, but if we proceed upon the basis that the millennium is near at hand for us and for the blood-stained nations seeking our good offices, the sardonic laughter of the mischief-making gods on Olympus will reach our ears. Representa- tive Lumpkin, of the Freshwater, Ind., district, re- cently congratulated this country from the floor of the House upon the fact that in withdrawing our troops from the City of Vera Cruz we were setting an ex- 202 THE GAME OF EMPIEES ample of altruistic imselfiskness to the warring na- tions of Europe that would make upon them a strong and uplifting impression. Representative Lumpkin's broad and enlightened view of international affairs has always aroused the admiration, if not of the na- tion at large, at least of his own constituents. But for the United States to exercise upon the quarrel- some powers of the Old World the influence we should be pleased to exert something more is necessarv upon our part than a good example. We must admit the existence upon earth of what Professor Cramb calls "the struggle for power" and, before anything ap- proaching permanent world peace can be assured, the necessity for its measurement and control. Un- less we as a nation possess the courage and common sense to look existing world facts squarely in the face we must eventually prove unworthy of what appears to be at the moment our manifest destiny j< There is, we repeat, no such thing as civilized warfare, but there is a civilized attitude toward war that inspires a nation holding it to refrain always from unjustifi- able hostilities though it protects itself, when need be, against aggression. And, further, it may be as- serted with emphasis that in order to take the high- est advantage of a great opportunity that may come to the United States as a peacemaker this nation should not be merely strong enough to make its wishes of importance to the world's Militarists, but it should THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS 203 insist upon dealing as arbitrator with those most af- fected hy war, namely, the peoples of the various countries seeking a way through our good offices to surcease from conflict. A peace congress at which only the opinions and desires of emperors, kings and diplomats are in evidence will be as ineffective in hastening the glad day of international disarma- ment as have been its predecessors. The following memorable words from an article published in the Atlantic Monthly were written by G. Lowes Dickinson, of Kings College, Cambridge, England, and are entitled to the widest publicity and to the earnest consideration of all of us who still hope, despite the depressing effects of recent world history, that mankind may yet find a way to make peace treaties, through a radical change in their sources, effective. Speaking of the future, Dr. Dick- inson says: "It can not be molded to any good purpose unless the plain men and women, workers with their hands and workers with their brains, in England and in Germany and in all countries, get together and say to the people who have led them into this catastrophe, and who will lead them into such again, and again, '^o more ! No more ! And never again ! You rulers, you soldiers, you diplomats, you who through all the long agony of history have con- ducted the destinies of mankind and have conducted them to hell, we do now repudiate you. Our labor 204 THE GA:\rE OF EMPIEES and our blood have been at your disposal. They shall be so no more. You shall not make the peace as you have made the war. The Europe that shall come out of this v^ar shall be our Europe. And it shall be one in which another European war shall never be possible.' " CHAPTER XII CHRISTIANITY AT THE BAR CHAPTER XII CHEISTIANITY AT THE BAR In December, 1914, for the first time since the town of Bethlehem, Judaea, had gained immortality, the approach of the Savior's birthday created real embarrassment throughout all Christendom. In Eu- rope Corsica, for the time being, had conquered Galilee. It was of no avail for the agitated devout to assert that the Christian religion had been instru- mental in putting an end to various former evils, in- cluding human slavery, belief in witchcraft, the exe- cution of conformists or nonconformists, as the case might be, and had substituted "civilized" for barbaric warfare. For was it not apparent that what the world had gained, at least so far as Europe was con- cerned, in one direction it had lost in another; that the instruments of torture to be found in mediaeval dungeons, for example, were crude and ineffectual contrivances for inflicting human misery compared with German howitzers or French machine-guns? Two thousand years ago, roughly speaking, the Christ had been tried, condemned and crucified by the Mili- 207 208 THE GAME OF EMPIEES tarists of that period. That Europe might continue on Christmas Day, 1914, to render unto Cnesar the things that are Caesar's it was essential, for military reasons, that no truce be proclaimed on the battle- fronts, that the birthday of the Savior be ignored both in the trenches and at staff headquarters. Christians at war with each other must not pause, even for a day, in their efforts to butcher one an- other in the name of God, or of Patriotism, or of the Kaiser or of the Sanctity of Treaties. Whether fighting for the vindication of War as an institution or ostensibly to put an end to it for all time, the man behind the gun in Europe had the appearance on Christmas Day, 1914, of an atavistic reversion, butchered or butchering in the trenches to make a Roman holiday, a pagan feast of blood that is not of Christ but of Ca?sar. The war of wars had brought before the judgment- seat of a reawakened world every phase of human activity to plead for its own vindication. As never before in the history of the race Man was questioning his own soul. It was as if the image of God and the image of Satan had appeared to the world and Man interrogated himself as to which of them he the more resembled. Christmas Day, 1914, came not as an occasion for rejoicing in all Christendom but as a time of doubt and questioning, during which charges of a sweeping character were brought against CHRISTIANITY AT THE BAR 209 the religion of the Cross from sources which even the most bigoted Christian could not afford to ignore. "For nineteen hundred years the ethics of Jesus of ISTazareth have been in the world," said ex-Presi- dent Eliot of Harvard University, "but have had no effect to prevent or even reduce the evils of war, the greatest of the evils which afflict mankind. The ethical doctrines of Christianity in regard to justice, humility and mercy have not found expression in the relations between Christian nations, whether in peace or at war, or indeed in the history of institu- tional Christianity itself. At this moment none of the Christian churches has had any influence to pre- vent the catastrophe which has overtaken Europe. Each national church supports the national govern- ment and every ruler is as sure of his God's approval as ever Israel was of Jehovah's ; and within each na- tion all the religions represented unite in the support of the national government gone to war." That in the realm of law, national and interna- tional, there may lie a road that leads eventually to world-peace Dr. Eliot suggests, but that the powers that be are not at present traveling that road is sadly apparent. There is, however, one encouraging fea- ture connected with the overwhelming tragedy that befell the world in the year of Our Lord 1914. Every one of the powers, from Russia the Colossus to Montenegro the Pygmy, appears to feel a real sense 210 THE GAME OF EMPIRES of shame at its connection with a cataclysm that has for a time overthrown modern civilization. As Chris- tianity now finds itself on trial on the charge of in- efiiciency before a questioning world, so has every government involved in the war of wars been brought before the bar of nations to answer to an indictment affecting its right to continuous existence. Eor they all, with one accord, began to make excuse, before the great conflict of 1914 was a day old. In a sense this apologetic attitude upon the part of the powers involved in the war of wars is creditable to human nature. That no one nation, or group of nations, is willing silently to bear the blame for the overthrow of the pillars of European civilization establishes the somewhat encouraging fact that Man can not revert to the status of Caveman without displaying to a shocked and disheartened universe a blush of self- reproach. To the charge of treason to the cause of civilization each of the powers engaged in the great war entered the plea of "not guilty." The fact that Vice is willing to pay homage, even if it be nothing of more worth than Hypocrisy, to Virtue is an indica- tion of the latter's exalted station even in an evil world. "The War was forced upon us." ISTot one of the belligerents fails to make this uncompromising as- sertion to a suspicious and outraged bench of the neutral nations. Dust-worn diplomatic documents CHRISTIANITY AT THE BAR 211 are unearthed, learned historians become contro- vertialists, the intellectual resources of each warring power are employed to prove to a censorious world that, in the last analysis, the responsibility for the most colossal crime ever perpetrated by Man can not be attributed to any given gang of international gun- men. This splitting of recent historical hairs pos- sesses a grim humor to the open mind of an un- prejudiced observer but, more important still, it proves that the criminals gTiilty of bringing down upon the heads of innocent peoples the direst of all world-calamities have some shame left, and gaze upon the horrors they have begotten with full appreciation of the punishment they deserve and a firm intention of escaping that punishment if they can. ''We main- tained constantly increasing armaments only for pro- tective purposes," plead all the defendants with one voice, and in making this plea they admit that this war of wars, to which we Americans object as a wholly unjustifiable outrage on civilization, is such a hideous cataclysm that responsibility for its origin must be dodged at any cost of misrepresentation, sup- pression of facts or deliberate falsehood. A few days before the most inopportune and condemnatory Christmas the Christian world had been ever called upon to celebrate M. Viviani, the French Premier, addressed the Chamber of Deputies in part as follows: "The Allies are determined to 212 THE GAME OF EMPIEES continue this war until outraged right has been avenged, the stolen provinces regained, heroic Bel- gium restored, Prussian militarism crushed and all Europe regenerated and reconstructed according to every ideal of justice." M. Deschanel, President of the Chamber, upon the same occasion, rose to a somewhat loftier height than that attained bj the Premier. He said: "France is defending her re- spect for treaties, for the independence of Europe and for human liberty. The question now before us is whether or not centuries of effort in that direction must end in slavery, if matter is to dominate mind and if the world is to become the bloodstained prey of violence." Revenge was the keynote struck by M. Viviani, Liberty the dominant idea chosen by M. Deschanel. The forgiveness of enemies, a Christian procedure most appropriate to the Christmas season, was not even remotely suggested as a desirable pro- ceeding by either speaker, pleading, as they were at the moment, the cause of warring France before the bar of the world's neutrals. In fact a statesman who to-day advocated the application of Christianity as a poultice to cure the open wounds of humanity would be met with suspicion, if not derision, by those who at present hold the destinies of the race in their control. Nevertheless, it remains true that both the warring and the neutral nations of the earth are practically CHKISTIANITY AT THE BAR 213 at one at this crisis in their denunciation of, and detestation for, War as an institution. The accusa- tion that the able and learned Eliot brings against Christianity that it has not made international peace practicable may be unanswerable, but is it not pos- sible that the teachings of Christ may be largely responsible for the fact that each one of the Euro- pean belligerents has officially and publicly expressed an abhorrence for the necessity that seemingly made bloodshed inevitable? Each warring nation appeals for vindication to this generation and to posterity. It seems to be recognized to-day by the powers that be that the race at large possesses a moral sense that cannot be ignored, ^o one can doubt the courage of the Germans. It has been proved repeatedly upon many a bloody field. But there is one fear that is exhibited by the Kaiser's subjects, a fear that does them credit, and that is that now, and to-morrow, and for all time they may be held responsible for making the greatest of all recorded crimes possible. Against the possibility that this damning judgment may fall upon them they have made use of every re- source at their command to establish their innocence before the world. Surely this sensitiveness upon the part of Germany, and of every nation taking part in the war of wars, to the opinion of mankind regarding the moral issues involved in the great conflict orig- inates rather in Galilee than in Corsica. 214 THE GAME OF EMPIKES Because the greatest of all human wrongs was per- petrated on earth nineteen hundred and fourteen years after the birth of Christ it is claimed that Christianity has failed in its mission to mankind. The facts in this most important of all cases ever brought before the bar of civilization prove conclu- sively that the indictment, as worded by ex-President Eliot and others, is too sweeping in its range. Chris- tianity, it is evident, has failed to exercise a guiding influence upon Emperors, Kings, Statesmen, Diplo- matists and gun manufacturers, but do not all peoples on the planet long to-day, as they have never longed before, for peace on earth — ^good will to men? As Dr. Eliot points out, the men in high places who de- creed the war of wars — and they were amazingly few in number — recognized the fact that Man is not merely a fighting animal but a religious being, who gropes in the dark blindly for a supernatural sanc- tion when some great crisis in his life as an indi- vidual or in the mass demands of him heroic action. Autocracy — and it is from autocracy that wars spring — has always recognized, and used to its own ad- vantage, that mysterious human tendency to wor- ship a power that is not of earth to which even the atheistical I^apoleon was wont to appeal when he wished to refill his decimated ranks. Galilee spurns and rejects Corsica but Corsica, with diabolical cun- ning, makes use of Galilee. CHEISTIANITY AT THE BAR 215 That the ethics of the ITazarene have failed, after nineteen hundred years of existence, to put an end to the greatest of all human evils is a lamentable fact that proves not the inherent weakness of the ethics in question but the fact that so long as man- kind permits Caesar to maintain his autocratic rule the doctrines of Christ, predicating, as they do, the brotherhood of man, can not prevail on earth. The revelations recently made to the public of the secrets of the European diplomacy that preceded the war of wars demonstrate conclusively the significant proposition that the conflict now raging in the world is the outcome of surviving forms of despotism that deny to the peoples over which they tyrannize the right to decide the issue, when it grows acute, of war or peace. And what is true in this connection to-day has been true for the nineteen hundred years that have succeeded the coming to earth of the Prince of Peace. Autocracy, when it has not nullified the doctrines of Christianity, has made use of them adroitly for the furtherance of its own ends. In other words, the teachings of the Christ have not as yet had an opportunity, owing to the pernicious per- sistence in the world of forms of government an- tagonistic to their spirit, of exercising sufficient power to render war, the most unchristian of all hu- man activities, obsolete. But the end is not yet. The conflict between Cor- 216 THE GAME OF EMPIKES sica and Galilee has not been fought to a finish. Christ preached Democracy and Democracy is funda- mentally antagonistic to War. Before it can be as- serted without danger of contradiction that the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth have failed permanently to re- generate a blood-stained world those ethics must have, as they are sure to have, a chance to employ demo- cratic institutions as a medium through which to influence the destinies of mankind. Every recent war on earth has been followed by a weakening of the hold of autocracy upon the scepters it has wielded too long and a marked increase in the power and spread of democracy. There is nothing mysterious about this significant and encouraging fact. An autocrat who in these days assembles a vast army beneath his banner is playing with an explosive. The intercourse with each other of the rank and file of embattled troops, each individual of whom has put into practice perforce the great renunciation, the self-sacrifice that patriotism demands, gives a prac- tical demonstration of that brotherhood of man by means of which universal democracy shall erect eventually its shining palace of peace. And over the portals of that palace will be inscribed not the words of the Corsican, "What are a million lives to me?" but those of the Galilean: "Peace on earth — good will to men!" CHAPTER XIII THE AEMOE OF EIGHTEOUSNESS CHAPTER XIII THE AEMOK OF EIGHTEOUSNESS The bloodiest, most tragic year in tlie history of the race approached its end with few gleams of light to relieve the darkness that had enveloped the planet for five black months. Men wished each other a "Happy New Year" with an earnestness hitherto unknovsm but with a note of apprehension in their voices. Not only was the end of the war of wars not yet in sight but it promised to involve presently several nations, notably Italy, hitherto maintaining with great difficulty their neutrality. The magnitude of the conflict gave to it several char- acteristics that had been heretofore absent from in- ternational wars. It seemed as if a large part of mankind had been suddenly afflicted with a mania for human slaughter, as if the God Mars, importu- nate and unsatiated, had cursed the world with an epidemic of madness to the end that he might gloat over the most colossal clash of armies the earth had ever known. The toll taken of human life by the end of the 219 220 THE GAME OF EMPIRES Year of Death, 1914, was appalling. The theory that modern warfare would prove less destructive than the conflicts from which it has evolved had been proved to be untenable. The hope that an approximation to "civilized" warfare might be gained through new and more effective weapons had come to naught. Death, as heretofore, presided over the game of war and demanded even a larger percentage of the pawns involved than he had ex- acted in former times. Modern surgery had made great progress in dealing with the latest styles in wounds but, despite its ingenuity, the fatalities on the battlefields of 1914: reached a higher percentage than had ever been attained in the fine art of man's destruction of man. A semi-official statement published in the last week of December, 1914, regarding the casualties sus- tained by the Germans said : "The Prussian losses up to date, including those not published, may be set down as about 250,000 dead, 400,000 missing and 850,000 wounded, bringing the total up to about one and a half million. With the Wurttemberg, Bavarian and navy losses, the German losses alto- gether must be about 2,000,000. According to in- formation from Vienna the Austro-Hungarian casu- alties are estimated at about one and a half million officers and men killed, wounded and missing." From figures compiled by M. Yves Guyot, the AEMOR OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 221 noted French economist, the number of men with- drawn from employment in Germany to engage in war is conservatively 4,350,000 and from Austria- Hungary 3,500,000. If this grand total of Y,850,- 000 men is approximately correct and the losses have been 3,500,000, the price paid by these two nations in killed, wounded and missing has been over 44 per cent, of the forces engaged — a propor- tional loss much greater than was inflicted upon the combatants in the American Civil War or the Franco-Prussian War. It was beyond the power of the human imagina- tion to gi'asp the grim significance of these astound- ing figures. When to them were added the losses sustained in the war of wars by the other nations involved therein, the mind of man found itself as powerless to comprehend the full scope of the great cataclysm of 1914 as to realize the meaning of eternity or infinity. And the possibilities of the immediate future were startling. Even the nations not actually engaged in warfare had become super- sensitive and quarrelsome by the end of the Great Red Year. Uncle Sam's holiday greetings to John Bull had taken the form of a sharp note advising our English cousins to exercise more care in their treatment of American merchant vessels. Italy was shaking her mailed fist at Turkey and continuing her dispute with Austria. If, as many able men 222 THE GAME OF EMPIRES assert, War is an institution of spiritual value to the race, it appeared as if many hitherto peaceful nations, both great and small, seemed determined to take advantage of the contentious nature of the times and gain for themselves such portion of this spiritual uplift as might come within their grasp. In a sense, many of the concepts cherished by the age of chivalry were revived and preached in a new form. As the youthful knight of old watched and prayed beside his arms during the dark hours pre- ceding his admittance as a full-fledged warrior to the coming fray, so the neutral nations of the earth met the advent of the year 1915 with searching eyes fixed upon their weapons. There was in the world a widespread fear that the year that had brought the greatest of all woes to mankind might be followed conceivably by a twelvemonth that should widen rather than narrow the scope of the war of wars. There was one feature of the tragic situation in which the world found itself as the New Year came in that made a strong impression upon many thoughtful Americans. That war is of itself wholly and uncompromisingly evil had become of recent years practically a national belief in this country. But, behold it to-day, waged on a gigantic scale by machinery, and there is about it something soul- stirring, uplifting, psychologically purifying that ARMOR OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 223 gives it a vindication against which we protest but whose influence is changing the thoughts of millions of peace-loving men and women startled at the pos- sibility that their denunciations of war as an un- justifiable return of man to savagery may have been too sweeping. To die in battle for a cause in which one believes is to make, in a minor way, the same kind of sacrifice that the Christ made upon the Cross. As a writer in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1915, signing himself "E. S.," puts it: "The truth is that modern life and modern thought have com- passed an unnatural evolution. We have sought to invert ancient ideals, and the minds of men revolt. Look freshly at the contrast. Peace calls men to comfort and refreshment, to freedom from danger, and rest from fear. War points the way to toil and suffering, to strange new gropings in the mysterious paths of pain, to struggle and victory and death. The more toilsome the way, the more difficult the goal, the stronger the lure must be to ardent spirits. It is the desperate alternative which grips mind and heart and spirit." "Let me remind you," wrote the late J. A. Cramb, of Queen's College, London, "that in human life as a whole there are always elements and forces, there are always motives and ideals, which defy the analy- sis of reason — mysterious and dark forces. Man 224 THE GAME OF EMPIRES shall not live bj bread alone! And in war this element constantly tends to assert itself. It assumes forms that sometimes are dazzling in their beauty; sometimes are wrapt in a kind of transcendental wonder; sometimes, in appearance at least, are sim- ply utilitarian, or chimerical, or fantastic. But all alike have this quality of defying reason, of eluding the grasp of the mind when exercised in formal judgment merely. It is easy, for example, to demon- strate that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you can demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. Nevertheless men still live and go on pursuing that illusion and that mockery." As we Americans, gazing with horrified eyes across the seas at embattled millions of our fellow- men, murmured the season's greetings to each other, was it strange that in our souls we were conscious of, puzzled by, and apprehensive of that mysterious fascination that War has possessed for Man through- out all the ages, never before apparently more powerful than to-day ? Even if history did not warn us as a nation against turning our swords into prun- ing hooks, is there not deep within us something that responds to the call of the heroic, something that leads us to gaze into the future with the con- viction that we Americans, who have the blood of fighting generations in our veins, must be tested ARMOR OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 225 eventually by the fires that call for the great renun- ciation and in their horror and their splendor, de- stroying selfishness and pettiness and the common- place, glorify a people worthy to undergo the ordeal ? Belgium as a nation of shopkeepers was negligible; Belgium as a nation of heroes shall be an inspira- tion to all generations to come. A clear and ringing note in connection with this subject has been struck recently by an American woman, Agnes Repplier, a note, it is to be feared, that will fall upon many ears in Washington woe- fully deaf to the harsh sounds of warning that come to us from many unexpected sources. "For years we have chosen to believe," says Miss Rep- plier, who would never turn her hatpin into a hair- pin, "that arbitration would secure for the world a maximum of comfort at a minimum of cost, and that the religion of humanity would achieve what the religion of Christ has never achieved, — the brotherhood of man. From this dream we have been rudely awakened; but, being awake, let us clearly realize that simple and great quality which makes every man the defender of his home, the guardian of his rights, the avenger of his shame- ful wrongs." There are men in the United States, some of them high in the councils of the nation, who should read these manly words of a brilliant woman with the blush of shame mantling their cheeks. 226 THE GAME OF EMPIRES It might be possible for a careless reader to mistake the above in its entirety as a plea in behalf of War, as the attitude of an American "Jingo" inspired, at a safe distance from battlefields, by the glory of martial achievements and indifferent to the horrors that attend the movements and clash of armies. In such a case, a grave injustice would be perpetrated. An American writer who should to- day endeavor to arouse in this country a martial spirit based simply upon admiration of War as an institution would be, so far as his influence went, a traitor to the highest interests of humanity. The year 1915 found at its coming but one satisfactory feature in the existing situation on earth, namely, that the United States was at peace with all nations and was endeavoring earnestly to remain so. Be- tween peace and war, even though there be elements in the latter that are not wholly evil, there is no question as to which of the two is the more advan- tageous to any nation. But war has not been elimi- nated from human affairs, nor is there the slightest prospect that the present gigantic conflict will put an end to it forever. It is the bounden duty of every patriotic American to realize this and to ex- tract what comfort he can from the fact that the sac- rifices that an embattled people are forced to make exert an uplifting effect that does something to atone for the horrors and misery inflicted by war. And it ARMOR OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 227 must be borne in mind always that there is a radical difference between a righteous war and an unright- eous war, as there is between peace with honor and peace with shame. There is a price for peace that no nation sensitive regarding its honor is ever willing to pay. Bishop Ingram, of London, holding as he does high rank in the army of Him who came to bring not peace but a sword, gave voice in his New Year's sermon to his admiration for "the new spirit" that has come of late to the English people. They are fighting, or suffering, nobly in a worthy cause and there has come to them a spiritual awakening that rewards only that nation, or individual, to which, or whom, the purifying influences of self-sacrifice are made known through stress and strife and the ab- sorption of individual aims by a lofty ideal. From the standpoint of the parents, widows or orphans bereaved by a war, of which English valor has been one of the most striking features, the price paid for the spiritual uplift that has been vouchsafed to a nation sorely in need thereof may seem at first too great. But there will come a time when the descendants of the Britishers who fell in defending Belgium from unrighteous aggression, who died for the sanc- tity of their nation's plighted word, will be better 228 THE GAME OF EMPIRES men because of the proud memories they cherish of their forbears of this generation. The youth of America retain to-day a vivid recol- lection of a war fought with a European power by the United States to destroy the intolerable tyranny of an obsolete despotism exercised upon an unhappy people just beyond our coast-line. Has not that in- spiring memory much to do with the fact that this nation as a whole has been dominated from the out- set of the war of wars by earnest sympathy for Eng- land and the cause for which she fights ? Our very worthy pacificists cannot alter the fact that as a peo- ple we remember, and shall alwaj^s remember, the Maine. We have worn the armor of righteousness, and he is but a shortsighted and misg-uided Ameri- can who asserts that we may never be forced to don that armor again. CHAPTER XIV THE IMMOEALITY OF WEAKNESS CHAPTER XIV THE IMMORALITY OF WEAKNESS To add to the gloom that had prevailed in the United States at what should have been the joyous 'New Year season, hostilities had broken out early in January at Washington, D. C. The fever of bel- ligerency that had long been epidemic among the wielders of power in Europe had attacked the lead- ing personages at our nation's capital and open war had been declared between the President and the Senate. Compared with Petrograd, London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, Washington had been, since the outbreak of hostilities across the sea, a governmental center in which peace, and a large amount of real joyousness, had prevailed. There were beneath the dome of our Capitol no wounded soldiers coming from the front, mourning garb was not to be seen on all sides, the city was well lighted at night and the holiday dances had been gay and well attended. But a war cloud, small as a woman's hand — the hand of Mrs. Marjorie Bloom, of Devil's Lake, N. D. — had appeared upon our national horizon and the 231 232 THE GAME OF EMPIKES White House telescope constantly scanned the heav- ens for hostile aeroplanes that might be dispatched carrying bombs from the Senate Chamber. The seriousness of the situation could not be ex- aggerated. With millions of men in Europe and other parts of the world shooting each other down because of misunderstandings regarding their re- spective prerogatives on earth, it was the most ap- propriate possible time for the Executive and Sen- ate of the United States to display firmness and courage in regard to their conflicting rights. The President had taken the ground that Mrs. Bloom was eminently fitted to manipulate such mail as might happen to reach the post-office at Devil's Lake, I^. D. The Senate had rejected unanimously the President's nomination, thus throwing down a gaunt- let that appeared to put an end to all possibilities of reconciliation between the White House and the Upper Chamber. An administration that seemed destined to undertake the most colossal task of arbi- tration that had ever been thrust upon a neutral power had found it impossible to make a postmis- tress of Mrs. Marjorie Bloom. Parturiunt monies, nascetur ridiculus mus. What may be known to posterity as the war of Devil's Lake was the more to be regretted as many of the people of the LTnited States had become con- vinced gradually that it was high time for our gov- THE IMMOKALITY OF WEAKNESS 233 ernment to look existing world facts squarely in the face and prepare for possibilities in the future that might easily test our defensive resources to their uttermost. In the first week of January, 1915, a startling detailed presentment of our appalling weakness as a fighting power was made to the American public, through the columns of a Xew York newspaper, by Captain Matthew E. Hanna, U. S. A., retired. A gTaduate of West Point, he had seen service in the Santiago campaign, and his book on tactics has been recognized as a standard authority by our War Department. If our first line of defense, namely, our naval power, proved itself too weak to cripple an invading fleet of transports protected by battleships sent against our eastern coast by a European foe. Captain Hanna shows by incontrovertible facts and figures that our military arm is far from strong enough to protect us from an army that might be landed at any unprotected strip of coast between Maine and Florida. The voice of the expert is heard in the land, and there are among our people many who heed it. But what effect have the words of Captain Hanna had upon the calm, unimpressionable, fearless mind of, let us say. Representative Lumpkin, of the Freshwater, Ind., district ? Is the latter at all shocked by the demonstrated fact, made clear by Captain Hanna, that there is not in this country to-day sufficient am- 234 THE GAME OF EMPIEES munition to enable our available forces to continue a battle lasting longer than, at the most, forty-eight hours? ]S[o. "What of it?" queries the eloquent Lumpkin in a recent speech to his admiring con- stituents. "This talk about a possible invasion of this country is all poppycock. To store ammunition in large quantities with the idea that some time in the remote future some war-mad European power might attempt to land troops on the Jersey Coast is to spend the people's money recklessly. We need dams, irrigation, post-offices, and, perhaps, now and then, a new battleship. My motto, my friends, is, and shall continue to be: ^Millions for tribute but not one cent for defense !' " There are many Lumpkinses in the United States, both in and out of office. They are suffering from a form of sleeping sickness known in its manifesta- tions in official circles as "watchful waiting." Watchful waiting is a kind of mental inertia that, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. It mas- querades before the world as a praiseworthy method of procedure, in which caution, conservatism and carefulness supply the elements that should recom- mend it to a nation that prides itself upon its regard for common sense. Watchfulness has always been recognized as a virtue worthy of cultivation by either a people or an individual. That we Americans should always keep an eye upon the Game of Em- THE IMMORALITY OF WEAKNESS 235 pires as it is played in the twentieth century upon a blood-stained earth is the admonition that is im- plied in the historic phrase quoted above. We are, furthermore, to remain perfectly cool and calm — and wait. For what, can it not be asked, are we to wait? Is it suggested that, before we take the necessary steps to put our country in a state of reasonable de- fense, we are to delay all practical endeavors toward strengthening our position until an immediate need for such activity shall come to us? Unfortunately this interpretation of the advice that has been given to the country by a spineless type of statesmen has had its influence upon a large number of Americans who are so busy with their personal affairs that they dislike to have their attention called forcibly to the foreign relations of our government. This type of our fellow-citizens is fond of seeking his pillow at night to fall off to slumber with a picture in his mind of a watchful administration at Washington engaged at all hours in scanning the horizons of the world to see to it that no peril to us from a foreign source can arise in a way that should be either sud- den or alarming or both. In other words, watclv ful waiting is guaranteed to work while the people sleep. One of the greatest of the many difficulties that confront writers like Roosevelt, Hanna and others 236 THE GAME OF EMPIRES in their efforts to arouse the people of the United States to a realization of the unpleasant possibilities that threaten us in the future lies in the fact that the average man possesses little if any imagination. He thinks in terms of his own personal experience, not in those of states or nations or races. Even though he may read history, past and present, his mental limitations are such that he cannot grasp the full significance of the facts by which he has been confronted. Accuse him of a lack of imagination and that very lack disables him from comprehending the gravity of the charge that you bring against him. ISTo living man has yet been discovered who would admit that his imagination is defective or that he is lacking in a sense of humor. Men and women pos- sessing both imagination and humor — and these emanate from brain-cells closely connected — are forced to talk to their fellow-men at times in a lan- guage that the latter have never understood. Say to the average American that, when the time of an ocean voyage from Europe to America was reduced, by the geniuses who make modern machin- ery, to five days, the situation of this country from a military standpoint was radically changed ; he may admit your proposition but his smug satisfaction in the settled conviction that, under any circumstances, this country could "lick the world" will not be shaken. Tell him that an army of a hundred thou- THE IMMOEALITY OF WEAKNESS 237 sand well-trained European soldiers landed upon our Eastern shores could put our country at their mercy and he will advise you to take a nerve-tonic or to consult a specialist in general prostration. If you go too far with him, become too earnest in your con- tention that our lack of preparedness for war is a real peril, he may even accuse you of being inter- ested financially in the manufacture of arms and a patriot only for the interests of your own pocket. The vast majority of Americans have not yet grasped the full meaning of the change of status of the United States among the nations of the world brought about by the outcome of our war with Spain. They are fond of saying that to mind one's own business is the wisest course for either a people or an individual to pursue. That Belgium was follow- ing this praiseworthy method of procedure early last summer is a fact that apparently has no significance for them. Belgium was not permitted to mind her own business. Through a combination of events the United States, having become a so-called "world power," is no longer in a position to confine her ac- tivities within the limitations that were possible a few years ago. For a "world power" is of necessity one of a very few nations upon whose procedure the destinies of the race depends. The future of the world is in the hands of several great peoples now at war and, outside of them, of the United States 238 THE GAME OF EMPIKES only. Fate has ordained that the time has long gone by when this country could confine her energies wholly to her own concerns. In fact, in our recent effort, at a great international crisis, to mind our own business we stultified ourselves for all time by not fulfilling, or even making a pretense to fulfill, our obligations to invaded Belgium. Watchful wait- ing, forsooth ! We silently watched the perpetration of a great crime and supinely waited until the pro- test that it was our bounden duty to make was ren- dered impossible through the passage of time. Technically and morally, as the leading authori- ties on the subject, including one ex-President of the United States, have shown, the United States failed in its sworn duty to Belgium. The greatest opportunity that has ever come to this nation to prove that as a world power it is not only altruistic but also strong and courageous enough to make its altruism effectual will be to us throughout the ages not a glory but a reproach. It has taken a long while for the American who is busily engaged in minding his own business, and who reluctantly ad- mits that new obligations have come to this coimtry, to realize that any responsibility for the precipita- tion of the war of wars rests upon the shoulders of the United States. But he has begun to see light on this matter and if anything is certain in this world it is the fact that the present administration THE IMMORALITY OF WEAKNESS 239 at Washington will be eventually held to account by the people of this country for not doing the right thing at the right time regarding Germany's inva- sion, in the summer of 1914, of a neutral state. It may be asked, in the above connection, why, if, as Captain Hanna has shown, we are weak as a fighting power, we should have taken the dangerous step of protesting to Germany against her treatment of Belgium. The query is pertinent as bringing clearly into the limelight a fact that should make a powerful impression upon a people that, as our past has shown, is just, honorable and courageous at the core. Weakness in a nation or an individual renders the fulfillment of moral obligations impossible. For a government to give guarantees that it has not the power to make good when they are put to the test is a crime of the same kind that a man commits who promises to accomplish a given purpose that is be- yond the means at his disposal. The people of the United States have been taught many lessons by the war of wars. If one of these lessons brings to our cheeks the blush of shame, it is for us to insist upon it, through our representatives at Washington, that we so strengthen ourselves as a fighting power that henceforth we may not prove false to our plighted word as a nation merely because we are too weak to risk the perils that might threaten us if we remained true to our obligations. "At present the prime duty 240 TII£ GAME OF EMPIRES of the American people," says ex-President Roose- velt, "is to abandon the inane and mischievous prin- ciple of watchful waiting — that is, of slothful and timid refusal either to face facts or to perform duty. Let us act justly toward others ; and let us also be prepared with stout heart and strong hand to defend our rights against injustice from others." It comes to this, that the United States has two imperative reasons for strengthening our naval and military forces, one of them materialistic, the other moral. We should be in a position at all times to repel aggression, and never too weak to fulfill to the letter our obligations as an honorable people. That for the above reasons there is present need for action upon the part of our government has been reluc- tantly and, in a way, amusingly admitted by several of the leading pacificists of our country. The l^ew York Peace Society, of which Mr. Andrew Carnegie is President, in January, 1915, sent a letter to the President of the United States that resembled a mes- sage from men who deplore the existence of rain but admit the necessity for umbrellas if the clouds become sufiiciently threatening. "We are in agree- ment," wrote the pacificists to Mr. Wilson, "with your interpretation of the principles which underlie our national policy of defense, viz.: that in the fu- ture, as in the past, we shall maintain a powerful navy as our natural means of defense, but never for THE IMMORALITY OF WEAKNESS 241 aggression; that our systems of state and national militia shall be extended in an orderly manner and be maintained on such a basis as to constitute an ade- quate land defense, but that while we maintain our present principles and ideals we shall not keep a large standing army or move in the direction of compulsory military service ; that the army and navy shall be kept in a high state of efficiency, and that we shall always make our moral insurance against war very definite, certain and adequate." It is apparent that imagination and a sense of humor, closely related, as was said above, are not in evidence in this remarkable communication from pacificists to the President. One of the interesting features of this letter lies in the fact that it emanates from New York, a city that suffered recently from an unchecked wave of crime and was terrorized by gun- men. Supposing that a body of highly intelligent and prominent citizens of New York should write to the Mayor to assure him that they were now, as in the past, in favor of the maintenance of a powerful police force — but never for aggression. Suppose that they should put forward the proposition that the best way to keep gunmen in order is for reputable citizens to furnish them at all times with a worthy example. Supposing that they should go to the length of insisting that a policeman should always parley with a criminal malefactor before using force 242 THE GAME OF EMPIRES against him — would the Mayor and the public be favorably impressed with their point of view ? It is evident that the events of the year 1914 have not succeeded in forcing American pacificists to adopt a position that is either consistent, logical or practical. Their recent letter to President Wilson establishes the fact that they have been forced to admit that war, far from being obsolete, is a very active institution at the present time. They appear now to realize, as they did not realize before the recent outbreak of hostilities in Europe, that little progress has been made in eliminating from the world the worst of its many evils. With the revela- tion of the continued depravity of pugnacious Man that has been made to them by recent bloody events, they have become aware of the unpleasant truth that the woe and ruin that have befallen Europe might conceivably afflict these United States. But they must approach the matter gingerly, compromising as they go, keeping one hand on the white dove of peace and the other — naughty hand! — upon a gun. The coming of the millennium is much to be de- sired for countless reasons, not the least important among them being that its advent might prevent many really admirable men from periodically mak- ing themselves publicly ridiculous. CHAPTER XV VALOR VERSUS AVOIDANCE CHAPTER XV VALOR VERSUS AVOIDANCE "World dominion or downfall!" By January of 1915 it had become apparent that Germany was not to obtain the prize for which her militarists had plunged a deluded people into a war begun in mad- ness and carried on against overwhelming odds. Whether the alternative to universal power, namely, complete overthrow, was to be Germany's punish- ment for inane, even insane, temerity was a ques- tion that the future only could answer, but the Ger- manization of the world had become a discredited dream the realization of which had been vainly at- tempted at the cost of innumerable lives. The cour- age, efficiency and enthusiasm of the German armies had proved unavailing to bring to success a mili- tary adventure that will go down to posterity as the most amazing and foolhardy exhibition of martial dare-deviltry that history has recorded. An alle- gorical picture representing von Kluck knocking at the gates of Paris would be a design immortalizing a gigantic military blunder and the transposition of 245 246 THE GAME OF EMPIRES a vision of impossible glory into the grim reality of a lost cause. The Battle of the Marne put an end forever not only to the effort of Germany to attain world domination but to her attempt to exalt Corsica at the expense of Galilee. "While preparing to found a world-empire," says the late Professor Cramb, "Germany is also prepar- ing to create a world-religion. * * * The prevalent bent of mind at the universities, in the army among the more cultured, is toward what may be described as the Religion of Valor, reinterpreted by ISTapoleon and by Kietzsche — the glory of action, heroism, the doing of great things. It is in metaphysics Zara- thustra's ^Amor Fati.' It is in politics and ethics !N^apoleonism. These same young men, who, in this very month, thrill with the scenes of 1813, see in IN^apoleon the oppressor, biit they see in ISTapoleon' s creed the springs of his action, a message of fire: Live dangerously!" Germany's endeavor to foist the Religion of Valor upon an unwilling world sprang, as is apparent, from an inclination that was not inconsistent with her success in winning the active assistance of Tur- key in the waging of the war of wars. A Germany devoted to Galilee could not have made use of the Turk. A Germany inspired by Corsica was under no obligation to inspect the religious creed of an ally. The only question at issue was whether Turkey had VALOR VERSUS AVOIDANCE 247 recovered sufficiently from recent military disasters to wage effective warfare. Unfortunately for Ger- many, Turkey, as had Austria, proved to be a weak sister rather than a stalwart brother. The rout of three Turkish army corps in the Caucasus by the Russians at the beginning of the new year was a more serious blow to Germany than the American public generally realized. The flower of the Turkish army had been destroyed in the futile effort to in- vade Russian provinces in Asia Minor and thus weaken Russian pressure upon Germany and Aus- tria. The full significance of this crushing blow to Germany's latest ally was summed up in the follow- ing words by Mr. Frank H. Simonds, who has taken a high place during the war of wars as an authority on the military features of the great struggle : "The Turkish defeat in the Caucasus has imperiled the whole German supremacy on the Golden Horn, it has abolished all possible temptation for the Balkan States to join the Kaiser, it has opened the way to Bulgaria, Roumania and Greece to win easy laurels and new provinces. In addition it has practically assured British position in Egypt, in the near East generally. The Holy War has gone glimmering." Pan-Germanism and Pan-Islamism had been cast into that astounding rubbish heap into which all schemes for universal domination are eventually thrown. Italy and the Balkan States, long held in 248 THE GAME OF EMPIRES leash, prepared to take part in the great fray, to the end that when the spoils of the war of wars were divided they might present claims to a share therein. Toothing succeeds like success. The increasing probability that the Triple Entente was to dictate presently the immediate future of Europe influenced powers still technically neutral to fall into line with the coming victors. Europe was being butchered to make presently the most amazing holiday the world had known. Happy that people in the coming time of triumph or atonement whose portion should be bread and circuses rather than chains and despoil- ment. In the quaint phraseology of American poli- tics, it was high time for Italy, Roumania, Greece and other ambitious states to get aboard the band wagon. Such was the situation in Europe when the Presi- dent of the United States, in a speech at Indianapo- lis, Ind., counseled the people of this country to avoid taking too much interest in the epoch-making events that were rapidly changing the map of the world. "I for one," said Mr. Wilson, "would prefer that our thoughts should not too often cross the ocean but should center themselves upon the policies and duties of the United States." Behold the contrast presented at the moment by the Old World and the InTow. In the former the Religion of Valor stood forth as a false doctrine that was sending millions VALOK VERSUS AVOIDANCE 249 of men to death : in the latter the Religion of Avoid- ance was being preached to the end that the blind might continue to be leaders of the blind. Can it be possible that between such seemingly an- tagonistic cults as the Religion of Valor and the Re- ligion of Avoidance there can be anything in com- mon, that in the last analysis they should be four.d to rest upon the same foundation-stone? The for- mer, through whose influence the continent of Eu- rope has been deluged with blood, bids its devotees to "live dangerously" and, if need be, to die slaughtered. The Religion of Avoidance, on the other hand, commands its adherents to live safely and to die, if possible, of extreme old age. Between the teachings of the German Kaiser and the Ameri- can President there seems to be, at first glance, a great gulf fixed. But placing them beneath the mi- croscope of close scrutiny and eliminating the sharply contrasted modes of procedure that they respectively advocate, we find that their underpinning is iden- tically the same, that they are both based upon the unworthy passion of human selfishness. There is another point of resemblance between the Religion of Valor and the Religion of Avoidance. It is only a provincial type of mentality that could preach either of these cults to an enlightened people in the twentieth century. The Religion of Valor is based upon a narrow, reactionary, uncosmopolitan 250 THE GAME OF EMPIRES attitude of mind toward the legitimate mission of a civilized nation in the world of to-daj. It is founded upon the same kind of colossal and ludicrous egotism that is exhibited bj countless country vil- lages each one of which loudly proclaims itself to an unappreciative public as the center of the universe. The idea underlying the phrase ^'Deutschland liber Alles" is a manifestation of provincial megalomania that would be laughable if it had not been responsi- ble for the greatest of all world tragedies. The Religion of Avoidance, solemnly urged upon the people of the United States as the only true faith, is, like the Religion of Valor, a product of provin- cialism, of a point of view that wholly ignores the just demands of perspective. It insists upon it that no man is his brother's keeper, that no nation can be reasonably concerned in the affairs of its neighbors. "I want to say a word about Mexico," remarked the President, at Indianapolis, on January 9, 1915. ' 'Eighty per cent, of the people of Mexico never had a 'look in' in determining who should be their gover- nors or what their government should be. It is none of my business and it is none of your business how long they take in determining it. It is none of my business and it is none of your business how they go about the business. The country is theirs. The liberty, if they can get it, and God speed them in getting it, is theirs. And so far as my influence goes VALOR VERSUS AVOIDANCE 251 while I am President nobody shall interfere with them." It will be seen from the above uncompromising words that the Religion of Valor and the Religion of Avoidance, while they resemble each other in their provincial selfishness, display marked differ- ences in their practical application to the affairs of nations. The attitude of the Kaiser toward a neigh- boring state is radically different from that of the President. The Religion of Valor permits a people to hack their way through neutral territory if the advisability of so doing appears to be clear. The Religion of Avoidance impels its High Priest to send not an army but a Chief of Staff to persuade our un- ruly neighbors across the southern border of our country to kindly refrain, so far as is consistent with the eternal principles of liberty, from shoot- ing American citizens to death across the line. The Religion of Valor commands Germans to live dan- gerously. The Religion of Avoidance urges Texans to die complacently. We have seen, with eyes big with horror, how the Religion of Valor put into practice has turned Eu- rope into a shambles. The teachings of Treitschke and Bernhardi proved to be seed whose harvest was death and desolation. In spite of our temperamental egotism, we Americans, .if we are honest with our- selves, must admit that a year ago the most highly 252 THE GAME OF EMPIEES civilized part of the globe was the continent of Eu- rope, if civilization consists in the development of art, science, commerce, culture in the best sense of the word, and all the other activities of man that spring from his highest aspirations. But a Euro- pean nation, boasting of its devotion to art, science, commerce and culture, had for more than a genera- tion made a Keligion of Valor and had bowed down to the idols of Militarism. The outcome of Ger- many's substitution of Corsica for Galilee has been the overthrow of European civilization, the substitu- tion of war for peace over a whole blood-reddened continent, the turning of a world that was a garden into a graveyard. An idea evil in its conception and brutal in its manifestations has turned back the hands of time and changed the youth of Europe from men who should make the future glorious into mur- derous, burrowing animals, killing each other to the end that the Religion of Valor may take a greater toll of human lives than any pagan cult has ever demanded from its devotees. As for us Americans, let us not deceive ourselves. We are worshiping idols as false and treacherous and fond of blood as those to which the German Militarists have been paying homage for the last forty years. The Religion of Avoidance bids fair in the end to demand of mankind as gory a sacri- fice as has the Religion of Valor. Its high priests VALOR VERSUS AVOIDANCE 253 and professors preach not only the doctrine of non- resistance to aggression but of blind indifference to existing perils. As a cult it defends itself by point- ing to its good intentions, about which as a pave- ment there has always clung a sulphurous odor. Its creed is attractive but misleading. Its basic tenets assert that war is savage, illogical and unnecessary and that the time has come for mankind to free it- self from its curse. The appeal made by the Re- ligion of Avoidance to the mind of the average peace- loving American is strong and real, but his response thereto does more credit to his heart than to his head. He should rise to a realization of the fact that he is a citizen of a world power at a time when war, far from being obsolete, is making the most hideous demonstration of its vitality as an institution that it has ever exhibited. If the leading American advocate of the Religion of Avoidance had displayed perfect consistency in the practical application of his cult to the foreign affairs of our government, the dangers that threaten us from beyond our borders might be less ominous than they appear to be at present. But what can be said of a Mexican policy, for example, that con- sists at one time of armed aggression and the cap- ture of a Mexican port and at another of public denial on the part of the Administration that this country has any obligations connected with the dis- 254 THE GAME OF EMPIRES orders across our Southern borders ? When Pontius Pilate theatrically washed his hands before the mul- titude to testify to his innocence in connection with the crucifixion of the Nazarene did he establish that innocence to the judgment of posterity? There is a golden mean between the Religion of Valor upon the one hand and the Religion of Avoid- ance upon the other upon which every clear-minded, open-eyed, patriotic American should base his atti- tude toward our national problems as they relate to war. It is inconceivable that the hasheesh of Mili- tarism can ever poison the minds of the people of this country. The unfortunate German devotees of the Religion of Valor stir the pity rather than the envy of Americans. World dominion, foreign con- quest, martial glory hold no allurements for us — are, in fact, repellent to our habitual modes of thought. On the other hand, the Religion of Avoidance, a form, as has been said, of sleeping sickness, cannot make a deep or permanent impression upon a people that is far from being fundamentally cowardly or degenerate. As a nation we have always been in- clined to mind our own business, but that fact did not prevent Dewey from destroying a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila with the warm approval of all his countrymen. The American people have not changed radically of late, even under the influence of office-holding doctrinaires and phrase-mongers VALOR VERSUS AVOIDAKCE 255 wlio seized upon the most inopportune moment in the history of the race to preach the inherent superi- ority of pruning-hooks to swords. Since the founda- tion of our nation, rendered possible by a long and bitter war, we have been, from one point of view, at least, a fighting people, l^o generation of Ameri- cans since the days of Washington has lived and died without facing the ordeal of either a foreign or a civil war. Our martial experiences in the past have not tended in the slightest degree to arouse in us a fondness for militarism. But our wars have added materially to our national fund of self-respect. That we are as a people willing that that fund should be wiped out by the insidious influence of the compara- tively new Religion of Avoidance is unbelievable. This unmanly cult, in control by an unhappy chance of the reins of American government at a great world crisis, succeeded in preventing us from fulfilling our sacred obligations to violated Belgium, but is it too optimistic to assert that the supineness displayed by our government in that instance can never, with the consent of an aroused and enlight- ened people, be repeated? Between the strength that tempts to conquest and the weakness that must sacrifice honor there is a rea- sonable and practical compromise toward which the United States must turn if the lofty mission that 256 THE GAME OF EMPIEES fate is forcing upon this nation of freemen is to be worthily fulfilled. The Religion of Valor leads to blood and downfall. The Religion of Avoidance leads to blood and disgrace. Surely in the heroic and uplifting past of our nation we can find a creed applicable to our present needs that shall protect us as a people from the necessity to worship either the God of Brutality or the God of Impotence. CHAPTER XVI THE ONLY HOPE FOR PEACE CHAPTER XVI THE ONLY HOPE FOR PEACE As the Tvar of wars gradually demonstrated the fact that, contrary to the avowed opinion of many eminent experts in military matters, a conflict in- volving a large number of nations would not be necessarily of short duration, the thoughtful men and women of neutral powers became increasingly interested in projects for restraining, or, perhaps, putting an end forever to the activities of the god Mars. Old and new "sure cures" for war were sug- gested and recommended in a world aroused from its customary apathy regarding seemingly unsolvable problems by the unspeakable horrors presented to the eyes of an outraged race by the blood-stained conti- nent of Europe. Peace societies increased their ef- forts to spread their propaganda, religious sects of countless varieties joined in the crusade against war, statesmen and politicians advocated either increased armaments or universal disarmament as the best method for avoiding international hostilities in the future, pacificists predicted the imminent coming of 259 260 THE GAME OF EMPIEES the millenniuin and fire-eaters contended that the only remedy for war was more war. There had been those among the writers and lecturers of recent times who had asserted that a great European war could not be fought without the consent of the lead- ing money-lenders of the world. They had claimed that capital was opposed to war and that, therefore, Armageddon was merely an evil dream that would never come true. There had been others of the lit- erary and oratorical professions who had argued that as Socialism, a growing force in the Old World, was antagonistic to war the projects of the militarists of the twentieth century must come to naught. But as the war of wars progressed it was seen that no financial obstacles stood in the way of its colossal activities, and as for the European Socialists they had shouldered their gims at the outbreak of hostili- ties and had joined their respective colors. All that had been said against war in the past had been shown to be true in a manner and on a scale more impressive than ever heretofore. "War is wickedness," Plutarch had said, "war is devilish" according to Luther, "war is an illustrious crime," pronounced Isidore of Pelusium. Sherman called it "Hell," Gibbon "robbery," Wellington "detest- able," Lactantius "murder," Bentham "misery," John Hay "futile." But here it was again, devastat- ing half the earth with a thoroughgoing diabolism THE ONLY HOPE FOR PEACE 261 that made the great wars of the past look like insig- nificant skirmishes fought by incompetent and inade- quately-armed contestants. Every safeguard that the ingenuity of man had raised against the greatest of all human curses had proved to be inadequate at the world's most fateful crisis and the race at large gazed gloomily into the future, hoping against hope that some yet untried method for checking man's in- humanity to man might presently be discovered. It came eventually to this, that, to the minds of the thoughtful, one significant fact presented itself for consideration with an insistence that it had never before displayed. It could not be denied that from time immemorial the destinies of the race had been determined by the inclinations of the masculine part thereof. Races, peoples, nations, states had been governed and controlled by men, and by men only. And what had they done to civilization ? The pic- ture that the earth presented to the onlooking gods in the year 1915 brought the male sex under indict- ment for wholesale murder. How could men dodge the responsibility for the condition of savagery that prevailed at that time over a large part of the globe ? History has been made, as it has been written, al- most exclusively by men. As for the cataclysm that had befallen the race in 1914, it had been precipi- tated wholly by masculine agencies, and the responsi- bility for the greatest crime in the career of human- 262 THE GAME OF EMPIKES ity rested upon man alone. Eor countless ages the so-called stronger sex had dominated the world — to the world's undoing. A woman doctor of Copenhagen, Erau Estrid Hein, was widely quoted in January, 1915, to the following effect: "In my capacity as a woman, I must say that I always have had a sort of distrust of society as organized by men. This distrust has grown with the war and I feel that if the women of Europe had only had more to say in the governing of their countries this terrible slaughter of soldiers and civilians would have been avoided. We women may have our faults, yet it is our instinctive impulse to preserve our children from the cruelties and hor- rors of the battlefield. As a doctor, as a mother and as a woman I am beginning to put the value of indi- vidual life before that of this terrible campaign," The restraint and conservatism of these suggestive words add to their effectiveness and render them worthy of earnest consideration. Is there not good reason to admit that Frau Estrid Hein's distrust of society as organized by men is well-founded, and that to-day, more than ever heretofore, the failure of the male sex to make of a plastic world what civili- zation had striven vainly to produce emphasizes the necessity for the introduction, if possible, of a new and elevating influence into human affairs ? It does not require much imagination to hear the THE ONLY HOPE FOE PEACE 263 clamor of protest that is sure to be raised by anti- suffragists, and other reactionaries, when the above proposition is laid before them. The civil war that the militant suffragists of England recently inaugu- rated will be cited to prove that woman, as well as man, is a fighting animal. But the truth of the matter is simply this, that any intelligent animal can be taught to perform tricks for which nature has not designed it. An elephant playing cards with its trunk gives an exhibition of cleverness that is dis- tinctly startling, but it does not demonstrate the fit- ness of elephants in the mass to amuse themselves with bridge or poker. That women are qualified to wage war, or as a sex are disposed to encourage or condone it, is a contention that cannot be established. That they possess naturally more physical courage than men scientists have asserted, but that they are on the whole bitterly opposed to the human slaugh- ter that war demands is an imdeniable fact. In a former chapter it was shown that the war of wars was rendered inevitable by the survival in Europe of hereditary autocracy. Democracy is es- sentially antagonistic to war and it is fair to assume that war will become permanently obsolete only when the peoples of all countries possess the power to decide in all cases the issue of war or peace. It has become constantly more apparent that with the progress of democracy in the world the influence 264 THE GAME OF EMPIRES of women in public affairs has increased. The femi- nist movement is merely one feature of the slow but resistless drift of mankind toward universal democ- racy. That this drift will be amazingly accelerated by the sequel to the war of wars the history of the last few centuries abundantly proves. Autocracy, an atavistic survival, man's vermiform appendix, is being cut out of the body politic by the bloodiest surgical operation the race has ever been forced to undergo. The operation may be only partially suc- cessful at this period, but the "divine right" of kings to indulge at their pleasure in human butchery has been exercised — unless, as pessimists assert, man- kind is beyond all saving — for the last time. If at the conclusion of the war of wars democratic influ- ences fail to make another such world tragedy not easily precipitated, the lie will be given to every generalization that the records of man's past appear to establish. That democracy exclusively dominated by men, however, could put an end to war is open to ques- tion. Frau Estrid Hein's distrust of a society wholly masculine in its organization is more than justified by the fact that even the male Socialists of Europe rushed to war in 1914 with inconsistent fervor and without a protest against a mandate of autocracy that apparently aroused their patriotism while it chloro- formed their altruism. If, then, democracy is to put THE ONLY HOPE FOE PEACE 265 an end to war it can only achieve this result by and through the influence and assistance of women. That the immediate future promises to find, the growing power of women in the state sufficiently strong to make this present war of wars the last great con- flict that the nations are to wage is far from probable. The time has not yet come when the sex that is com- posed almost wholly of pacificists can do much to change the belligerent tendencies of the world's great powers. But in so far as women have as yet gained political prerogatives they have used them, on the whole, in behalf of the higher aspirations of the race, including the movements that make for inter- national peace. A curious and suggestive contrast was presented to the eyes of the world by the varied tragedies that afflicted Europe in the month of January, 1915. Vast armies were confronting each other, engaged day and night in the grim, savage work of human slaughter. But in Italy, to which neutral country had come the devastating and death-dealing horror of an appalling earthquake, the mobilized troops, awaiting the call to a foreign war, had been trans- formed suddenly from warriors into philanthropists, devoting their skill, discipline, and enthusiasm to the saving rather than the taking of human life. The dynamics of military efficiency were turned into channels of mercy instead of destruction and a great 266 THE GAME OF EMPIKES catastrophe for which only nature was responsible brought to view at least one European army that was exerting its power as a skilled organization not to increase the miseries of the race but, so far as was within its power, to minimize them. Side by side with the women of the Red Cross Society, the pro- fessional soldiers of Italy toiled and suffered to re- lieve the agonies that one of the most awful of modern seismic horrors had inflicted upon its vic- tims. Trained men and trained women striving together to alleviate the afflictions that befall the race ! There seemed to be an allegory in the picture thus pre- sented, a promise for the future, perhaps remote, that threw a ray of light into the gloom that had so long overhung a war-blackened world. It suggested the possibility that eventually there may come a uni- fication upon earth to the end that what are called the weaker and the stronger sex may combine their energies to reduce, by every method possible to man- kind, the aggregate of human suffering. To pre- vent the death and destruction that come from seis- mic convulsions is beyond the power of the race, but is it not possible that men and women working to- gether toward one much-to-be-desired end could ren- der the man-made curse of war forever obsolete ? There are practically only two experiments left that mankind has not yet tried in the effort to elimi- THE OXLY HOPE FOR PEACE 267 nate, or reduce to a minimum, the pernicious activi- ties of recurrent warfare. The one consists in the establishment of an armed international police force that should make unjustifiable wars impossible. The other lies in giving to one half the race, and that the peace-loving half, the political prerogatives that have hitherto been exercised by the male sex alone. It seems probable that the efficacy of an international police force will be tested before the last possible obstacle to the recurrence of internationl wars, namely, the political power of women, is called into play in behalf of peace. But the formation of an international supreme court possessing the power to enforce its decisions is a project confronted by great difficulties and there is room for doubt that, if its decrees were made and executed by men only, the final outcome could possibly be the elimination of international wars from the world's activities. That such an experiment is well worth trying no lover of peace will deny, but that it would be a thorough, or even a partial, success in its efforts to overcome the inherent belligerency of men is open to question. The one great hope of a blood-stained earth lies with that half of the race that has but recently begim to make its influence felt in the affairs that influence the political destinies of nations. Woman has a mission in the future grander even than the dreams that inspired the first emancipators of her sex. She 268 THE GAME OF EMPIRES has reason to look forward to the time when her power in the modem state will be equal to that of men and the opportunity will be given to her to use that power in the interest of universal peace. And unless peace, peimanent peace, shall eventually come to mankind it will remain forever foolishness for the race to prate of civilization and progress and the possibility of the millennium. We men speak affec- tionately of our plant as Mother Earth and from time immemorial we have stained her bosom with human blood. We, her sons, have comported ourselves throughout all the ages as brutes. May it not be that the time is at hand when Earth's daughters shall lead their brothers out of the jungle in which war prevails to the smiling gardens where a bleeding race shall find the blessings of peace and good will to men? CHAPTER XVII ISOLATION AND ITS PERILS CHAPTER XVII ISOLATION AND ITS PERILS The so-called progressive nations of the world are, and always have been, land-grabbers. A people that has no craving for territorial expansion has been looked upon, throughout the ages, with more or less contempt by its more aggressive competitors, who have been inspired by the conviction that in the ac- quisition of land, and ever more land, lies the high- way to a place among the so-called world powers, the great desideratum of every ambitious race. There is no longer a furthest West, nor East, a furthest North, a furthest South. Our little planet has been surveyed and measured, and upon the walls of the world's chancelleries hang maps upon which the most desirable places in the sun are marked in red ink. ]^o modern nation is deceived, as were the old Ro- mans, by the belief that Terminus, the god of the boundaries, plants his stones with a view to perma- nency. The great game for which earth is the table, and whose dice are human bones, is being played to-day with even more fervor than in former ages 271 272 THE GAME OF EMPIRES for the reason that geographical exploration has placed a final limit upon the size of the stakes. The time has gone by when a loser at the great interna- tional gambling table could seize from one side com- pensation for what he had parted with upon the other. The earth offers to mankind a given number of square miles of land and the militant powers of the world to-day are struggling with each other, with a detailed knowledge of the stakes involved not pos- sessed by their predecessors, for territorial prizes that grow more valuable with every succeeding gen- eration. For the land upon our little planet does not increase in extent, while the population of the globe is constantly in a state of growth. The great obstacle that lies in the pathway toward peace on earth, a peace that, as has been said, seems to be attainable only through the employment of an international police force or through the soothing in- fluence of woman upon public affairs, or through _ both combined, is to be found in this insatiable pas- sion for territorial aggrandizement upon the part of the ascendant peoples of the earth. During the past half century the amount of land-grabbing done by the leading powers of the world illustrates the diffi- culty that the pacificist finds, and must continue to find, in his endeavors to persuade the dominant na- tions of the earth that war should be abolished. Within that period France has added to her colonial ISOLATION AND ITS PERILS 273 possessions nearly 3,000,000 square miles, with a population of 60,000,000 people. England, during the same period, has acquired 3,200,000 square miles and 95,000,000 people. North of the neutral- ity line drawn by the English-Russian treaty of 1907 Russia has obtained vast territories in Asia. Within the last twenty years Japan has practically doubled her possessions. German expansion in a comparatively short period preceding the war of wars resulted in the acquisition of 1,100,000 square miles of land, with a population of 13,000,000 peo- ple. Even little Belgium put out her hand not long ago and seized 900,000 square miles, with 9,000,000 of population, in Africa. Now what have we peaceable, contented and un- ambitious Americans been doing in the way of land- grabbing during the last half century ? Can it be possible"" that we have inherited from our forefa- thers, who subdued and overran a continent, the same passion for territorial acquisition that we so loudly deprecate when it is manifested by the buc- caneering powers of the Old World? And if that passion is a heritage of ours, does it not "follow as the night the day" that we must eventually pay the price for its satisfaction that fate eventually de- mands of every nation whose colonial expansion awakens the jealousy of rival powers? Let us look for a moment at the startling figures that confront 274 THE GAME OF EMPIRES us when we investigate the territorial expansion in which we have indulged during the last two decades. During our great land-grabbing year of 1898 we took possession of the Hawaiian Islands, 6,449 square miles; of Porto Rico, 3,435 square miles; of Guam, 210 square miles; and of the Philippine Islands, 114,958 square miles. In the following year we added 77 square miles to our holdings by the acquisition of Samoa and in 1904 we made our great waterway a possibility by obtaining the Pan- ama Canal Zone, 436 square miles in extent. There are Americans who are inclined to protest to a suspi- cious and cynical world that our recent land-grab- bing was forced upon us by the malicious chances of war, that we reluctantly accepted obligations that we had no desire to assume, through motives of the pur- est and most altruistic kind ; and that, as we proved by our treatment of Cuba, the permanency of our expansion in any direction is always dependent upon the length of time it may take us to teach a tempo- rarily dependent people how to govern themselves. That the land-hungry nations of the world now at war with each other cherish doubt of our good intentions, refuse to believe that there is at least one great power in the world that is not inspired by greed for increased territory, is not to be wondered at. Their skepticism is a fact that this nation must accept as unalterable, despite the injustice it may do ISOLATION AND ITS PERILS 275 to us as a people, and in its acceptance we must real- ize and face the perils that confront us through the unwillingness of the other powers of the world to believe that the United States possesses a moral grandeur that they themselves lack, and that is some- thing new in the history of the human race. Let us as a nation be, if possible, a Dr. Jekyll, but let us not forget that the rest of the world looks upon us as a Mr. Hyde. "There is no thought of conquest," said Senator Lodge, of Massachusetts, to his fellow Senators early in the year 1915, "in the hearts of the American people. We wish for nothing but peace at home and abroad. Every reflecting man must favor general disarmament or a general reduction of armaments, but there is no such incitement to war possible as for a rich and prosperous nation, whether great or small, to disarm alone and remain unarmed in the midst of an armed world. We do not want war with any nation or any people, and the way to avoid war is not to invite it. Unarmed, unready, undefended, we offer a standing invitation to aggression and at- tack, and the idea, still popular or used for purposes of oratory by some people, that we can meet all dan- gers by springing to arms when the moment comes is a dream so wild that it would be grotesque if it were not tragic." There is no hysteria in the words quoted above. 276 THE GAME OF EMPIRES They are the calm, statesmanlike presentment of the most important issue now before the American peo- ple by a publicist who is equipped by intellect, ex- perience and first-hand information to voice effec- tively a warning that a blindly optimistic nation should heed. Senator Lodge is in accord with Presi- dent Wilson in the conviction that we Americans earnestly desire the continued maintenance of peace. ^Nevertheless the fact remains that the United States is to-day a great world power, in theory, without the means, if the need should arise, of giving prac- tical demonstration of its ability to maintain the international prominence that has been thrust upon us in recent years. Furthermore we are inclined to indulge as a nation in a tendency to exhibit a swag- gering attitude to a belligerent world the while we carry several irritating chips upon our shoulders. The Philippines, Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Canal Zone, acquired by the United States by purchase or by war, are among the earth's desirable places in the sun that might conceivably arouse the cupidity of acquisitive powers who have no real lik- ing for the American people, for our form of govern- ment or for the transcendentalism upon which we claim to base our foreign policy. And not one of our outlying possessions is adequately protected from offensive operations that, if they ever come, are sure to come suddenly. ISOLATION AND ITS PEKILS 277 The incontrovertible fact that the American peo- ple, as a whole, is antagonistic to war has practically nothing to do with the dire possibilities that our national future presents to the gaze of the student of history. "The forces which determine the actions of empires and great nations are deep hidden and not easily affected by words or even by feelings of hostility or friendship. They lie beyond the wishes or intentions of the individuals composing those na- tions. They may even be contrary to those wishes and those intentions." Thus wrote the late Profes- sor Cramb, and he went on to say: "Individual friendship or hate has a very fugitive and uncertain influence on war and peace; and the good or evil will, even of great numbers of private persons, has little effect on the ultimate motives that control the actions of states." The United States, conscientiously obeying the be- hests of the nation's founders, has avoided "entan- gling alliances." By following this eminently wise course, however, we have been forced to pay a high price for independence in the realm of international affairs. Among the great powers of the world the United States possesses not a single friend. Eng- land long boasted of her "splendid isolation," but when the war of wars overthrew the equilibrium of the world the powerful allies that have joined hands with her in recent years served to save her empire 278 THE GAME OF EMPIEES from dismemberment. Isolation for even the great- est of powers may be "splendid," but in this age of national interdependence it carries with it the peril of annihilation. Let us not blind our eyes to an unwelcome truth ! If a foreign war from any source should be forced upon the United States there is no power beyond our own borders to which we could turn for assistance or even for sympathy. Our general unpopularity as a nation was demonstrated at the time of our war with Spain. The success that came to our arms in that conflict added to the world-wide dislike felt for us as a people, the while it brought to us territorial ac- quisitions that vastly increase the danger that threat- ens us from foreign aggression. Among our national treasures we are supposed to possess certain "historic friendships" — with France, for example, or with Russia or Japan — but sentiment counts for nothing when the game of empires is being played and hu- man bones are rattling in the dice-box. Further- more our maintenance of strict neutrality since the outbreak of the war of wars has done nothing to de- crease our unpopularity in any direction. Whereso- ever our present sympathies may lie as a people will have no bearing upon the international complica- tions that seem to lie in wait for us in the future. There are two permanent obstacles that stand in the way of our efforts as a nation to put ourselves ISOLATION AND ITS PEKILS 279 in a position to confront the perils that may pres- ently menace us, the one theoretical, the other prac- tical. Many of our legislators cherish the belief that in increasing our armaments we would invite war, a proposition that can muster enough arguments in its support to make it seemingly plausible. But the most disastrous effect upon all endeavors to place the United States and our dependencies in a condi- tion of safety from aggression lies in the persistent tendency of Congress to adopt halfway measures. We provide our harbors with guns but not with the men needed to make them effective. Congress, in so far as national defense is concerned, is forever com- promising, economizing, rendering abortive the well- considered plans of military and naval experts. Even under the influence of a war scare, widespread and, under existing world conditions, well-founded, our legislators hesitate to take the only steps that can change our present condition of weakness and unpreparedness for war into a state of adequate de- fense. Under the pressure of a popular demand something will be done, of course, to render the posi- tion of this country somewhat more secure than it has been of late, but that our lawmakers will solve the problem of national defense in a broad and thor- oughly effective way is, unless all precedents are re- versed, not to be expected. The voice of the alarmist is never music to the 280 THE GAME OF EMPIKES ears of men wrapped up in their own personal af- fairs. They have heard the cry of "Wolf!" when there was no wolf so often that they have grown indifferent to warnings that have in them nothing novel. But to-day there has come a new note into the voices of those enlightened and foresighted Americans who are crying aloud to the nation to arouse itself to the perils of the future, a note re- sulting from the tragedy that is being enacted upon the European stage. Friendless among the nations of the world, the United States is at present without the means to defend her borders, her harbors, her coast lines or her dependencies if war should come, as it came to half the world last summer, suddenly and without the warnings that usually precede hos- tilities between nations. Is it not the duty of every American citizen to use all the influence he can bring to bear upon our legislators to the end that the measures now being devised to render our posi- tion as a nation less insecure in a warring world shall not be marred by the blighting effects of con- servatism, compromises and carelessness? Our peril is not imaginary — our defenses must be real! CHAPTER XVin THE STONE OF SISYPHUS CHAPTEE XVIII THE STONE OF SISYPHUS The greatest of all world conflicts, begun in the summer of 1914 and still at its height as the weary, heart-breaking months of the following winter dragged on toward what promised to be the bloodiest springtime the earth had known, had wiped the cobwebs out of the sky and in many different ways had clarified the thoughts of men. The most colos- sal struggle on record, it had proved itself to be also the most iconoclastic. Countless hopes, beliefs, theo- ries and aspirations that the optimistic had cherished and promulgated had been destroyed by what was not only the most stupendous but the most cruel of all the innumerable combats waged by men against men. Among the delusions in which the race had indulged that came to an end in the year of slaugh- ter 1915 was the unfounded idea that there was, or might be, such a thing as so-called "civilized war- fare." An American Indian, with the scalps of his enemies hanging from his belt, would have been shocked at certain details of the human butchery in 283 284 THE GAME OF EMPIRES which the enlightened peoples of Europe had been engaged for many months. Every rule by which men in recent times of peace had sought to minimize the horrors of future wars had been broken during the progress of a conflict that had sprung most ap- propriately from seed sown by an assassin. The dreadful suspicion, amounting almost to con- viction, had come to the minds of men that what we have been wont to call civilization is really non- existent, a chimera that fades away when the primi- tive passions of a self-deceived race defiantly assert themselves. A skulking savage plunging a tomahawk through the head of a woman pioneer in the wilds of America presents a picture of barbarity that chills the blood, but is it more horrifying than the sight of a highly-trained and presumably intellectual air- man dropping bombs upon non-combatants in unfor- tified towns ? In fact, as between the untutored In- dian and the educated aviator, the former could put up the better defense for his method of waging war. The savage has not enjoyed the alleged advantages that a technical school is supposed to furnish to its pupils. Behold a most amazing inconsistency! In the twentieth century a nation proclaims its fitness to dominate the world and to confer upon the race a higher civilization and culture than have yet pre- vailed upon earth. As proof of its qualifications for THE STONE OF SISYPHUS 285 this seemingly altruistic endeavor it strives to terrify its opponents by adding, through means provided by the advance of science, new and appalling horrors to war. The theory underlying this apparent contra- diction between motives and methods seems to be that a people possessing sufficient efficiency to multi- ply the savageries of war is necessarily equipped to confer upon mankind an increased number of the blessings of peace. But ours is, as a whole, a rather stubborn and con- servative world. Mankind at large seems disinclined to be terrorized into accepting a yoke that, though it might add to the general efficiency of the race, would destroy of necessity the ideals that underlie the indi- vidualistic attitude toward existence. The align- ment of the various powers taking part in the war of wars presented various inconsistencies and contra- dictions, but in the last analysis, as the great strug- gle developed, it was seen that the race had been called upon to choose, through the arbitrament of war, between two radically antagonistic points of view regarding the state itself and the attitude of the individual citizen thereto. The idea permeating the expression Deutschland ilher alles was merely an ap- plication to the world at large of a governmental theory and practice that minimizes the significance of the governed to exaggerate the importance of the government. Under the workings of this theory gov- 286 THE GAME OF EMPIRES ermnent becomes a Juggernaut beneath the wheels of which men, women and children joyfully extermi- nate themselves to the greater glory of a soulless ma- chine. Air, land and water vibrated with the explosions of ingenious weapons that had been devised to elimi- nate from a conquered world poetry, pity and per- sonality, to establish on a planet dominated by the first all-conquering race in history the reign of a dull, lifeless, unimaginative system that should blight, as it had blighted in Germany, the finest as- pirations of all who rendered it obedience. And the war that was fought to put this unbearable collar upon the neck of the race at large was waged with a pitiless indifference to the rules of what had once been somewhat absurdly called civilized warfare that helped to defeat the very object for which its cruel wantonness had been brought into activity. For the neutral nations of the earth felt instinctively that, as a man is known by the company he keeps, so, in some degree, can a nation's cause be judged by the weapons it uses and the victims it slays. The nation that had dreamed and planned and fought to the end that it might put a girdle of effi- ciency and culture around the world made no secret of its belief that there is in reality no such thing as civilized warfare. Both by word and deed it demon- strated its conviction that war in the twentieth cen- THE STONE OF SISYPHUS 287 tury differs from war in former times not in being less cruel but in displaying ingenious and novel ways for making cruelty a more effective ally than of old to military endeavor. Science had been called into play to utilize terror as a weapon whose re- sources former ages, black as they are with the crimes of soldiery, had not employed in their entirety. "The German War Book," the manual of the usages of war on land issued by the General Staff of the German Army, is an official and authoritative publication that is unpleasantly enlightening in con- nection with the above assertions. "International law," says this appalling war-manual, "is in no way opposed to the exploitation of crimes of third parties, assassination, incendiarism, robbery, and the like, to the prejudice of the enemy. The ugly and immoral aspect of such methods cannot affect the recognition of their lawfulness." "Should peaceful inhabitants of an invaded country be exposed to the fire of their own troops ?" "Yes," is the uncompromising an- swer. "It may be indispensable, but its main justi- fication is that it is 'successful.' " "Should women and children and the old and feeble be allowed to depart before a bombardment begins ?" is a question put by the manual, and its compilers make answer as follows: "On the contrary their presence is greatly to be desired. It makes the bombardment all the more effective." 288 THE GAME OE EMPIRES It is difficult for Americans, despite the hideous details that have been made public regarding the horrors of the war now being waged in Europe, to grasp the full significance of the theory and practice that have combined to make of German Militarism what it has shown itself to be. The plea that the more terrifying a war is rendered the shorter will be its duration is not sufficiently powerful to impress a nation that had cherished the conviction, now shown to be baseless, that the recent efforts of peace con- ferences and Hague tribunals to minimize the hor- rors of warfare had been of some value. The reve- lation has been made to a shocked and disappointed world that when the so-called most civilized powers on earth to-day make their appeal to the sword the progress that the race had seemingly won of late toward higher planes of thought and action disap- pears, and mankind indulges in an exhibition of bar- barity that makes the warfare of the past in com- parison approximately humane. Armageddon has thrust the millennium into cold storage for an indefinite period. The efforts of man- kind to minimize the evils that spring from poverty, disease and other afflictions that beset a world at peace have been rendered of secondary importance by the war of wars. The splendid struggles that are being waged against tuberculosis, against white slav- ery, against child labor, have been thrown out of THE STOITE OF SISYPHUS 289 their rightful perspective of late through the sudden intrusion into the modern world of the ancient curse of war in a guise more horrifying and in scope more all-embracing than it has ever displayed since the first cave-men hacked at each other with stone-axes. It has come upon our modern world with new and appallingly destructive weapons, and brazenly, au- daciously it asserts that idealism is degeneracy and that might makes right. It has its priests, its preach- ers and its song-makers as well as its makers of war- manuals. The only sensitiveness to a feeling of shame that it displays lies in its denial that it is a curse and its insistence that, when thoroughly appre- ciated in all its effects, it is the greatest blessing vouchsafed to man. And an amazed and disheart- ened world must turn from various promising altru- istic activities to confront this challenge from civili- zation's most ancient and most persistent enemy, the expression upon the countenance of humanity resem- bling that which comes to the face of Sisyphus when, after great but futile labor, he finds the stone he had pushed to the top of the hill rolling unchecked again to the bottom. CHAPTER XIX THE RELIGION OF STEADFASTNESS CHAPTER XIX THE EELIGION OF STEADFASTNESS In his immortal epic, the "Divine Comedy/' Dante's most withering scorn is expressed for those lost souls who during their earthly existence were neither good nor bad. As Virgil guides his brother poet through the abode of the damned their ears are shocked by groans, outcries and shrieks of despair that come not from Hell but from a place of suffer- ing adjacent thereto. "Master," exclaims Dante to his guide, "what do I hear, and what is this crowd which seems so crushed by sorrow ?" To this Virgil makes answer: "This is the miserable fate of the sad souls of all those who have lived without blame and without praise. They are mingled with that dread chorus of angels who were neither faithful to God, nor rebellious, but who existed for themselves only. They have been banished from Heaven, be- cause they spoiled its beauty, and the depths of Hell would not receive them because the damned would gain some glory by their presence." In the brilliant preface to his novel, "The Fear 293 294 THE GAME OF EMPIEES of Living," Henri Bordeaux, the noted French writer, says: "The fear of living means precisely this — to deserve neither blame nor praise. It is the constant all-prevailing desire for peace. It is the flight from responsibilities, struggles, risks and efforts. It is the careful avoidance of danger, fatigue, exaltation, passion, enthusiasm, sacrifice, every violent action, everything that disturbs and upsets. It is the re- fusal of life's claims upon our hearts, our sweat and our blood. In short, it is the pretense of living, while limiting life, while setting bounds to our des- tinies. It is that passive selfishness which would rather retrench its appetite than seek the food which it requires; the selfishness which is meanly content with a colorless, dull life, provided it is sure of meeting with no shocks, no difiiculties, no obstacles, like the traveler who will only journey along plains and on rubber tires." This fear of living, which, as Dante shows us, is not wholly a modem manifestation of cowardice, afflicts at times not merely individuals but entire na- tions. Into that suburb of Hell where dwell in tor- ment the souls of the colorless and insignificant, peo- ples and races have been thrust for their failure, when earthly opportunity was theirs, to do and dare. By succumbing to the fear of living a nation may be forced to undergo a punishment that is infinitely worse than total amiihilation. To serve neither God THE EELIGIOK OF STEADFASTNESS 295 nor the Devil is to acquire the contempt of both saints and sinners, to occupy a position more unde- sirable than any other in highest Heaven or lowest Hell. Are the people of the United States, at the most exacting crisis in the world's history, under tempta- tion to surrender to that fear of living that arouses the contempt of both the powers of light and the powers of darkness? Our ancestors conquered a continent. Have we, the descendanta of men who dared to live strenuously and to die bravely, de- generated into a resemblance to that "dread chorus of angels who were neither faithful to God, nor re- bellious" ? Have we become a nation of shirkers, of compromisers, of opportunists, afraid to look the facts and obligations of life in the face, to defend with our heart's blood, if need be, what our fore- fathers won at a mighty sacrifice ? These are not impertinent nor untimely questions. Under the conditions that prevail upon earth to-day, conditions that cannot be radically changed for many years to come, each nation is forced to estimate the strength of its own soul, to question that soul regard- ing its fitness to meet the exigencies of the dark days that must of necessity follow the dark days now upon us. The material side of the problem that at present confronts every organized state in the world is of vast importance but it sinks into insignificance 296 THE GAME OF EMPIEES compared with the psychological. For out of this chaotic welter of international conflict must come a strange, new planet upon which only that people shall have high place whose collective soul has heen strong and unterrified in the days of strife and adversity. Are we Americans really only a nation of shop- keepers, worshiping exclusively the courtesan to whom Tolstoi gave the name of Commerce, or do we as a people possess a soul that can rise, when called upon hy the insistent voice of a destiny apparently manifest, to the complete fulfillment of our duty hoth to God and man ? The Religion of Valor we de- nounce and repudiate. The Religion of Avoidance, if we as a nation adopt it, would cast us into that purgatory where mourn forever the "sad souls of all those who have lived without praise and without blame." But there is a Religion of Steadfastness to which we Americans should pay the homage of devotion and, if need be, self-sacrifice. Its creed affirms, or better, reaffirms, the principles, beliefs and ideals whose influences have combined to make the history of our nation a record of which we may well be proud. It calls upon us at all times for a firmness that refuses to sacrifice honor for expedi- ency, for a foresightedness that shall provide the strength necessary for our salvation in the hour of peril, for an unswerving loyalty to the conviction that Right, however praiseworthy it may be in the ab- THE RELIGION" OF STEADFASTNESS 297 stract, is of little potency in this still uncivilized world of ours unless it is backed by Migbt. The Religion of Steadfastness regards the American flag as a symbol sufficiently sacred to be always and every- where defended from insult. There is no hysteria, sentimentality, mock-heroism, about this cult to which we Americans should vow allegiance. It is founded upon elevating precedents, upon common sense, upon a permanent and lofty appeal to the soul of a people not as yet worthy of the contempt that Dante felt for those wretched deserters who were the de- spised of Hell as they had been of Earth. Swashbucklers ? Fire-eaters ? Alarmists ? Do we Americans who cherish the memory of our nation's past, who take pride in innumerable features of its present, and who look to see it fulfill the obligations of its future deserve the harsh names that are hurled at us by those of our fellow countrymen who imagine that they see in the powder flashes of Armageddon the herald gleams of the millennium? There are hun- dreds of thousands of men on the battlefronts of Europe to-day who hate war, who realize and con- demn its barbarity, its lack of logic, its fundamental inconsistency with the highest ideals of civilization, but who are fighting bravely because "a condition, not a theory" confronted them at a crisis when pacificism would have been supreme cowardice. It is possible for a man to be a pacificist at heart 298 THE GAME OF EMPIEES but mentally and morally true to the obligations that beset him in a world in which, unfortunately, war has not as yet become obsolete. It comes down to this, that the Militarists of the race are still suf- ficiently powerful to bring about crises during which countless lovers of peace are forced to engage in active warfare. That such a condition of affairs is unreasonable and deplorable the war of wars has demonstrated. Realizing this, the neutrals on earth to-day are endeavoring to hit upon some project that shall render war in the future a calamity that can be localized or even wholly prevented. But if they fail — and there seems to be no present prospect that their endeavors in behalf of world-wide peace can be in the near future even approximately successful — what duty, immediate and pressing, is thrust upon the people of the United States, a people neither physically nor morally degenerate and still loyal at heart to ideals that in the past have demanded of them the sacrifices that war makes necessary ? Our duty is so plainly indicated by our present military and naval weakness and by the unpleasant possibilities that threaten us in the future that those Americans who deny its existence grow less influen- tial numerically, and less noisy in their protests against national defensive measures, as time goes on. We are not, we have never been, a nation addicted to impractical dreams or futile rainbow chasing. THE EELIGION OF STEADFASTNESS 299 The genius of our people prefers, and rightfully so, to manifest itself through the media provided by peace rather than by war. But despite this praise- worthy predilection, it is not conceivable that a na- tion that won its independence by force of arms, that cut from its bosom the cancer of slavery by four years of bloody strife, that waged war to free Cuba from an obsolete despotism has become, by the stroke of anybody's pen, a people from whom the damned would gain some glory if Hell consented to receive them. Before the war of wars broke out in Europe with appalling suddenness in August, 1914, England had been repeatedly warned by her statesmen, military leaders, authors and poets that a rival nation was plotting and planning for the overthrow of the British Empire. These warnings fell upon ears stubbornly deaf to the voice of either the military expert or the inspired prophet. The tail of the British lion had been twisted so frequently in the past that that phleg- matic creature had grown indifferent to external an- noyances and menaces. Furthermore, had not Eng- land, despite many blunders and setbacks, enjoyed practically for centuries her own way on earth? That a crisis was imminent that should imperil not only her colonial possessions but the little island home from which she had so long ruled a large part of the globe seemed absurd and incredible to the average 300 THE GAME OF EMPIRES Englishman. His personal affairs were to him last July the most important factors in the universe. Where is he to-day and what is he doing ? If he has not laid down his life in battle, he is drilling to go to the front or, perhaps, fighting in a trench and wonder- ing vaguely if nature really cursed him with a lack of imagination. He has sho^^^l himself to be pos- sessed of heroic qualities but he is well aware now that he is not endowed mentally with anything re- sembling clairvoyant powers. What has happened of late to our English cousins is worthy of earnest consideration by us Americans, many of whom inherit strains of blood that carry with them a tendency toward both the faults and the virtues that the Britisher displays. We are optimis- tic, courageous and somewhat overbearing as a na- tion. We have a tendency to trust more to our good luck if war comes to us than to our preparedness for the ordeal. We are skeptical regarding, or indiffer- ent to, the evident hostility of other nations. Having faith, as have the English, in what appears to be manifest destiny, we underestimate the possibilities that might arise to render the fulfillment of that des- tiny impossible. That we possess, in abundance, as do the English, the raw material that can be molded into effective fighting power there can be no question. But it takes much more time at present than formerly to change the raw material of youth and brawn and THE EELIGION OF STEADFASTNESS 301 pluck into the finished product of a trained and efii- cacious soldiery. As we have so recently seen, mod- ern wars may come like lightning out of a clear sky. Modern armies worthy of the name can only be made while we wait — and woe to us if we should ever be compelled to wait too long ! It is not the purpose of this book to mince words nor to give heed in advance to the possible criticisms to which it may be subjected. It has been written by a pacificist, if a pacificist is one who cherishes a detestation for war and longs for its complete and permanent abolition. If, on the other hand, a pa- cificist is one who believes that the time is at hand when the interests of universal peace could be ad- vanced by the turning of all American swords into pruning-hooks, or some equally useful tool, the writer is not entitled to the name. On the contrary, indeed, he believes that the greatest obstacle to the establish- ment in the near future of a condition of world-wide peace would be the continued inadequacy of the land and sea defenses of the United States. The war of wars has been most comprehensive in its iconoclasm and one of the images that it has smashed represented the untenable belief that an inoffensive and peaceable country is, because of its praiseworthy virtues, neces- sarily free from all danger of invasion. We Ameri- cans may as a nation put on the whole armor of righteousness but it will avail us nothing if, with our 302 THE GAME OF EMPIRES armor, offensive and defensive weapons are not in- cluded. Let us as a people, friendless in a world of jealous and warlike powers, take to ourselves the words of the English poet Henley as a sacred hymn adapted to the use of a nation that has rejected the Religions both of Valor and Avoidance and finds its inspiration in the Religion of Steadfastness. "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the horror of the shade. And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul." r>K H 52-79: * ^mm^ o \^ .. °^ "» fe-^^^* '5^^ .i,* ^^-^ -^v^, -v>ja\h^ <^ ■:^??'! ' o ?^^: ■"- '" ;"^^fi^-. 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