Class _J2_ f) i£ ' v L Book._ !_tr_ 20- Gop}Tight)i^_ COKfRSGHT DEPOSIT. THROUGH WAR TO PEACE ■y^^dp^ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONIO THROUGH WAR TO PEACE A Study of the Great War as an Incident in the Evolution of Society BY ALBERT G. KELLER PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY IN YALE UNIVERSITY AUTHOR OF "SOCIETAL EVOLUTION" Revised Edition il3eto gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 All rights reserved :P Copyright, 1918 and 1921, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY Printed from type. Published March, 1918. Revised Edition Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1931. MAR 23 1921 g)C!.A611380 PREFACE (to the second edition) The main purpose of this little book, as originally written, is stated in the Introduc- tion. It was a war-book and would not have appeared but for the war. It attempts, how- ever, to view that tremendous event in its evolu- tionary setting; and I have known a number of beginners in the study of societal evolution who have got their bearings in that subject more readily through this book as an approach. Most young men are familiar with the outstanding facts concerning the late conflict, and pass with less difficulty from the specific case to the general. I wish to use this book, and am therefore unwill- ing to have it drop out of print. The original occasion for writing has passed, and the occasional character of this essay should be removed, if it is to be used in classes for some years to come. That could be most thoroughly done, no doubt, by re-writing, in the past tense and in the mood of the historian. But I am un- willing to sacrifice whatever vividness the treat- ment may have, by reason of having been struck vi PREFACE off hastily and with intensity of feeling, during very dark days. I have therefore contented my- self with removing errors, simplifying certain passages, cutting out others which were well enough when hostility ran higher, and inter- polating one chapter at the beginning. We have come through war and victory to peace. The peace is defective enough as yet; but there can be no great storm without pro- tracted agitation of the upheaved waters. One who surveys these national and international matters from the point of view for which this book contends, looks for eventual and better ad- justments as confidently as, in the darker days, he expected the eventual vindication of civiliza- tion. A. G. K. New Haven. January 6, 1921. INTRODUCTION There is a growing sentiment in this country that what Germany has come to stand for is utterly irreconcilable with all those acquisitions of human society — freedom, democracy, hu- manity, Christianity — which we most prize; that it represents a grave menace to them all. This sentiment, with its attendant foreboding, I believe to be substantially correct, so that it will bear examination in the light of reason and science. I think it can be shown that the Ger- man code of international behavior constitutes a direct and grave challenge to the essentials of civilization; that it is a reversion toward an earlier and cruder phase of societal development; and that it must be extirpated if civilization is to go forward on its course. If reason is to be found back of this popular presentiment, that fact will confer a certain solid- ity and surety upon what we might otherwise, in the face of specious argument or unpleasant consequences, cleave to less tenaciously. It will lead to the strengthening of hearts. But strong hearts are what we require in these times; for vii viii INTRODUCTION the world is tiring under the burden of its loss and misery, and even the sturdiest has need of holding his convictions fast. There is also an indeterminate number who are less firm in the faith, and who are likely to falter unless they are fortified by an abiding belief that this challenge to civilization must and can be met and repelled, if we faint not. They need to be shown that re- lentlessness in the exaction of " restitution, repa- ration, and guarantees '' is not an expression of rage and revengefuluess, but rather of the high- est form of humanity — of interest in the wel- fare of all men, to be secured, in this case, by relieving the race of the German peril. It is " Through War to Peace," and not otherwise. A faith has never been weakened by the demon- stration that it had reason behind it. Some of us are further convinced that this peril is certain to be eliminated, now or later, by the operation of the elemental forces which have made civilization what it is. Here is a cause that cannot fail. But we want it to triumph now rather than later. For it is at the cost of much human agony that the operation of these ele- mental forces is hindered and retarded, through a failure to understand and work with them; and their action may be hastened, with the result INTRODUCTION ix of sparing human suffering, if we seek to under- stand and fall in with their massive stress and do not, for the sate of petty sentiment, throw ourselves, as chosen victims, across their path. This issue is going to be settled aright despite human foolishness — despite even an easy-going and irrelevant " magnanimity " ; and if we can see that now, and not try to stop the process short of a definitive decision, we shall save ourselves and those that come after us an infinity of suffer- ing. A rational justification for such convictions appears, I think, in the following pages. Events even so startling as those of the present fall into line as episodes of society's development, if the course of that development is seen in perspective — in the light, that is, of a general survey of societal evolution, made with no special reference to any one of its episodes as compared with the rest. But it is impossible to present this war in such a perspective without devoting some pages to an indication of the line of approach here adopted, and without using a minimum of terminology. This clearing of the ground will doubtless slow up the pace of presentation ap- preciably, but it has to be done if the conclusions in the last few chapters — to which the reader X INTRODUCTION who is impatient of the approach may refer — are to carry more weight than they would as mere expressions of personal opinion. Whatever enlightenment this essay has to offer is due to the fact that societies are here viewed as wholes and not in terms of their ultimate compo- nents, namely, individuals. Much is said of the dominance in societal evolution of the automatic, spontaneous, and impersonal, as against the individual and purposeful. It is in part for the sake of emphasising this point of approach that I use the adjective " societal," meaning " of society," instead of " social," which has no pre- cise meaning. It is my belief that the great mass of individuals pursue their petty interests as they see them, close at hand, in virtual unconscious- ness of the wide interests of the society, while the society moves ponderously on, under laws of its own, through a succession of phases which the individual has to accept, much as he accepts climate or rainfall, as conditions of life. The occasional endowed individual identifies the im- personal forces in the field and seems to control them, much as does the engineer, by moving things into or out of their way ; but the vast bulk of mankind live on unconscious of their very existence, or vaguely sensing it. INTRODUCTION xi There is a confused view of society that is the outcome of preoccupation with the individual, his psychology and his " choices ■ ' ; then there is another, which seems to some of us to offer superior clarity, that takes account of the indi- vidual as the ultimate component of society and then sets him aside. The latter view is the one taken here. It is not so obvious as the other and demands emphasis; but any one who has caught it once will not be much disturbed by the absence of fine balancings and whittlings in the pages that are to follow. Rightly or wrongly, I find myself in no great doubt or anxiety as to the ultimate outcome of this international conflict. My conclusions, as worked out for my own satisfaction, are some- thing of a comfort to me; and I hope they may be of use to others, in particular to those who, just because they are enviably able to lend the strength of their arms to the cause of civilization and human freedom, have the less leisure to re- flect over the wider aspects of the conflict. A. G. K. New Haven, December 27, 1917. CONTENTS CHAPTER »A0« Preface (to the Second Edition) .... v Introduction vii I. After the Crisis 1 II. The Impersonal Character of the Issue 13 III. Unforeseen Consequences to Society 19 IV. Automatic Adjustments 27 V. A People's War 39 VI. Folkways and Societal Codes of Con- duct 47 VII. Conflict an Essential to Selection; Peaceful Competition 58 VIII. Public Opinion and the National Code 70 IX. The International Peace-Group . . 86 X. The International Code .... 96 XI. The German Code 112 XII. The Challenge to the International Code 122 xiii xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XIII. The Formation of a World-Opinion . 131 XIV. Selection by War 142 XV. German Fetish- Worship 153 XVI. The One Way to Upset the Fetish . 163 XVII. On Faltering at the Finish . . . 175 XVIII. On Intelligent Adjustment to the In- evitable 188 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE I. AFTER THE CRISIS The original chapters of this little book — which follow, in practically unaltered form, the present chapter — were printed in the spring of 1918. Their argument calls for the attainment of that military victory which sometimes seemed in those days nearly as remote as it was indis- pensable, but which has now slipped two years back into history. We are now on the farther side of the supreme crisis. If we have thus pressed on through war to peace, we should be glad that we have so credit- ably covered that much of the crisis-period, and should not be too much depressed because the peace we have, though in some of its aspects it " passeth understanding," is not yet the perfect one. If foresight were ever the equal of after- thought, we might have waged a flawless war and might now be basking in an immaculate serenity. But, as is indicated here and there in what fol- lows, this is not the way things human go. As 2 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE they go, we are getting on normally enough, but with plenty of chance yet of falling into trouble if we relax our vigilance. So far, so good; but simply by winning the war, though that exploit was the indispensable next step in rendering the world a decent place to live in, we have not pushed all the way through to blessedness. The world's fever may be broken, but the patient is as yet no more than convalescent. These facts lead to the reflection that the crisis is not yet over. Tlie truth is that a crisis in the evolution of civilization can never be located at a point of time or identified with any single event. It is too big for that. It covers a period, rather, and the chain of events that runs through a period. A crisis is like a hill; we are in it, or on it, from the time we begin to mount until we are again upon the level. It is plain that we have passed the pinnacle of the crisis-hill up which we have been struggling; but it is naive to expect things to get back yet awhile to what we are wont to call the normal. Every barom- eter that we have registers us as still far from the level from which, years ago, we started. In short, the crisis-period is still on. Early in 1918 there was not much temptation to look beyond the supreme necessity of victory ; and the AFTER THE CRISIS S following chapters may seem, for that reason, to be out of date. Nothing is out of date which records a phase of the evolution of society and of civilization ; for the episodes of that evolution repeat themselves in their essentials, and it is well, both in theory and in practice, to be acquainted wdth their characteristics. We shall assume, in this chapter, that the supreme crisis is past, and shall devote brief attention to some of the major sequels of the war, which form the^ part of the crisis still to be traversed. One of the outstanding facts that confront us is that the world is much poorer than it was. Many products of human toil — the metals men have dug out of the earth, the chemical prepara- tions — have been scattered in useless fragments over large areas of Europe, dissipated by explo- sion into the air, or sunk in the sea. Wealth has been destroyed in destroying wealth, with the con- sequence of a doubled and re-doubled loss. In some districts the very soil has been annihilated. Suppose the world had now not only the wealth destroyed by war, but also the wealth that was used up in doing that destroying; would it not be an incomparably richer world? Suppose the energy diverted into the preparation of war- materials had been put into the production of 4 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE the necessities of life ; would living not be easier? The high cost of living is due, doubtless, to many contributing factors, but the wholesale destruc- tion of wealth is certainly one of the most sig- nificant of them. And consider the loss undergone by the world in superior human material. Final official sta- tistics of the French Ministry fix the total num- ber of P^rench soldiers killed during the Great War at considerably over a million and a third. If these soldiers, and the other millions belong- ing to other nationalities, had been mere riff-raff, the race might have profited by their loss; but, as every one knows, they were not. Consider, in addition, the numbers that have perished other- wise than by being slain in war. Mere numbers are nothing; but these losses have involved qual- ity as well as quantity. The world is poorer in superior human beings, not only by reason of the dead individuals, but also because of the stop- page of many a superior strain of heredity. In the countries which have suffered, good men as well as good goods are hard to get. To regain the lost wealth there is need of labor and services of high quality. But production is not so readily to be reestablished. It is plain that not enough work is being done. This is due AFTER THE CRISIS 5 partially to a reaction from the mood of self- sacrifice in the interests of the whole which was one of the brightest phenomena of the war-period. Labor has changed its point of view somewhat. During the war the laborers were told that all depended upon them; they were flattered and cajoled, and wages rose to an incredible figure. They gained a conception of their importance in the world, and wish now to be handled in a man- ner corresponding. They became conscious of their power, and propose to use it. No one can blame them if they do so with some exhilaration, or even overdo the matter in the swelling con- sciousness of power. Capital certainly did the same when it came to realize its strength. These oscillations always have to be endured or con- trolled, as may be, until they settle toward equilibrium. A consequence of the war that is more dis- quieting is the extravagance that has accom- panied the increase of labors winnings. The standard of living has risen immensely for many classes of laborers, and as usual when it has been enabled to rise swiftly and unexpectedly, there has been a lack of balance and sense in its mani- festations. If, now, conditions change so as to deprive the extravagant of the means of con- 6 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tinuing their extravagancies, it will be an excep- tion to all precedents if they acquiesce without resistance in returning toward the former stand- ard of living. Such a change of conditions will stimulate, rather, a discontent likely to find its expression in the support of some program for modifying tlie social order in the direction of socialism or worse. A further change of ideas, which amounts to another alteration in the standard of living, is the unwillingness of the ex-soldier to return to the farm. He was content there when he knew practically that life alone; but now there is a repellent flatness and dullness about it, and he stops in the city. Thus is production further handicapped ; thus is the disproportion further increased between moutlis and food. And the less successful the ex-soldier is in locating him- self again in the industrial organization, the surer he is to call for money-rewards for services rendered originally under liigher motive. When waters are troubled there always promptly appears a representation of those un- savory characters who sense the special opportu- nities for fishing. And no government, however strong and honest, has ever succeeded in holding the enemy off with one hand so as to have the AFTER THE CRISIS 7 other free for the throttling of treachery within the country. Profiteering is sure to occur in war-times, and to last over into the unsettled periods that follow. Powers have been shifted and concentrated for the attainment of victory, and it is not so simple a matter to distribute them again to the stations where they belong in times of peace. Confusion is inevitable, no mat- ter how highminded the intentions of those who govern. And the period of confusion is the op- portunity of the thief of all descriptions, from the pickpocket to the heavy villain whose takings are at the expense of all of us. Here is a series of maladjustments consequent largely upon the War. But even if all the se- quels of the conflict were similarly uncomfort- able and expensive, the main decision would yet have been worth the cost. These matters will settle themselves at length and i)robably peace- ably — if not peaceabh^, then they would have had to be settled by war in any case, and the de- struction of Prussianism remains no less a gain for the world. But not all of the aspects of the continuing crisis-period are discouraging. We have not only escaped a great peril, a fact which we should never allow ourselves to forget, but we stand to win much that we are now in a posi- 8 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tion, never before occupied by the world, to reach out for. I do not need to catalogue the contributions of this war to the arts of peace. Under the tre- mendous stress of the conflict inventions and dis- coveries have been forced into being long before they would have emerged under ordinary condi- tions. Consider, as one outstanding example, the progress of aviation. Necessity raised to a high power has been fecund in otispiiug. Again, it seems unquestionable that, despite certain irritating results, the participants in the conflict, in this country, at least — and that does not mean the front-line fighters alone — have gained much from their experience and devotion. Physical drill and the identification and treat- ment of physical defects have done much for many. Enforced attention to hygiene in its vari- ous forms has left a product of wholesome habi- tudes; not all have relapsed when the coercion has been removed. Thrift has been learned even by those who have temporarily forgotten the les- son; and the reports of savings-institutions dis- close a condition that offsets somewhat the men- ace of extravagance. The present is not much to judge by, for it is, clearly enough, a period of dislocation and readjustment — of " reconstruc- AFTER THE CRISIS 9 tion " as the eupliemist asserts and as the discreet hope. Those who come after, and are not dis- traught by the confusion, the heat and dust, of this period, will judge as to this. No one is very well satisfied at a time like this, and opinions may differ widely as to the promise of weal or the prospect of woe in such matters as have been set down above. There is no point in prolonging illustration. But there is yet to be noted the central, most outstanding, and most significant product of the crisis-period. This is the League or Society of Nations. A League to Enforce Peace had been suggested when the fol- lowing chai)ters were written; and since that time ideas of such an adjustment have taken more and more definite form, and have arrived, at length, at the stage of formulation, discussion, general acceptance, and incipient application. The argument of this book indicates some such adjustment to the altered conditions of the life of human society, as a necessity for the present and future well-being of the race. And there is as little doubt that the international peace-group will attain to the formulation of its constitution and to its regulative organization as there was that the international code would receive vindica- tion as against the challenge of the German code. 10 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE This is not because certain individuals have been " idealistic," or have produced a perfect or faulty set of specifications, or, whatever their motives, have sought to withstand the first attempts to formulate and organize. Society must, as a con- dition of its very self-preservation, advance to a more comprehensive organization; and that necessity is unconsciously or consciously sensed by the masses of mankind. They feel that some- thing such is imperative to the realization of the interests that press upon them. They are un- willing not to tiy to make an adjustment in the indicated direction. No covenant and league de- signed to avoid future war and to promote peace and amity can be, at this time, a mere paper constitution, corresponding to nothing actual; for the current of public opinion has set in to- ward these desirables, and they must needs ap- pear and be tested out. That any pioneer variation in this direction must be found faulty and need correction is to be expected; and no sensible man has ever thought otherwise. The Constitution of the United States was considerably amended, even in the early days. The only candid objection to any or all variations lies in hopeless conservatism or in timorousness before an issue — qualities which AFTER THE CRISIS 11 have always opposed, but never permanently thwarted, new and more expedient adjustments. Even a hermit nation is eventually, and despite itself, drawn from its isolation into a fuller life. With the several types of uneandid opposition, either to the new in general, or to the Society of Nations in particular, I need not concern myself ; and I am glad to escape the need of rehearsing the sorry tale. The erection of an international organization is indicated as clearly as was once the organiza- tion, on the smaller scale, of the nation, or of any federation of states such as the British Empire or the United States. It is not a question of stopping the current, or of seriously diverting it ; it is one, rather, of forecasting its course and adjusting to it. With most of the provisions for a League, as struck off by representatives of the Allies, there is no serious quarrel on the part of any intelligent and candid man ; they are quite as good, to start with, as have ])een the provisions of many an historic Charta to whose formulators we now assign, not by reason of their infallibility as regards detail, but because of their grasp of broad essentials, a mythical preternatural sagac- ity. It is only because our thinking is preoccu- pied with visions of revealed perfection, or tradi- 12 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tions of such, that we fail to realize the obvious fact that nothing that has life in it can remain unchanged in a changing world. And to refuse, because of personal or partisan aversions, to con- sider movements of such moment on their merits is like declining to get out of the way of an avalanche because one has been warned by an un- loved voice. Although the rest of this book contemplates the crisis-period only up to the defeat of Germany, yet such sequels to the war as I have presented, by the selection of a few out of many, likewise belong to that period, and must be reckoned in as members of the evolutionaiy series. And it is to be noted, by way of linking this chapter to the following ones, that all these matters belong to the category of unforeseen consequences of the gathering and breaking conflict. All are normal and could have been predicted if we had known enough. We cannot aspire to offhand omnisci- ence, but there is notliing to prevent us from learning what we can from past stretches of evolution and forecasting as best we may what to expect in the future. II. THE IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE To all of us most of the time, and to most of us all of the time, the course of this war has been a succession of particular events and of the do- ings of particular persons. The head-lines are scanned to see whether the battle-lines have changed, whether this or that wavering neutral has thrown its lot into the struggle, whether the prospects of the Loan have improved, and so on. Even more typical of our attitude is the interest in persons. What has been said overnight by the President, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, the Ger- man Chancellor, Trotzty, Colonel Roosevelt? Has Edison discovered anything? Has Hoover any new project? Are there any more revela- tions from the Department of State concerning German " diplomacy "? Or — a matter of still more intimate personal interest — is the acquaintance, friend, brother, or sou, about to be called? Is the reader of the day's news himself to be drafted? We cannot help being interested in these im- 13 14 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE mediate things. That in the way we live — amidst the definite and immediate; and then, too, we think with less strain if we think in terms of persons. In fact, the race has always personal- ized the less tangible and more abstract things, for by such means it has been possible to tie up floating and evasive conceptions so that they can be found again and dealt with. The vast im- personalities that control our destiny — Nature, Chance, God — are rendered into terms that men are more used to handle. It is as if one should meet some difficult pi'()])()sition, full of subtleties of thought, in a ])artially known foreign lan- guage; he will feel more secure if he gets it over into the mother-tongue before he tries to do much with it. The de-personalization of what has been long personalized has demanded a tedious pro- cess of mental discijiline and development. " It is diflicult,'' writes Darwin, " to avoid personify- ing the word Nature " ; and he warns against the superficial interpretation that is commonly put upon the term by the reader — he himself is emj)loying it, for brevity's sake, to cover " the aggregate action and product of many natural laws." But absorption with the immediate and per- sonal, though natural enough, does not make for THE CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 15 comprehensiveness of view. It prevents us from seeing the woods for the trees. To see the woods, it is necessary to secure distance and detach- ment. Yet a view of the woods is sometimes highly desirable, especially if one is confused by the number and apparently unmeaning location of the trees. To see the forest it is necessary to get outside of it, whether that be done by some- how ascending above it, or by having recourse to the mind's eye and viewing the broad lay of the land from the mapped-out results of the experience of othei*s. I suppose that no one will quarrel very much over the aptness of this analogy to the present facts. In the matter of this war-situation we are wandering in the woods, and most of us are concerned as to where we are and how and at what place we are going to get out. But the analogy is employed merely by way of setting the situation before us; it is not conceived of as carrying any weight of argument. In viewing the course of the war, then, atten- tion has been much focussed upon persons — personages, perhaps, might be the better term. But this tendency goes farther. Human groups, such as the Bolsheviki, the War Council, the pacifists, and even larger groups or societies, 16 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE as the Belgians, Jugo-Slavs, Entente Allies, or Neutrals, are seen as a combination of the in- dividuals that compose them rather than in their impersonal corporate form. In fact, we are prone to think of any human society, or of So- ciety in general, in terms of its components rather than as an entity in and of itself. We also tend to personify Society as we do Nature, and do not ordinarily think of it (to adapt Darwin's words) as the aggregate action and product of many societal laws. This conception of human society as a sort of composite of individuals, having no special being of its own, is an easy and obvious one; and it has been elaborated by theorists. These hold, briefly stated, that to understand society the object of interest and study is the individual; and that, since the mind of the latter is the part of him that attends to his social relations and interactions, the prime object in the study of society is to become clear on individual psy- chology. Study the human intellect and you are on the way to an understanding of the '' social mind," which directs society's destiny. Then presently you issue into " social psychology " or " psychological sociology," and the keys to the whole matter are delivered into your hands. THE CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 17 Social development, we are told, is the result of the reasoned and purposeful action of the in- dividual. An extreme of this view would, with Carljle, see the history of a nation in the biog- raphy of its heroic fig-ures. A social philosophy of this order is a popular one, for it lends learned support to that current i^rejudice toward interest in the personal and immediate (which we think we know without so much study, living in it as we do) to which allusion was made at the outset. It is the object of the present writing, however, to present that vast episode in societal evolution (meaning the evolution of human society) , which is working itself out before our eyes, from an altogether different point of view — one which recognizes the individual as a component part of society, and then ignores him, much as the phys- iologist recognizes the cell as the undoubted final component of this or that organ, or of the body, but then ignores it in favor of a study of the body as a whole. The body is an object of study by itself, and results are derived from physiology that could not be attained by restrict- ing attention to the cell. I do not intend, though, to enter into a technical controversy, but rather to cite, first, a series of societal changes belonging to the war-period, and for whose ap- 18 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE pearance the reasoned purposefulness of the in- dividual has not been responsible; and then to present the advantages of what is to me a more commanding point of view for the observation and understanding of the societal formations and dissolutions that are taking place as the days go by. III. UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO SOCIETY Societal changes of great moment have taken place, not only in Europe, but in the rest of the world as well, since the war began. I do not refer so much to the almost complete national destruction of Belgium or Serbia, under the iron heel itself, as to the less direct consequences of the strife. I take examples almost at random, as they suggest themselves. In England there has come to pass a centralization of government, together with a decline of parliamentary control, that must startle the elderly Briton who contem- plates it. Again, the women are doing men's work, are beginning, in large numbers, to work for wages, and are not very far from getting the full franchise. The Irish question has taken on a new phase. There is a " back to the land " movement that represents a degree of reversal of the urban migration. People who used to be filled with pious horror at the thought of a man marrying his deceased wife's sister are reconsid- ering the status of illegitimacy — in view of the 19 20 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE presence of " war-babies '' — and there has even been reported some talk, on the part of perfectly reputable jieople, of examining into the merits of plural marriage. Here is a catalogue, by no means exhaustive, of societal right-abouts. The salient feat performed by the French has consisted in divesting tlieuiselves of what used to be regarded as their traditional race-character. It is now demonstrated that they are as steady and enduring as the best. They are as far as possible from being a nation of frivolous, excit- able, quickly-tiring i)loasuro-lovers. Tlie former accounts of them did them injustice, but there can be no doubt now that their national life runs more seriously and strongly within more secure channels than it has done before. And such a basic cliange draws a far-flung sequence of insti- tutional inodilications in its wake. Further, French life and societal structure are being much altered by the presence in France of representa- tives of almost all the nations of the earth, many of whom, we are told, mean to remain. Some fear that the very national identity of France lies in the balance. The name Russia summons up a scene of in- stitutional upheaval and transformation. The outstanding fact is the passing of the Little UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 21 Father and the emergence of a new set of na- tional figures, pnrsning new methods under novel and even weird compulsions. Mother Vodka is banished as Mother Breshkovskaya returns. The mujik has been torn out of his isolation, where the dunghill before the hut has been the most prominent feature on the horizon of a sordid life, and has been not only smartly uniformed and drilled to stand erect, but also transported to unknown countries and his eyes perforce opened to unfamiliar things. His head has been filled also with undigested economic and social theory, and has reacted upon this pabulum in fantastic and unedifjing ways. But it is clear that he will never again be what he was or settle down contentedly to the old life. Russia may be an incalculable variable for some time to come; but the limit it approaches can never be that status ante bellum. For the deeps have been stirred. If the French have divested themselves of their traditional race-character, the Germans have done no less. I do not need to go into the re- pulsive tale; it is enough to say that the mani- festations of German manners and morals were received by the world with utter incredulity until the evidence became irresistible. It is a question 22 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE sometimes debated whether this barbarity was or was not in the national make-up; whether there was any real change here or merely a reve- lation. It looks as if Germany was so ready for predatoi-y war that not much adjustment to its conditions was necessary. It is all a question of whether the peoi>le have been with their rulers or not ; and the consideration of that question must be postponed for the moment. There have been recurrences of unrest in (Jermany, followed by ostensible yieldings and cajolery on the part of the government ; but opinion as to what is really occurring, or about to occur, must remain, in the absence of trustworthy evidence, largely in- ferential, or based upon general considerations. And we know as little about what is happen- ing in Germany's vassal states, except that, what- ever it is, it is directed or countenanced from Berlin. There are indications that sections of the Alliance are somewhat restless under an in- exorable control that holds them from making adjustments which they are not loath to contem- plate. Not Turkey — for she has no qualms in remaining what she is and has been — but the Dual Empire, and even Bulgaria, give signs of concern over the state in which they find them- selves; and neither the one nor the other seems UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 23 entirely willing to embrace all the methods of their unscrupulous pace-setter. Only Turkey finds herself in sympathetic harmony with her own type of theory and practice. Of all the societal changes consequent on the war none are more astonishing, though some are more dramatic, than those which have occurred in the United KStates. It is evident that our for- mer " beneficent isolation " belongs to history. It suffered inroads as a consequence of the Span- ish War and the brief imi)erialistic fever; and subsequent improvements in annihilation of dis- tance had left it but a shell. Industrialism under isolation has ceased, for us, to represent adjustment to our national life-conditions. This the war has revealed. And now we have swung far toward militancy, if not toward militarism.^ A few years ago a military and naval budget of a few hundred millions was considered scandal- ously high, and, indeed, inconsonant with the spirit of American institutions ; twenty, or even ten years ago, the man who proposed conscrip- tion might as well have suggested having a king. And now we approve almost unanimously a budget of billions and compulsory service — if 1 For the distinction here made between the two terms, see p. 139. 24 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE the votes of Congress, the sentiment of the press, the general acquiescence and even enthusiastic support of the people, and the spirit of the na- tional array may form a basis for judgment. There can be no question about our so-called industrialism having experienced a shrewd and rugged wrench in the direction of militancy. In the face of a menace and a need, our society has stirred uneasily, groped about after relief, pawed over the traditional expedients, and finally settled down upon the most drastic of them. Delegation of i)0wer to the executive has sur- passed anything the country has ever seen before ; and there has set in an era of control over indus- tries and of price-fixing that reminds one in tni ii of the Middle Ages and of socialistic Utopias. To a few men have been committed in(iuisitorial powers which would have been impossible of dele- gation a few years, or even months ago. And among the startling innovations comes the move- ment toward economy; Cassandras who have be- wailed our wastefulness now stand aghast and fall backward before the sudden realization of their wildest dreams. For there is a goodly nucleus of citizens who are making a business of saving and who are seizing the opportunity to edge the masses over in that direction. There is UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 25 also a large, though indeterminate body of us, male and female, who are doing something which bears at least an appearance of usefulness — knitting in the first row of the balcony, for ex- ample — instead of employing our time and strength in exclusively non-productive or waste- ful activities. We do not now hear so much of bridge and the fox-trot. Again, a revision of policy in regard to immi- gration, and in particular of the attitude toward the foreign-born, is indicated. Doubts as to the unlimited efficiency of the " melting-pot '' have been voiced ere now ; ])ut the revelation that some of our accessions to poi)ulation — and those not the most recent, either — still harbor a feeling toward tlie fatherland that is somewhat warmer and more })alpable and practical than sentimental reminiscence, has come as a great shock to every patriot. As a measure of common caution, a revision of easy-going and trustful methods and of careless optimism is demanded. Foreign lan- guages in schools, foreign news-sheets, and foreign associations designed to keep up home- ties, not to mention more sinister purposes, are now at a discount. The advocates of restriction of immigration have been given a considerable lift. 26 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE Not to prolong this list, but one additional alteration of societal policy will be noted. It was a statesman's insight that saw in the Mexican difficulty a chance to strengthen our ties with South America; but the war has infused an ele- ment of fellowship that has not existed before. Common danger and common resentment have fostered sentiments that are replacing the former uninformed indifference or even impatient dis- esteem on our part, and the resentful mortifica- tion and suspicion on the other side, with a mutual toleration, understanding, and apprecia- tion that promise much to the interest of both parties. This catalogue of societal changes during the war-period is not complete — something un- foreseen is happening to organized forms of religion, for example — but it is probably not far from representative. With this type of event in mind, we now go on to inquire to what extent the reasoned pnrposefulness of the in- dividual has been responsible for its appearance. IV. AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS Had the war not occurred, most of the societal changes just cited, and many another that the reader can call to mind, would not have taken place now, or perhaps at all. Very likely the Russian revolution was due in the near future; but the American swing toward militancy was not. In all cases the war-conditions were the precipitating agency. Much in the way of so- cietal structure has been awaiting selection, or has beeu involved in the process, that would not have attained to a si)eedy verdict but for the war, with its general dislocations, revelations, and readjustments. But it is evident that the war was not started for the realization of any such purposes. The Germans did not set out to get the vote for British women nor yet to enforce economy in this country ; not even the British or the Americans had either of these ends in view in entering the conflict. Germany, in fact, did not want either England or the United States to participate; she planned to have them both go their unsuspecting, careless, and decadent way 27 28 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE until she got ready for them. There was no pur- pose in the minds of any foreigners, for example, that we should adopt conscription. It is cer- tainly no vindication of reasoned purposefulness when the actual results come to the purposers as a surprise, involving disappointment and even consternation. The societal changes in the several countries developed automatically and impersonally in so far as the originators of the conflict were con- cerned. The state of war drew in its train a set of consequences; situations appeared, for the most part uni)lanned and unforeseen, to which the several societies secured adjustment by their respective alterations of policy. Let us look first into the process of adjustment to these situations consequent upon war, to see whether it should be called automatic or whether it should be re- ferred to the reason and purpose of the indi- vidual ; then we can go back and inquire whether the state of war itself was brought about by auto- matically acting, impersonal forces or by those same faculties of the individual. Broadly speaking, all adjustment of society to its life-conditions is enforced by the pain of mal- adjustment, or the prospect of such pain, as sensed by numbers of individuals; and it is AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 29 secured when members have concurred in a course of action that brings relief. But it is inadmis- sible to credit that action to individual reason and purpose unless a great majority, at least, of the society members have really taken in the broad situation confronting the society and have deliberately chosen the expedient that was adopted. This very rarely occurs unless the situ- ation is exceptionally easy of visualization; and an international situation — generally foreseen by but few — is seldom, if ever, that. It is hardly fair to give credit to individual reason and purpose if only a few have really visualized the situation, and the rest have gone as the few wanted to go, under a variety of irrelevant mo- tives. But we hasten to concrete illustration. In England one of the aspects of the situation following on war was a growing disproportion between the sexes. In the face of the traditional division of labor by sex, into man's work and woman's work, this meant a depletion of the male labor-supply, and a depletion coincident with an increasing demand for labor. Adjust- ment was possible only by the elimination, or at least suspension, of the time-honored tradition. There was, however, no general comprehension of the scope of such a change ; there was action, first so THROUGH WAR TO PEACE of all, on the part of the women. This action was unreflecting as respects the broad societal issue and was taken in response to a variety of stimuli, irrelevant to the broad situation. Numbers of women, in concerted response to the need and to the opening opportunity, entered to fill the par- tial vacuum, much as cooler air-currents " natur- ally " flow toward a cyclonic center. These women followed their interests as they felt them : economic necessity, impatience with idleness, the desire to do as others were doing, loneliness, lo^^alty, fear of the enemy — all tliese and doubt- less many another motive moved the individual. The situation facing the nation was visualized, doubtless, by a few; and many went in on the basis of general patriotism — of which, as a rea- soned motive, more later on. What is sometimes called the " elite " may have figured out the eon- sequences. Probably not more than one woman in a thousand entered an ammunition-plant or delivered mail in order to get the vote for women ; yet the furthering of the suffrage cause was one of the things that came of it. It was in good part the demonstration by women of their industrial efiflciency, as well as of their patriotism, that dis- posed the opposition to a change of heart. It had been the enforced idleness of hand and brain, as AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 31 well as the emptiness of arms, that had goaded many women to an offensively restless activity; but now, in the face of the opening opportunities, even the militants, who had been pouring acid into mail-boxes and assaulting premiers, dropped their special purposes for the time and went to work — later to find their desires moving toward realization by way of a course of indirection fore- seen by few. The fact that married as well as single women are taking their places beside men as income-earners for life threatens even man's headship of the family, as well as his monopoly of the franchise. In cases like this (including those cited in the preceding chapter) there is a predominant ele- ment of unreasoned or even unwitting contribu- tion to the big result. People act on impulses of various description; upon sentiments that are diffuse, customary, or habitual rather than ra- tional and discriminating. It is usually the immediate personal interest only, and generally an economic one, that is pursued with a genuinely rational and purposeful motive. Loyalty and patriotism as motives, however creditable to the individual, as well as efficient and wholesome for the nation, are not usually rational. It is neces- sary to be very clear here on the distinction 32 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE between that which we know to be the product of reason and that which looks, at first sight, as if it must have been. An expedient that " works " always impresses the partially informed as necessarily due to the planful action of some person : man or god. The camel's foot looks as if it had ])een skilfully planned for desert use ; the more exact our mathe- matics, says Maeterlinck in his " Life of the Bee," the nearer do we come to the formula of cell-construction practiced in the hive. But there is no question here of anything but the unplanned and automatic. When natural selec- tion is done, the product is always " rational " ; science has ever stumbled along after such facts. The nature-process issues in that which will stand to reason. But now the " social pro- cess " also can not but show the same sort of issue. The savages often practice what is in effect a quarantine on the house of death; they apply heat to a lame muscle to expel pain; they proscribe close in-marriage. But tliat any such regulations have adequate reasoning and purpose behind them few would be found to maintain. We cannot any longer accept the ghost-theory that fatliered them. Such action can be adjudged rational only if obseiTed in retrospect and in AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 33 ignorance of its antecedents. So seen, there is a strong suggestion of reason; but the reason is after the act, and is put in by the more sophisti- cated observer. It is clear, then, that the cus- tomary or habitual may show the same sort of rationality as the " natural," and reveal results that reason would be proud to be credited with, and sometimes tries to appropriate. The occasion for drawing this distinction was the remark that loyalty and patriotism are not usually rational. They are matters of feeling and habit. They lie in custom. But the ex- pediency of many such social usages is so evi- dent, that is, they work so well, that they are credited to reason. In reality they have survived selection just as the nature-products have; only the selection is on the plane of societal, not or- ganic evolution. It could be shown that patriot- ism, and even jingoism, are sentiments that serve a society well, and have thus had a high survival- value in the course of its evolution. But it should now be clear that it will not do to consider an adjustment made by society to be the result of individual purposeful reasoning because of the patriotism behind it. If so, there is nothing to show that the condition created by the disi)ro- portion of the sexes in England, a consequence of 84 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE the war, evoked, in the form of a far-reaching societal change, a reasoned and purposeful re- sponse on the part of individuals. It is difficult to descry much response of the rational order, or much even that might be mis- taken for such, in the Russian doings. The im- pression here is as of behemoth lurching uneasily about and making uncertain starts, now this way and now that, under the stress of undefined, ill- defined, and fleeting impulses — a vision of the crudely automatic. If adjustment comes about eventually, it will be through the lumbering and costly process of trial and failure, and that ir- respective of whether or not a glittering mahout rides on the monster's head as it finally plods into some course of adequate adjustment. All varieties of unreasoned and irrational cross- purpose are here having their day. In the United States a better informed people stands a more hopeful chance of thinking a new situation out and acting purposefully in the light of reflection. Take the movement looking to economy in living. Saving in the face of want is a pretty obvious expedient, and also it has to do with concrete and tangible things. It does not demand great intellectual tension; even the AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS S5 savage does it. In this country, ease in the dis- semination of programs of saving, and of the simple considerations back of them, further aids the application of reason-directed purpose. It is apparently a hard case for alignment under the automatic category. It is not denied that the controllers of food, coal, and other indispensables will be able, by their propaganda, to enlist the rational support of millions. However, even here, the presence of the impersonal and auto- matic can be made out clearly enough. Many will save, not because they sense the peculiar reasons for so doing, but because they will auto- matically cease to consume the scarce and high- priced articles. And there are many who will never accept the reasonableness of economy-pro- grams, but, whatever they do — evade or obey — it will be done unintelligently. Reason will be enlisted by others, but only to support self-indul- gence and selfishness. Such unintelligent do- cility or unwilling acquiescence are far from being reasoned purposefulness in the face of a recognized societal issue. Even those individuals who economize " for the country,'' and do not go behind the phrase, afford no evidence for the theorist who insists that societal adjustment is 86 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE by way of the intelligent, purposeful action of individuals in the face of visualized and under- stood conditions. The automatic element is more marked as the case is less concrete and immediate. There are many persons in this enliglitened land of op- portunity who have not the imagination to visualize anything but the most concrete and immediate. Their spheres of comprehension are narrowly circumscribed, and outside are merely ambiguous forms and fantastic hopes and fears. Often, however, they will take leading readily enough, especially if they are vaguely frightened, and if tlie leading does not impose too great a sacrifice of immediate interests. They are not moved by any theoretical or " academic " con- siderations and are not critical where their feel- ings are enlisted. What they need to move them is suggestion, applied and re-ap})lied. Here is the hope of the propagandist. " Too dark and pessimistic a picture," some one objects. Perhaps so ; but it must be realized that if the theory of reasoned, purposeful, individual action as the agency of society's adjustment is to be maintained, it must cover not only the " classes,'' but the " masses.'' The latter form the bulk of any society, and if it is to be moved, AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 37 they must be moved. These are the people many of whom crave the yellow journal and are un- critical of its sensational appeal to the feelings and prejudices. Here are those who eannot be shown a fact so obvious as that the potato, how- ever scarce and costly, is not the sole food ai)pro- priate for a laborer. There are those among us who live in an adherence to tradition about as intelligent as that of any primitive tribe. There are as few of this class in this country as in any other, but they cannot fairly be ignored. They cannot be rightly included under a sweeping theory of societal adaptation as performed by the intelligent and purposeful response of individ- uals. Nor, on the other hand, should a theory of automatic adaptation be so sweeping as to take no account of the relatively few thinkers. I am interested here in exhibiting the presence of the ignored automatic element rather than in claim- ing everything for it. It is commonly lost to cal- culation, but it ought not to be, for it is the basic element. It dominates even when there are purposeful reasoners in seats of power, for the reasoners cannot go ahead without reference to public opinion. Facing a situation as we do, where economy is plainly called for, many 38 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE respond intelligently and at once; it may even be that such persons can, in effect, respond vicariously for the rest. But if they do that, forcing or cajoling the rest into acting as the intelligent think best, then society's adjustment is not, in any reasonable interpretation of the case, one referable to the intellect and purpose of its constituent individuals. But, with this turn of the discussion toward the matter of leadership, we are drawn into considerations of a still more general order. V. A PEOPLE'S WAR There is, then, much reason to suppose that the several changes in societal arrangements and habitudes, effected in this and that society in adjustment to war-conditions, are typically auto- matic in their development. It is clear enough that most of these war-conditions, sex-dispropor- tion, for instance, were and are inevitable, repre- senting as they do a set of sequences set afloat automatically by the presence of war. It re- mains to inquire whether the war itself came about automatically or as the result of the rea- soned purpose of individuals. And it should be noted preliminarily that any war becomes straightway a " jieople's war '' if it becomes big enough and near enough to cause the people to believe, or to be persuaded, that the native land is threatened. Then they will rally to self-defense, inspired by feelings of patriotism, and can read- ily be shown, among other things, that a strong offensive is the best defense. This would seem to indicate that any group of men in power, or even any one man, can at any 39 40 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE time precipitate a war, aud a popular one, by stirring up a hornets' nest and then falling back upon the people. Doubtless this has been done; Bismarck was an adept at this sort of maneuver. But the question immediately rises as to why leaders of this ilk are in power, and why they are kept in power. Their type does, or does not, represent the national will. If it does — if Ger- mans are sure to be represented by this type of trouble-hunter — then the society must assume responsibility, the eminent indi\ddual dropping out except as an agent of the popular will. If it does not, then the inference is that this nation cannot or will not make its will felt as against Its rulers, either because it has no will or because extraordinary obstacles interpose to thwart ex- pression. The people are pathetically unin- formed, perhaps, or misinformed, or hopelessly prepossessed, or so docile and suggestible as to deserve the epithet " political imbecile." There is some evidence to support any one of these hypotheses ; a later chapter will be devoted to the special form of obsession to which the German people seem peculiarly susceptible. It is a matter of comparatively small con- sequence, seen in long perspective, that war eventuated in one year rather than another, or A PEOPLE'S WAR 41 under one Emperor rather than another; the disharmony was sure to come to a head sooner or later, for it is a case of incompatibility between societal systems, each represented by the sort of spokesmen characteristic of it. The war came about as the result of the action of impersonal, automatically operative social forces on the order of the impersonal, automatically acting natural forces; the antics of a ruler giddy with self- importance could have been played only on a stage set for him. The sun was coming up any- how, whether Chanticleer crowed or not. Doubtless the despot of an unresisting, inartic- ulate sheep-people or Vichvolk could render a striking exhibition of purposeful action by the individual as the moving force in societal evolu- tion. But this is hardly the sort of evidence to thrill the soul of the theorist whose pet views it seems to support; it looks atavistic or deca- dent. No one could contemplate, with proprie- tary pride, as grist available for his theory-mill, the spectacle of millions being led about by the national nose, even when that organ is clutched between the knuckles of no less a personage than the high priest of Odinism. There have been too few cases of the sort in the present or the past to justify the conviction that such an one is normal, 42 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE not pathological, if indeed it exists at all. And the German case is not yet closed; if there has been an incredible success in keeping a whole people uninformed, or misinformed, or under illu- sion, the misled may yet encounter a situation full of pain and disillusion that is calculated to spoil tlie completeness and perfection of the case for autocracy. The Kaiser may come to point the old Greek saying: Call no man hai)py till he is dead. It is a pretty far-gone imbecile that will not lash out if there is sufficient stimulus. As a matter of fact, the German people ac- quiesce in, where they do not heartily support, the programs of their rulers. If they did not, these programs could not be realized or even formulated. However the national sentiment is formed or guided, the lords of atfairs are power- less except as they are toleiated or supported by it. The purposeful action of the individual, how^ever exalted he may be, is no more than a variation on the theme set by the public opinion of the society. Even assuming that the Kaiser precipitated the present w^ar in order to harmo- nize elements with which he had been having dif- ficulty, and to justify the burdensome increase of armament, he could not have done this in an- other societ3^ If the Kaiser and his circle could. A PEOPLE'S WAR 43 by some miracle, be transferred into the execu- tive offices at Washington, they would be power- less to make programs and create situations fraught with gratuitous menace to other peoples. And they would not hold office long. It is foolish to lay all this world-coil to individuals. To do so is to deal in mythology and adhere to magic. It is like believing that old women produce tempests by pulling off their stockings. For there has never been a despot so securely settled on the throne and surrounded by so power- ful an entourage, that he could not be shaken down by the popular will if he crossed it often or flagrantly enough. In the modern world most kings are mere figure-heads, and, like Edward VII, attain to personal influence and power only when they are popular. The old method of unseating the unpopular ruler, by revolution, is present even in our own day; but elections and other forms of " peaceful revolution " have also been devised to keep the real rulei's — prime ministers and presidents — under regular control by the popular will. The whole course of society's evolution has been marked by in- creasingly efficient adjustments permitting of the more unrestricted expression of that will. If the German people are in a position of impotence 44* THROUGH WAR TO PEACE in this matter, the case is an exception that must have some special and vagrant course of develop- ment behind it. It is in accord with what we know of the operation of societal evolution, throughout hunum history, to believe, in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, that Germany's rulers are expressing German public opinion, either present or recent, and that if they were not there to voice it, other channels of outlet would have been opened. I say that acquaintance with the operation of societal evolution leads to this conclusion. I might have said that plain common sense points to such a conviction. But there are many things that are said to " stand to reason '' which will not stand to scientific examination; in fact, the phrase " it stands to reason " is often employed as a sort of camoutlage to conceal some " intui- tion " or some belief that is harbored merely because we want to believe it. Here is a place for the application of " trained and organized common sense,'' which was Huxley's detinition of science. I shall now try to indicate the con- ception of societal evolution that goes with the belief in the predominance of the impersonal, spontaneous, and automatic in the life of society, and to " place " in this evolutionary process the i A PEOPLE'S WAR 45 vast episode now being enacted with the whole world as a stage. From now on we shall confine attention, to the virtual disregard of the individual and his quali- ties and powers, upon societies. We have taken some little account of the trees, and now propose, without denying their indispensability as com- ponents, to view the woods. We shall deal in terms of a wider intention. For if, extending the perspective, we look over and beyond the individual, we see in this world-conflict the align- ment and confrontation of great societies — somewhat as Homer saw the vast forms of the higher powers seated unmoved above the fight- ing and dying mortals, or going al)out their pro- digious affairs, or engaging in immortal combat. The movements of these societies, so viewed, are impersonal and automatic after the manner of gravitation or osmosis, and the individual is lost to sight, or, rather, to identification, as he blends into the composite mass. It is from such a plane that we shall now view the conflict. Thus seen, it appears as a powerful selective factor in the evolution, not alone of the several nations, but of human society itself. Here is a vast laboratory of selection of the superorganic order — the greatest laboratory the social scien- 46 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tist has ever seen or heard of; for what is going on before his face is the most gigantic exhibition of that type of selection that the world has ever experienced. Now is his chance to get glimpses of the mass-motions that form the driving ener- gies of the tremendous process. A view of such matters in the large cannot be gained, however, without first giving some thought to tlie factors and processes of societal evolution in general. These should be capable, for the most part, of sinii)le and untechnical de- scription. In any ease the next item in my pro- gram is to attempt such an exposition.^ 1 For a condensed statement of the author's views, of a more technical order and wider scope, see Keller, *' Societal Evolution." VI. FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES OF CONDUCT The central figure in societal evolution is, as we shall view it, a human society. This is a group of human beings living in a cooperative effort to win subsistence and to perpetuate the species. Such a definition proposes for society the same functions that are familiar throughout the organic world: self -maintenance and self- perpetuation. The latter of these functions is a sort of extension, in time, of the former ; society, like an animal species, could exist awhile — for a generation — without it. But self-mainte- nance is fundamental and primordial ; it had to begin at once, and if there is going to be any species or society at all, it can never stop. In order not to complicate matters, let us fix atten- tion, at least for the moment, upon this basic matter of society's self-maintenance. Self-maintenance means primarily and uni- versally the food-quest; but it involves also, for most men, the provision for protection against the natural environment: clothing and other 47 48 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE shelter. This item of protection, when secured by industry, represents success, so far as it goes, in the struggle for existence. But there is an- other aspect of that struggle, when it is carried on against animate nature, namely, the competi- tion of life. This is a contest against plant, ani- mal, and fellow-man to attain or to retain that which makes existence possible, or to preserve life itself. Especially do men attempt to relieve other men of the products of the original indus- try, or wealth. Two main phases of the struggle thus reveal themselves, namely, industry and war for plunder. In the former the means of living are derived from the inanimate or animate en- vironment, by hunting and, later on, by herding and agriculture ; in the latter, by the appropria- tion of the product of the industry of others, or aggression. Always industry is the basic main- tenance activity. But the development of activities in self-main- tenance is not a haphazard, discontinuous pro- cess. When the first societies of which we know appear to view, they are already provided with a set of ways, or a traditional procedure, by which they carry on this activity, and every other of their activities as well. These ways represent a concurrence of group-members in the practice FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 49 of expedients, economic, political, religious, or other, which have been proved to them, in the event, to be successful ones. These expedient ways have been called the folkways or mores. Language is one of the most typical of the mores ; division of labor is another. No one planned them, but they grew up and are practiced un- questioningly, unconsciously, and automatically. They correspond to habits in the individual. Taken all together, they constitute the code of behavior of the society. They represent the proper way to act, and, although they are not subjected to any rational or critical examination, there exists the conviction that the.y are the only right ways, the only ones fit to live by. The mores, says Sumner,^ who first analyzed them, are " the ])opular usages and traditions, when they include a judgment that they are conducive to societal welfare, and when they exert a coercion on the individual to conform to them, although they are not coordinated by any autliority." It is just as well to have a technical term for them, for they are not precisely customs, or social habi- tudes, or ethics, or morals. They become uniform and universal in a group, 1 In "Folkways, A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals." 50 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE and also imperative ; and, often over long periods, they are so resistive to change as to appear in- variable. Many of them are strongly sanctioned by religion; in fact, practically all of them that are of long standing are supported by the readi- ness of the spirits, ancestral or other, to punish infringement or alteration. They thus come to form a prescribed body of rules of behavior for life in society that well deserves the title of " the social code." I have already intimated that the mores extend beyond the range of self-maintenance. Within that range they determine how the struggle for existence and the competition of life shall go on, thus rising to meet and cope with certain vital and perennial life-conditions. Another inescap- able and vital life-condition is laid down in the bisexuality of the human race; there are the re- lations of the sexes to be ordered, in the interst of the society's well-being. Innumerable mores attend to the relations of man and woman, parents and children, and they work out into various forms of marriage and the family. A big group of mores always surrounds some vital condition of society life, like that of sex, and forms the approved method of dealing with it. Another such condition, for further example. FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 51 was felt in the vividly conceived presence of a world of ghosts and spirits, an imao^inary envi- ronment to which men adjusted themselves by the unplanned development of a set of mores covering forms of avoidance, exorcism, concilia- tion, and propitiation. But these several sets of mores, " mere cus- tom '' at first, gradually attained a stage of organ- ization where they became institutions, as, for example, matrimony and religion. There is no human institution that has not risen from the matrix of custom, and the rise of new institu- tions now as always, is out of the same prolific source. And, as they take more definite form and somewhat disengage themselves from the mass of custom, the institutions do not lose, but cany with them, that approval and that convic- tion as to their indispensability for welfare that were accorded to the mores. Anything that is in our mores is right, and so our institutions are the best. " The mores," says Sumner again, " can make anything right and prevent condem- nation of anything." They are the approved ways of meeting the conditions of living, de- veloped, accepted, and practiced without the in- tervention of reasoned purpose. They are to a society what, for example, dens- 52 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE ity and color of fur are to arctic animals; namely automatic adaptations to environment. Life- conditions are present and society has to live under them. This is rendered possible, or easy, or easier, by adjustments in the manner of life or ways of living. Thus we have a societal code characteristic, for instance, of the arctics or of the tropics, of isolation or accessibility, of over- population or under-population, of the country or of the city, of peace or of war. Adaptation is the characteristic result of the process of organic evolution. It is also, though this is less commonly recognized, that of the pro- cess of societal evolution. It is never perfect; and, since life-conditions are always changing, it is never stable. Maladjustment recurs, to be fol- lowed by new adjustment by way of altered mores and institutions. This recurring adjustment is secured, in nature, through the operation of three factors : variation, selection, and heredity, all of which act, of course, automatically. By varia- tion, diversity is secured : the members of the new generation are not precisely like those of the old, nor are they all duplicates of one another. By heredity, on the other hand, a general likeness is retained as between parents and offspring, and as among the several offspring. Heredity is the FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 53 conservative element. By selection the least adapted of any generation are weeded out, leav- ing the best adapted to survive. These latter are the " fittest." A similar process, arriving at the same result, namely, adjustment to life-conditions, takes place in the life of society. Variation produces di- versity in the mores and in the institutions crys- tallizing out of them; tradition, corresponding to heredity in the organic world, holds the type of the mores, as they are passed along; and selection weeds out the less expedient mores and institutions. The evolutionary process is, how- ever, on another plane than that of organic evolution, and in a different mode. Its exist- ence has been long recognized in an unconscious sort of way; for writers on society's life have fre- quently spoken of " social heredity " or " social selection," just as generations of naturalists before Darwin spoke of " families " of plants or animals — not realizing that such terms were more than metaphorical, or better than analogies. To make use of the point of view here taken, it is necessary to be resolved as to the nature of variation, selection, and transmission as factors in societal evolution. Variation in the mores represents a series of 54 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tentatives, departing more or less from the ac- cepted code, that are struck out upon by individ- uals in the pursuit of their interests. The in- dividual's function is that of an agency for variation. These slight departures from the code are in evidence all the time; in fact, the society's code is a sort of average or mean or type, about which cluster the codes of classes, sects, and other larger and smaller sub-groups. The individual may adhere to a number of these sub- groups, as his interests dictate. He may belong, for instance, to the miners' union, the Baptist church, the Socialist party, the Masonic lodge, at one and the same time. When interests change, other and new codes may appear, some of them departing widely in character, perhaps, from the general or typical code of the society at large. In general, the rise of such variations is a consequence of discomfort under the pre- vailing code; interests strain toward a better realization by way of change, small or great. Such variations may be short-lived and ex- hibited by only a few, or there may be a con- currence of many which carries them forward until, perhaps, the code of the society at large has been profoundly modified. Some of the vari- ations live and some die out. Here is the fact FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 55 of selection. All through history, codes and institutions have appeared, have persisted for a time, and have been altered or have passed completely away. Since the topic of selection, and in particular selection by war, is the main interest in this present discussion, I should pre- fer for the moment merely to record the fact of selection, leaving the consideration of the process for special examination. Transmission of the mores is by tradition, which, I repeat, corresponds, in the societal realm, to heredity in the organic. Tradition, like heredity, tends to repeat the type. It is brought about through imitation, either spon- taneous or induced. Spontaneous imitation is a natural activity, common to animals and man, and especially marked, among human beings, in the young. The receiver of the mores, thus trans- mitted, wants to receive, and takes the initiative in the transfer, as when the small boy apes his father. But imitation is also capable of being induced, where there is no likelihood that it will be spontaneous, by precept and discipline. This is education, in its broadest sense. The receiver may be indifferent or even unwilling to receive, and the giver commonly takes the initiative, as, for example, in the " uplifting " of a " lower " 56 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE race. Also, while spontaneous imitation carries all the mores indiscriminately, education carries a more or less wisely selected body of mores. It is clear that the former is the more natural, ele- mental, impersonal, spontaneous, and automatic process; the latter is effective as it succeeds in reproducing the essentials, at least in semblance, of the former, but in c()nji)arison it appears arti- ficial. It involves, it has been noted, an ante- cedent choice or selection from the main body of the mores : we will teach the young certain things and others we will tr-y to keep from them as long as possible. This choice is supposed to be a rea- soned and purposeful one; but such a selection has little of the sureness and severe correctness of an automatic selection. These evolutionary factors are operative in the life of eveiy society, from the family group to the nation. And they do not stop there. They are effective, on the grand scale, in the life of Human Society as a whole. There is a world- code that has been in process of formation with the establishment of proximity between the na- tions; for that proximity, brought about by the " annihilation of distance," has meant altered conditions of life for many societies; and varia- tions that have been demonstrated, under selec- FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 57 tion, to be expedient, have been transmitted until enough mores have come to be held in common by all, or nearly all, to justify the term " international code " or " world-code." Varia- tions around this code, or in departure from it, may now be originated by a whole nation, and submitted for world-wide acceptance or rejec- tion. Slavery, for example, has been rejected, while democracy has widened its range. And of late stands forth Germany, as champion of a code that is even now undergoing the ordeal of selection. These national variations on the world-code cannot be tested up as soon as, or shortly after, they appear — as iMormonism was tested lip on the American national code — and the process of selection is the more imposing when it comes. We turn now to a survey of the essentials of the selective process. VII. CONFLICT AN ESSENTIAL TO SELEC- TION: PEACEFUL COMPETITION The idea of the variation and transmission of a societal code is readily grasped, though it should not be thought that these factors work out in a simple and obvious manner. But there is more difficulty with selection. The term itself causes some trouble, for there is about it a conno- tation of '' choosing '' which darkens counsel. In organic evolution there cannot be, of course, any question of choice; the results of natural selec- tion are attained by elimination of the mal- adapted, not by any positive process. The " fit " are those that are left after the rest have been disposed of. The whole process is impersonal and automatic, in its entirety. Similarly with the most important manifestations of societal selection, if not with them all. In any case, it is necessary to start out with the idea of selection by way of elimination rather than with the mis- leading positive conception of selection as pick- ing and choosing. Variations around the code appear and come to the test. Those that cannot 58 CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 59 qualify as expedient adjustments tend to pass away, and the rest remain because nothing is done to them. The " fit " variations in the mores, like the fit organisms, are let alone to run their course. Thus the term " selection/' as used in evolutionary systems, has a special sense and must be so understood. Essential to the operation of selection is con- flict. Conflict involves competition, and with- out it there is no test. Thus natural selection could not take place were it not for the struggle for existence out of which the better adapted forms emerge as the rest perish. Highly devel- oped specimens of organic life do not appear under isolation, but under conditions of com- petition; not in Australia, for example, but in Asia. This situation is duplicated in the societal realm, for no isolated people ever de- veloped an advanced code, that is, a high civili- zation. Compare Mesopotamiau culture, for instance, with that of Tierra del Fuego. But where numbers of human beings come into con- tact a competitive conflict is bound to occur; for all are trying to satisfy wants, and the satis- factions are too few to go round. Also it is characteristic of wants that they increase with the satisfaction of them ; if at one instant of time 60 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE all human wants were stilled, the next instant would reveal many more emerging, that could not be met. So that, in the pursuit of their interests, both individuals and societies are sure to fall into conflict. It is this conflict that brings codes of conduct and policies of living to a test and a selection. But the mores and codes cannot fight one another. If we speak of the conflict of mili- tarism and industrialism, we are using a flgure of speech. The conflict is not between codes or institutions, but between the societies adhering to them. If the battle goes to the bearers of a certain code, that code is extended and strength- ened in influence ; if against them, it is weakened and may be eliminated altogether. It is the issue of the conflict that is decisive. The conflict is of various types: military, industrial, commercial, political ; but it is always a struggle to realize interests, \yhat is wanted is the power to supj)ort rights to something, such as the franchise, a " place in the sun,'' and so on. We have a right to do a thing when the rest will hold off and let us have it; but they will not hold off unless they are under some compulsion to do so. The power — militar}', civil, moral, or other — established as the result of struggle, CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 61 is that compulsion. What people want above all, barring only existence itself, is the right to realize a standard of living. This is a matter of detail-enterprise, but for a society it amounts to a slight or a considerable idealization upon the liv- ing its members are used to ; it comes to involve an extension of the local code, with certain re- finements upon it. But such an objective readily brings two classes in the same nation or two nations into conflict over their codes, for in- stance over autocracy as against democracy. Thus the codes themselves furnish a cause of war. They are the more likely to do that because, in the conviction that "our" ways are the only right ones, we are wont to regard those of others as ridiculous, perverse, altogether wrong, or even contemptible. This sentiment of group-egotism is called ethnocentrism. It is plain, without going for the present into greater detail, that there are always occasions enough for conflict between societies. Now the crudest form of such conflict is common to both animals and men; it is by physical violence. This form is the one specifically before us, and must be looked into with some care; I should like to set it aside with that purpose in view while surveying first the milder forms of human 62 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE conflict. There is some advantage in consider- ing the more evolved peaceful forms first, when we are studying a ease of recurrence, in war, of the less evolved. This is, in effect, putting the cai't before the horse, so far as evolutionary sequence goes; for all other types of competi- tion are, at least among civilized peoples, modi- fications of an antecedent violence. They have been, in their time, variations on the code of violent conflict, and they have been subjected to selection. The fact that they have survived that test indicates that they are more expedient as adjustments to evolved life-conditions of societies than is their parent stock. But it should be noted that no evolutionary adjustments are j^er- manent; their persistence under given condi- tions proves nothing about their expediency should conditions change — change back, for in- stance, to resemble more primitive ones. For while softened conditions can be met by gentler expedients, a recurrence of harsh conditions calls for a return to rough and crude forms of adjust- ment. In considering the milder forms of conflict we encounter at once a broad adjustment which is a pre-condition to their development. This is the *' peace-group " otherw^ise called the " in- CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 63 group " or the " we-groiip " — a phenomenon which repays close examination. A peace-group is composed of members who have enough in- terests in common to allow of cooperation rather than conflict in their realization. They have a common code — common, that is, in the essen- tials; there is no conflict over the vital things, for they are assumed in the common code, and disputes over minor matters can be carried on, generally, without breach of the peace by recourse to violence. *' Men will always fight," it is said, " when they are mad enough '' ; but in this case the matters concerning which they could get mad enough are agreed upon by all fellow-mem- bers, so that they do not have to be fought about within the group; and over the issues of less weight, passion does not run so high. No one ever set out to invent a peace-group. It is a typically spontaneous, automatic, and impersonal development, and one with a very high survival value; for it is by peace and order within that a society is enabled to resist de- struction or to concentrate its strength in the pursuit of its interests against competitors. In fact, the very definition of a human society, as given above,^ implies internal peace as an indis- 1 p. 47. 64. THROUGH WAR TO PEACE pensable condition. Thus the peace-group may be taken to be as old as humanity, and even older, for animals form true societies. But it appears in history as a moditication of an ante- cedent regime of violence. What we actually see in recorded time is a progressive development of restriction on violence, both as between individ- uals and classes within the same society, and also as between societies. But the vei^ prohibi- tion of violence witnesses to the priority of vio- lence. Tlie general tendency, where we know war to have been the mode, has been in the direc- tion of milder methods; there is no general or steady tendency in the opposite direction ; and so the conflict by violence appears to be a heritage from the antique world. War is often spoken of as a reversion. Nations, even when at war, take pains to cast the odium of recourse to such a savage expedient upon the enemy. Public opinion has long been rolling up against violence and in favor of peace; but that it was not al- ways so, can be gathered from the character of the heroes and divinities of olden time. Whether or not the primordial era was one of unmitigated violence, the extension of the peace-group, as seen in history, has represented a progressive modifi- cation of the ruder methods of conflict. CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 65 The existence of a peace-group is dependent upon the adherence of its members to a common societal code; their major interests coincide and are being realized under adjustments to life- conditions represented by the code. There is a conviction that group-welfare depends upon the code, and there arises a loyalty to it and a partisanship that constitute patnotism. Such sentiments create cohesion and stability, and have, as we have seen, a high survival-value in any society's life. But this does not mean, we have already insisted, that the society's code remains forever the same. It is only tlie vital or salient mores that are held in common ; out- side of these is the inevitable variation, due to the non-uniform composition of the society. For every society or nation, however stable as a peace-group, includes classes, sects and other constituents, each of which has, as its truly dis- tinguishing feature, its special body of mores. The most essential of these mores receive rep- resentation in the national code; but there are minor interests enough to struggle for, in com- petition with other sub-groups. These compet- ing fellow-groups are also divisible into still smaller constituents, with still more special in- terests and still more specialized rules of con- 66 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE duct. There is endless chance for conflict, selec- tion, and adjustment within the peace-group. It is clear that as the different local bodies unite to form the larger ones, and as they all finally join to make up the society or nation, the number of mores common to the unions must become ever smaller and their form more general. The residue to which all peaceably adhere are the few and general essentials of the inclusive code; the conflict is about minor matters and is pursued in a milder way. I do not wish to load these pages with abstrac- tions or generalities not bearing directly upon my main topic, nor yet with needless illustra- tion. The milder methods of social conflict do not form the main subject of this writing, and are to be treated only as they throw light upon war- selection. However, it must be understood that war-selection comes about, in these days, when the milder methods break down ; and it is there- fore necessary to summon up a quite clear and definite impression of how the milder methods have been evolved and what they can and can- not do, in order to see where war comes in. Perhaps the generalities of a code upon which a whole nation agrees, as distinguished from details of lesser importance, may be best brought out by CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 67 a quotation ^ — in which the emphasis upon the impersonal and automatic in the formation and acceptance of a national code should be noted. " The rights of conscience, the equality of all men before the law, the separation of church and state, religious toleration, freedom of speech and of the press, popular education, are vital tradi- tions of the American people. They are not brought in question ; they form the stock of firm and universal convictions on which our national life is based; they are ingrained into the char- acter of our people, and you can assume, in any controversy, that an American will admit tlieir truth. But they fonn the sum of traditions which we obtain as our birthright. They are never explicitly taught to us, but we assimilate them in our earliest childhood from all our sur- roundings, at the fireside, at school, from the press, on the highways and streets. We never hear them disputed and it is only when we ob- serve how difficult it is for some foreign nations to learn them that we perceive that they are not implanted by nature in the human mind. They are a part and the most valuable part of our na- tional inheritance, and the obligation of love, labor, and protection which we owe to the nation 1 Sumner, W. G., " Collected Essays," III, 353-354. 68 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE rests upon these benefits which we receive from it." Agreeing with respect to these generalities — accepting them, in fact, without reflection — Americans experience in the rest of the national life a series of collisions of minor interests : some have wanted protectionism, others free trade; some an imperialistic policy, others the tradi- tional policy of isolation. A long series of in- terests, lined up for the fray, could be mentioned : labor vs. capital, debtors vs. creditors, gold-stand- ardists vs. inflationists, suffragists vs. anti-suf- fragists, " wets " vs. " drys "; and, on the smaller scale, religious sects, secret societies, and local organizations of all descriptions maintain an unremitting competition among themselves. Viewed from this angle, national life is a seeth- ing arena of conflict, industrial, commercial, political, religious, moral, full of petty or more than petty triumphs and reverses, entailing ex- tensions and eliminations of petty or more than petty codes of behavior. It remains to note that each smaller group is trying all the time to universalize its pet program, and that there is always the possibility that it may acquire a following sufficient to raise its code into a prominence from which it can chal- CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 69 lenge some of the essentials of the national code. If, then, there comes about a conflict over es- sentials, there is in prospect a selection that may demand revolution, probably violence, and so the suspension or even the destruction of the peace- status itself. Slavery in the South was for a long time a minor national issue; but it rose into prominence, got in among the essentials, so that the nation could not exist half-slave and half-free, and was finally eliminated by recourse to war. If any local issue works up into such prominence, it transcends peaceful settlement. People have become, with the successive thwart- ing of interests believed by them to be essential, angry enough to fight; and as yet there is no peaceful device that has stood the test as a sub- stitute for violence. Not for nothing has war been called the ultima ratio. War has always been and is now the last expedient in bringing about selection in the mores, and any other form of conflict may run out into war. VIII. PUBLIC OPINION AND THE NATIONAL CODE The code of any peace-group must contain, of necessity, taboos on violence, and also upon con- duct likely to lead to violence; otherwise the existence of the group would always be in jeopardy. " Thou shalt not kill " and " thou shalt not steal " are such taboos. Any member who transgresses these formulations of adjust- ment to life-conditions is removed from the group or some attempt is made to force him into har- mony. The code of any peace-group whatsoever must contain these taboos as a condition of being a peace-group ; this has l)een tested over and over throughout human history^ has become tradi- tional, and is never questioned. Other items in the code of a modern nation, such as freedom of conscience, are of much later development, having been acquired within the recent historic period. No variations are permitted that may tend to weaken these fundamentals ; in fact, every varia- tion is tested on the criterion of its consistency 70 PUBLIC OPINION 71 with the fundamentals. Thus is many a pro- posed law declared unconstitutional, that is, in- consistent with the national principles, or the genius of national institutions. But where the fundamentals of the code are not obviously in question, a flexible and adaptable societal system will show free and versatile va- riation. Such variability has a high selective value, for its presence means a heightened chance of securing, through comparison of multiplied ex- pedients, a speedy and adequate adjustment. But that result cannot come about unless un- hampered freedom of expression is accorded to the producers of any new expedient for living, whereby they may seek to oft'er it for imitation and concurrence, spontaneous or induced, in com- petition with other variations. I have said that such competition aims at power, political or other ; but that power can be gained only by win- ning over public opinion. Now, public opinion is commonly supposed to be responsive to reason, and people wlio accept that supposition are led to lay much stress upon reasoned and purposeful individual initiative as a moving force in societal evolution. If such a position is sound, then society practices a rational selection among its mores, and therefore a rational adjustment to its 72 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE life-conditions. It is necessary to reflect upon this matter before we go on. In conceiving of public opinion we are all in- clined to think of it as the opinion of our own circle of life, and if one's circle is composed chiefly of educated people, as is generally the case with any theoretical writer, he is apt to assume that public opinion includes a large element of the in- tellectual or of the rationally discriminative. But genuine public opinion cannot be anything else than the consensus of the whole society ; and the vast bulk of any society is composed of so- called " common people,'' not at all or not very well educated, of horizons much limited, and without the time, surplus energy, or even capacity or willingness to grapple intellectually with broad and general issues. This is no indictment of those who form the solid strength of any society ; in fact there are not a few of those who are regarded as intellectuals because of eminence in certain restricted fields, who are both artless and child-like when they set out to pass judgment on the societal order. The scope of any human intellect is circumscribed. Few men can deal in- telligently with the broadest issues of societal ad- justment. There is no immediate test or verifi- cation to go by, and it is generally only after the PUBLIC OPINION 78 issue is long past that the " verdict of history," the only sure one, can be rendered. Public opinion, in brief, is a matter of feeling rather than of intellect; and the feeling is de- veloped in connection with a more or less localized interest. If such interests are being realized, public opinion is favorable to or acqui- escent in the societal order ; if not, there is " un- rest " and a threat of conflict to secure change. Men adjust consciously only to what they can see, or visualize, or think they see. This may be thoroughly irrational, as with the primitive peo- ple, who have a whole set of adjustments to a world of ghosts and demons — a construction that can withstand none of our accepted tests of reality. And yet it is possible to contend that public opinion is prevailingly " right " — even that the vow populi is the vox dei. Public opinon sup- ported primitive religions. We cannot at all agree with the assumptions upon which it rested. But the religions were of the highest societal ef- fectiveness, constituting as they did, among other things, a powerful disciplinary factor just when and where discipline was most needed. They had a high survival- value and public sentiment was " right " in supporting them. Society auto- 74 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE matically used the public opinion, intellectually mistaken as it was, with the result of securing adaptation to conditions that really existed, and to them as they existed. Men in those elder ages never saw the societal expediency of their re- ligion ; it was all the time being put to uses quite other than those the contemplation of which had won it the favor of the public. No matter whence or how they arose, or how they were viewed by the individual mind, primitive re- ligious institutions represented a real adjust- ment to life-conditions, and therefore persisted, surviving all sorts of selective tests along their course. I do not wish to say that enlightenment has not enabled a modern society to proceed more in- telligently and consciously toward its destiny; but any one who faces the facts will have to con- clude that intelligent and conscious action is still, among the masses of mankind, confined for the most part to local issues and even to personal exigencies. The wider view is the rare view; it is, for example, the view of the statesman as con- trasted with that of the " practical politician." Most of us are but little concerned in action that contemplates a distant or universal result; few PUBLIC OPINION 75 people can take a deep intelligent interest in a social program, like that of eugenics, which aims at an improvement of the whole human race some centuries hence. The human tendency is to shrink such a jirogram down to a proximate, im- mediate aim ; to make it bear on the present situation, and upon the local interest of the ad- herent. Certainly the adjustment of a nation's code, not to say that of a race, to life-conditions is one of those matters that transcend the mental outfit and powers of most, if not of all men. How, then, can public opinion be trusted to settle such an issue? The answer is, because the process is typically automatic and impersonal, of a larger potency than any intellect-directed process can be, and must of necessity work out into adjust- ment. Consider the adjustment secured by natural selection, which is so apt that it was at first un- hesitatingly ascribed to infinite intelligence, and so rational in its outcome that the best brains of mankind have been employed for centuries in simply following out the process and seeing how it was done. Science has limped along after natural fact; after the act it has offered, at 76 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE length, its rational explanation; but would it trust itself, even now, to vie with the process which it has followed and learned? What science has learned is how things are and how they go, in the natural order. These pro- cesses cannot be altered, but they can be fallen in with, or adjusted to, with the result of human well-being. There is here no negation of the value of human knowledge and of action in its light. And the case is similar in the societal realm. The process, here too, is " riglit " as the natural process is " right " because it is of the same impersonal, elemental nature. The test is, in one case as in the other, the magnificently simple and conclusive one of persistence or non- persistence. Our business is to learn how things are and how they go, in the societal order; these processes, like the natural ones, cannot be altered, l)ut we can fall in with them, or adjust to them, with the result of societal well-being. Recurring now to public opinion, which comes near to being the elemental force in societal evo- lution, we find it based upon sentiment and in- terest rather tlian upon intellectual analyses of complicated conditions. Upon interest — but here is precisely the touchstone of society's ad- justments : do they subserve interests or do they PUBLIC OPINION 77 not? Each local group, while incompetent to survey the interests of the whole society, is clear enough upon its own immediate status, for it has to live from day to day in that status, and it knows without much cerebration whether life is comfortable or not. It is the only agency that can pass upon that question; for it is well-nigh impossible for a member of one group to see the life in another as a member of the latter sees it. If each group is to judge of its own interests, the responsibility lies precisely where the real ex- perience is. The resulting inferences as to what ought to be done may be wrong; in fact, through the suggestion of interested parties a group or class may be persuaded that it has cause for dis- content when none would be felt if it had been let alone ; but it is just the virtue of the automatic process that under it such unrealities at once en- counter, along with the realities, an unplanned test by conflict. If there is anything in proposed variations of the code, it will come out, at length ; if there are only phantasms, they will be dis- sipated under the test. If all the interests, locally felt and locally defended, have their chance within the arena marked out by the limits set in the code of the inclusive society, the com- posite product of the consequent selection, neither 78 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE foreseen nor planned by any one, will represent a more expedient adjustment for the whole society. And if the arena is too narrow, or the restriction too cramping, that too will take care of itself; the pressure of discontented groups is bound to increase under repression until the conflict issues in a revolutionary modification of the broader outlines of the society's code, or even in the violent disruption of the peace-group itself. Ad- justment to life-conditions is a necessity of life, for organism or society. It is bound to come. The peace-group, as we have seen, is an ex- pedient for living whose efficacy is unquestioned by any one except, perhaps, certain crazy anar- chists. But its adaptability, through freedom accorded to public opinion, has been a matter of growth. At an early period in the world's his- tory it was not in the mores to allow of the free expression of general opinion. " Sit down thy- self and cause the rest of the people to sit down," suggests Odysseus, blandly, to the excited noble, " for not yet dost thou clearly know what is the mind of the son of Atreus " ; but with the common man he uses harsher measures, and thunders : " Sit still and harken to the words of others who are your betters! On no account shall all the Achseans be king here. Not good is the rule of PUBLIC OPINION 79 many; one is to be leader, one is to be king." Yet even in Homer's time, and in war, the as- sembly of the people could make itself felt by peaceable means, even though the threat of vio- lence lay not far away. The course of civilization has been marked by a progressive enlargement of the range of expres- sion accorded to the popular will. This has as- sured the stability of peace-groups to a higher and higher degree, for it has amounted to enlarged opportunity for the realization of interests with- out resort to violence. It is the justification for a freedom of speech almost bordering upon li- cense, that popular discontent may thus blow it- self off into thin air and do no such damage as it might if confined. Limitation of freedom of expression is popular only when the group-code and the sentiment of patriotism supporting it are endangered and ou^traged. Formerly, then, there was little apparatus for the expression of public opinion. The society was conceived to be in the hands of its rulers. Theoretically the Homeric king was the only per- son who had a right to speak, even in the as- sembly, and if any one else wanted the floor, he had the privilege conferred upon him by being handed the royal scepter. The assembly of all 80 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tribal members, in earlier European times, often had no other mode of exi)ression than applause or silence in the face of an announcement of intent. But this state of inarticulateness was succeeded by the evolution of various devices, into the de- tail of which we need not go, which limited the power of the ruler by allowing registration of the popular will. When the king ceased to be a religious fetish and lost " divine right,'' there fell away, for the emancipated peoples, a formid- able barrier to the free expression of public opinion. The modern form of adjustment in this matter of enfranchising public opinion is democracy, where, as the etymology of the term indicates, recognition is accorded to no ruler at all except the demos or people. But no society can get along without an executive of its will. There has always been an executive of the society's code ; the only difference between types of execu- tive worth mentioning in this connection has lain in the degree of responsibility imposed. The executive is but a man, and he belongs to some class in the society. If not responsible, he may try to impose a capricious personal will or the special code of his class. As a matter of fact, there was always a limit to this sort of thing, PUBLIC OPINION 81 even if it had to be established by assassination. Deposition of some sort has been common enough under unlimited monarchies. Under the consti- tutional monarchy, the constitution or charter of rights laid down the essentials of the national code, and the executive was held responsible for its defense and upholding, as well as limited to action within it. If he or his class abused their position of power to tamper with the code of rights, there was always the expedient of revo- lution. But, in the recession from violence or from situations fraught with the threat of vio- lence, all of which menaced the very peace-group itself, the device of "peaceful revolution," or election, arose as a better adjustment. Nowa- days the executive — president or premier — is subject to periodic examination at the bar of public opinion ; the issue is as to whether he has executed its mandates or not. Meanwhile the king, where there is one, is a survival except as he symbolizes continuity, and in some other rela- tively unimportant respects. The election, though it is associated with per- sons, is essentially a selection in the details of the national code — details surrounding the un- questioned essentials to which allusion has several times been made. Some elections are 82 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE frankly the decision of an issue, as, for example, woman-suffrage; and the party platforms some- times make a clear presentation of an issue, as where protection and free trade have stood over against one another. A party espouses a certain type of societal policy and draws its adherents from certain well-recognized groups in the popu- lation that have, or think they have, interests in common. A revolt against the traditional code may bring about a new alignment, as in the case of the Progressives. However, when certain men have been elected, while it is understood that their special policies are to prosper with them, they are yet bound to uphold the national code and to look after the essential interests of all their constituents, of whatever political faith. The representatives are those to whom is dele- gated, so far as their constituencies go, the selective power of public opinion, but the dele- gating body can hold them responsible, for it has regularly recurring opportunities to con- tinue or discontinue its representatives. The move toward the referendum and recall indicates discontent with the traditional system of repre- sentation, and impatience over having to wait awhile for a chance to rebuke and change repre- sentatives. It is an important new variation at PUBLIC OPINION 83 the end of a long line of development, some of whose intervening phases we have reviewed, stretching from an era of restriction of the popu- lar voice toward ever greater freedom. Election is the typical modern method by which societal selection is accomplished within the peace-group, and an altered adjustment is attained. It is not asserted, however, that a single such expression of public opinon must be " right." The candid examination of an Ameri- can election ^ makes one dubious as to the effi- cacy of public opinion to secure expedient societal adjustments by this method. It can be swayed to a considerable extent by interested and un- scrupulous parties; let one refer to Lecky on the function of the demagogue in a democracy,^ or to Sumner on " Legislation by Clamor." ^ But we have as yet no surer device for apprais- ing public sentiment within a peace-group. It is needful for any one who wishes to see what there is in any evolutionary process to realize that much has been done in the lapse of time which we cannot perceive going on under our 1 For a brief account of the election as a method of societal selection, see Keller, "Societal Evolution," pp. 105-114. 2 " Democracy and Liberty," I, 22-23. 3 In "Collected Essays," III, 186-187. 84, THROUGH WAR TO PEACE eyes. We have gained man}^ an expedient ad- justment of societ}' at the hand of public opinion when, to contemporaries, it appeared that the popular will, in the contradictoriness of its ex- pressions, practically cancelled out. A societal process must be allowed its time and be viewed over a long perspective ; it should not be judged by a series of isolated and perhaps erratic swings. Only it cannot be accredited with purposeful rationality in the attainment of adjustments, and least of all can it be referred to the indi- vidual. It shows a general trend and some very actual results, when viewed over a long enough course and in perspective. Evolution does not produce perfection. It does not even bring forth a superlative, but only comparatives. Before des])airing, or even pass- ing judgment, one should always compare the contemporary evolutionary product with what went before. Defective as the election is, in iso- lated instances, one would be a bold man to ad- vocate going back to the theory and practice out of which this less restrained expression of public opinion once developed. On the face of it, and in short perspective, the lodgment of power in a few individuals, or even in one autocrat, seems PUBLIC OPINION 85 to attain an efficiency toward which a democ- racy vainly strains. And yet, to go back to a monarchical system would be to return to a su- perseded societal form. IX. THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE- GKOUP Hitherto the peace-group has been taken to include, at most, a nation, and the social code to be, at its widest, a national code. But the peace-group has shown an ampler extension than this ; empires have become veritable peace-groups, when covered by a Marjna Pax Romana or a Magna Pax Britannica. With such cases in mind the conception of the peace-group may be much expanded. But I do not want to stop short, in the present instance, of the widest prac- ticable application and implication of much that has been set down in preceding pages. Of course if " human brotherhood " is ever realized, the peace-group will be coterminous with the world. However, not to consider Utopias, let us put some such question as this : Have not civilized na- tions, at least temporarily, actually formed a grand peace-group ; and is there not in existence, even now, an international peace-group and also a code of civilized nations, covering essential in- 86 THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 87 ternational adjustments, to which all civilized nations have at least professed adherence? Whether or not civilized nations have been at war for fully as much of their time in the modern period as in former ones,^ it appears that warfare between nations, where the contending parties have both been representatives of high civiliza- tion, has been progressively less frequent. And it certainly seems safe to say that war has not taken place over such a variety of issues, some of them relatively trivial, as was formerly the case. It has not taken place at all, in recent times, without assertions of reluctance on both sides and without mutual accusations, between the enemies, of having transgressed certain tra- ditional norms of conduct. Such transgression must constitute, it is assumed, in the eyes of all civilized peoples, guilt deserving of punishment. Peace is in the international mores; whatever may be said of the actuality of war, the tradition respecting international relations of civilized peoples assumes a peace unbroken save under the most exceptional circumstances. The fact that " confidence-men " attain success is no proof that most people are dishonest ; quite the reverse, for that success is attained because people confide in 1 See Woods and Baltzly, " I3 War Diminishing? " 88 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE one another's honesty. Germany's doings do not witness the non-existence of an international code, but prove rather tliat most nations were depending upon such a code, with its tradition of international conduct, as on a very real and trustworthy thing. In so far as this tradition has represented the facts, the civilized nations have formed an inter- national peace-group; and even when the tradi- tion has not been followed by all, it has yet borne witness to a tendency towards the formation of sucli a group. The very circumstance that ap- peal was made, even hypocritically, to a tradi- tion of international behavior, indicates that a set of international mores has at least been in process of formation. There was no law to ap- peal to. It has been asserted with much justice that, despite university courses in the subject, there is no international law; but all civilized nations have recognized a body of international precedents, and there has even been an effort to legalize them by setting up an international tri- bunal. Evidently there has been rapprochement of an international nature, which exhibits all the essential marks of an at least incipient peace- group. This societal expedient, beginning in the THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 89 primitive family, has extended to include tribe, nation, confederation and even empire; and it seems not yet to have exhausted its scope. The inteiTiational peace-group, if it has not arrived, is well along in the process of becoming. There is no inherent reason why the extension of the peace-group must be limited by national boundaries. It is an adaptation to conditions of living presented to human society; and if it has shown undoubted survival-value for ever larger and larger societies, and has successfully transcended boundary after boundary, the infer- ence is that there is no limit to its expediency set by the increasing size of the compounded societal group. But it is also evident that, since the peace-group is made possible only by the fact that its members possess essential mores and interests in common, so that they may all adhere to a broad code in the matter of the essentials of conduct, competing as respects minor interests without violence — it is evident, I say, that each extension of this group involves greater complex- ity and refinement of adjustment. The larger the peace-group, as we have seen, the fewer the mores held in common by all parties. The code of the large peace-group is composed of few 90 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE items; more interests have to be settled by com- petition ; and so there is always more chance that violence will break out. One of the essentials of a stable peace-group is that its constituent parts shall understand each other, at least in a general way. This is one of the fundamental reasons for insisting upon a single national language; the peace-group that can place that one of the mores in its code adds immensely to its stability. Compare the British and the Dual Empires in the matter of their stability, and note the efforts of Germany to further the assimilation of Alsace-Lorraine by forcing out the former tongue. But all such in- sistence upon homogeneity in the national unit accentuates its individuality; and tlint makes the formation of a larger international composite the more difficult. The more perfect the organiza- tion of the national peace-groups, and the more settled and definite their codes, the more trouble is there bound to be in the construction of an in- ternational peace-group. It is like trying to secure a general agreement among adult persons of pronounced convictions and individuality. Aside from the obvious difference in language, the separate nations have never understood one another very well, and their divergences have THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 91 been emphasized by their ethnocentrism. No wonder, therefore, that the adjustment to civ- ilized society's life-conditions represented by an international peace-group is as yet an imperfect one. It could never have appeared at all except for the previous partial conquest of numerous barriers calculated to keep nations apart and un- able to understand one another. These barriers were such as prevented or hindered the inter- transmission of the mores, and their conquest was at the hand of agencies, for the most part auto- matically developed, which furthered such trans- mission. Of all the agencies which have brought groups of men into proximity so that they could know and learn from one another, become similar, tolerant, or even, at length, friendly, by far the most effective is trade. Doubtless the first peaceful meeting-ground of tribes and nations was the market. The development of trade has been a thoroughly and typically natural and auto- matic movement, directed by immediate self- interest and with no purpose in view except the realization of definite, material ends. Yet, al- though the trader directly and consciously assaulted no one of the barriers to peace and the mutual assimilation of codes, he ended by under- 92 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE mining and leveling most of them. He trans- mitted products, then processes, then mores in general, between nation and nation. I need not go into the detail of this transmission, which resulted in a spreading similarit}^ in civilization and a consequent lessening of the feeling of strangeness and hostility. Other agencies of transmission operated along with trade, the most modern of these being, perhaps, the novel. Most people know little of Russia, for example, outside of what Turgenev, Dostoyevski, and other Russian writers have told them. The net result of" all the inter-transmission has been the possi- bility of the rapprochement of which I have spoken. When that possibility emerged, the au- tomatic drift of civilized nations was toward an agreement upon essentials, and a shifting of conflict from its violent pliase into an industrial, commercial, or other peaceable competition. This is, on the larger scale, what happened in the formation of the limited national peace- group. There are essentials upon whicli all com- bining elements at least profess to agree; then there are the minor matters concerning which they remain in constant, but peaceful conflict and competition. But nations are not so will- THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 93 ing to sign away portions of their independence as are constituent groups within the same nation ; there is not the same mutual confidence, nor is there the same apparatus of centralization. Nearly all groups in this country are willing to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court; but when it comes to an international court of arbitration, certain reservations are made, for example, touching questions of national " honor." No nation is sure that all of the essentials of its code are going to be represented in the official international code which such a court is de- signed to interpret. Each nation is concerned for its interests be- cause the comparatively few items of the inter- national code have to be stated in comprehensive and therefore somewhat vague terms, that seem susceptible of a variety of interpretations. And there has been developed no system for checking up the international authorities, in so far as they may be taken to exist at all. The whole organi- zation of the international peace-group is, in brief, inchoate and unstable, and public opinion, without reasoning that out, feels it and becomes wary of committing itself. Perhaps if there could have been a world-empire of some sort, 94 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE corresponding to the original despotism of the group-chief, there would have been something definite and actual to limit and modify, as there was in the case of the smaller society. The case is always more natural where there is something- positive upon which to use negative, restrictive methods, than where there is something to build up out of chaotic materials. Most human insti- tutious are formed as the statue is freed from the rugged block, by hacking, and at length chiseling away the jagged corners and unlovely attach- ments that imprison the real figure, as someone has exi)ressed it, within the originally rude mass. Yet there has been, after all, in peace-group forming, something original and crude to hack at and to chisel down, and that was the general savagery of former international relations. The rude and shapeless block, in the case of any hu- man institution, has been always a chaotic mass of mores, and the drill and chisel have been the taboo. The taboo has been the great institution- shaper. Let us desert, for the time, the appar- ently dubious recent projects aimed at the crea- tion of an international peace-group, and look into the process from the other end, trjdng to fol- low somewhat up its line of evolution. This will lead us to consider the modification of the earlier THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 95 forms toward what we have, rather than to spec- ulate upon what we can do, by taking thought, or to worry over what seems, in our disillusion- ment; impossible. X. THE INTERNATIONAL CODE We start, then, from the violent conflict be- tween tribes and nations and are to follow its modifications toward peaceful competition. Al- ways out of the war-element have sprung varia- tions making for peace; and, thougli we cannot always see the why and how, it is yet an unde- niable fact that they have survived and replaced mores of violence. The methods of the violent conflict itself have been altered toward mildness. Once warfare was like the chase and utterly un- regulated by any taboos. There was no warn- ing declaration, no quarter to the vanquished, no chivalry of any sort. Poisoned springs, poisoned thorns planted upright in the path, or poisoned weapons were common enough in war- practice. Any method was good that secured the result. But long ago all this was altered : then declaration came seldom to be omitted, prisoners were adopted or enslaved, and the duel or the gantlet gave a captive at least a theoretic chance. Odysseus could get no poison in Ephyre to anoint his arrows with, for the man to whom he applied 96 THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 97 would not give, fearing the immortal gods. The other forms of poisoning, assaults without warn- ing, mutilation, torture, and many another sav- age custom were superseded. The rules of war were developed — rules that a proper man or tribe would not think of infringing. For most savage peoples war became, in a certain rude sense, a gentleman's game. Punctilios grew up along these lines until warfare became as hu- mane, courteous, and high-minded as such a practice could well be. There were developed also small oases or nuclei of peace, in the shape of truces for burying the dead or for other purposes, and treaties of alliance, offensive and defensive. In connection with trade, and sanctioned by religion, there grew up several types of peace : the market-peace, the temple-peace, the peace of God. The mutual suspicion that is revealed so significantly in " dumb barter " or " silent trade " was allayed, so that merchant and customer trusted them- selves in one another's proximity, even unarmed. Disputes came to be discussed and smoothed over, revenge for injuries sustained was commuted into property-payments. The apparatus, personnel, and methods of diplomacy began to appear. Numerous courteous forms of inter-group com- 98 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE munication sprang up — forms often empty in the fact, but whose existence was significant of conciliation rather than of defiance or indif- ference. Further and more detailed agreements came to be made, as the centuries passed, concerning the occasions and methods of war-making, con- cerning trade in all its aspects, freedom of the seas, spheres of interest or influence, religion, extradition, immigration, copyright, the maOs, and thousands of other matters, smaller and greater. By many of the agreements of this order, and potentially by each of them, there was averted an unmistakable possibility of resort to arms. They were nearly all, therefore, in ef- fect taboos on violence, and, as such, construc- tive of peace. Among civilized nations they came gradually to constitute a series of tradi- tions or precedents, and behavior in accordance with this code became the mark of the civilized nation or a member thereof. Further transmission of the mores, possible now that nations might be at peace for pro- tracted periods, and might come, through the development of trade and communications, to be ever better acquainted with one another, led to concurrence of all in variations developed by THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 99 some. The Germans speedily adopted the Ameri- can invention or process; the Americans visited the German cities to study their municipal ad- ministration ^\ith a view to adapting and adopt- ing it. Especially did the New World send students to the Old, to acquire learning and polish of manners. Many departments of socie- tal life, but especially the economic, took on an essential similarity over the civilized world. It was a case of concurrence in selected variations which, as the event proved, secured better adjust- ment to the life-conditions of the several societies. And among the sweeping adjustments was the democratic state, of which I have spoken ; free- dom of pul)lic opinion and the control by peoples of their own destinies, by way of parliamentary government, came to be the mode in the civilized world. In a still more general way, the evolution of society led toward the supersession of mediaeval methods resting upon suspicion of machiavellian policies on the part of the governments of fellow- nations. All interests could not be entrusted to general sentiments of mutual fairness, good-will, and friendship, however insistently these were voiced upon public occasions; but a nation's honor was supposed to be involved in the keeping 100 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE of its voluntary engagements, and it was almost if not quite unheard-of that a government should not try to prove that it had been honorable, even tliough it had not. That degree, at least, of deference to the international code could be counted on. For there was here, in actuality, such a code. I have not aimed at exhaustiveness in the pre- ceding sketch of the mores that developed within the international group. The group was an im- perfect thing, and the code was not imperative in anything like the same degree as a national code with a government behind it. It could not be that, in the past or present, and may never be so. But it is plain enough that civilized nations have been long on the way toward an automatic ordering of their joint destiny — long on the way, to secure even so imperfect a result as the one before us, with the inferential pros- pect of remaining yet long on the way before it can be realized in any perfection — plainly, how- ever, on the way, if a long enough sweep of societal evolution is surveyed. Now it is possible to get a sense of the real existence of an international code by asking why a certain nation, say Turkey, has not been in- cluded within the concourse of civilization. The THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 101 former Armenian massacres, together with many another sinister performance, have ruled her out. And why? Because such things are forbidden by the civilized code. Russia's pogroms, and the general character of her government, were hardly outweighed by certain positive qualifications. But Japan was of the group. The disqualifica- tions are easier to name than are the qualifica- tions for membership. It is a harder task to determine what conduct is consonant with a code than what is not; for the code, from the Deca- logue down, is couched, if reduced at all to form, in the negative — Thou shalt not. In general, it is to those same mores which enable a smaller society to hold together in adjustment to life-conditions that nations must cling, if they are to form, or while they form, even temporarily, a peace-group. We have seen that the two taboos on killing and stealing have had to be enforced as a condition of societal sur- vival. But all such taboos confer rights; the two just mentioned confer respectively the right to life and the right to property within the peace- group — not outside, for peace is preserved only within the boundaries, and it has always been laudable to kill and rob the member of the "out- group." Similarly, all the taboos connected 102 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE with any code confer rights of one kind or an- other upon the adherents of the code, that is, the members of the peace-group in question. And there is a duty corresponding to each such right, imposed upon each group-member, namely, the obligation to support the right conferred. In a stable peace-group any member may be called upon to help enforce the code and punish the transgressor of it — to enforce and punish by violence, if need be. The extreme of individual punishment is always exclusion, permanent or for a term, from the society. The laws, being the crystallized part of the code, carry a threat of such punishment for conduct varying widely from the norm. Minor offenses against local codes are visited with ostracism, ridicule, and other milder penalties. It is now proposed to do something analogous in a wider field — something in the line of en- forcement of the international code through the projected League to Enforce Peace. We are not interested here in programs, but in historic fact. The fact is that each of the nations now belligerent professes to be fighting because it, or some other member of the concourse of civilized nations, has been injured as respects some right guaranteed by the common code. But this im- THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 103 plies that the international peace-group ought to have been able to make good its guarantee with- out any one resorting to arms, and that it has failed. And that implication introduces the query as to whether an enlarged peace-group can assure any international rights by peaceful means. But the international peace-group has not as yet taken form sufficiently to have developed apparatus for guaranteeing anything. Even the very ancient nation had a king into whose hands the mores were delivered for safeguarding; but there is no corresponding international func- tionary. There is no executive. There is also no law-making body, nor yet a judiciary whose authority is habitually deferred to. If we ask what rights the international peace-group might claim to secure — which is equivalent, as we have seen, to inquiring as to what taboos there are in the international code — we find that these latter are nowhere stated in authoritative guise, as in a constitution. They are not codified in specific form; they are not even recorded in a generalized form. Some authors have sought to assemble international cases or to generalize upon international usage in some particular field, but no recognized codification has emerged. 104 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE The international political or governmental organization — the apparatus for international control — is where the organization of the na- tional peace-group was some time ago. There is, among civilized nations, a common public opinion, and that public opinion can and does distinguish between civilized and other conduct. There are also i)recedents based upon former set- tlements, secured bj conflict or compromise be- tween two or more nations. But that is all there is. For enforcing its behests the " judgment of civilization " is provided with no current and usual means short of violence or the threat of violence. Nations stand toward one another a good deal as individuals or small societies stood, before the advent of enforceable law; the}^ strive to realize their own interests with small heed to the wider interests of the corporate body of which they are coming to form a part. They make common cause with, or fall into disagreement with their fellows, according as their lasting or shifting in- terests harmonize or antagonize. The result is large-scale alignment or opposition, on the order of the party alliance and opposition within the better organized smaller peace-group. But there is no wav of reallv settling differences short of THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 105 force. There is no parallel to the election, but at best a veiled military menace. Ententes, un- derstandings, treaties, balancings of power are the onlj' devices for preserving the peace — be- tween the contracting parties as well as between the alliance and awed outsiders — and these as- sociations are only as strong as their weakest links, their least interested members. There are often also secret arrangements, a fact which leads of course to mutual distrust and suspicion. They are untrustworthy and always imply a threat of violence. They are very far inferior to the arrangements for securing the rights of component parts, as developed in the older, smaller types of the peace-group. There is, in a word, no international organization of control. There is a recession from war as a means of set- tlement, but there is nothing definite and reliable to take its place. There is only that diplomacy which finds its ex- pression in the treaties and other arrangements alluded to. This factor, however, is not to be despised. I have quoted some one who said: " If peoples are mad enough, they will fight ; " and the speaker added : " If they aren't, the ordinary means of diplomacy will do." That is, diplomacy will secure peace up to a certain point. 106 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE and on the minor issues. It may prevent a minor issue from becoming, through misunderstanding and excitement, a major one. It is full of com- promise and of the quid pro quo. It is like the settlement out of court. It helps to make prece- dents, and has been of solid utility in preventing conflict. But it represents no real control. It has no organization and is generally an al'fair of two nations rather than an international thing. It shows a set of variations in international mores rather than a settled institutional form. Its practice represents international politics rather than international statesmanship. But its out-reachings are promising, as the va- riation is always prophetic of better adaptation. Once there was no diplomacy to speak of, and what there was lay between small isolated tribes; now its field has expanded and it is doing for the larger groups what it once did for the smaller. There it led to closer and closer agreements and to alliances; and it is the basis, as we have seen, of the ententes and other wide rajyprochements of great nations. It undoubtedly prevented tribal wars and spread mutual knowledge and toler- ance ; and it has unquestionably staved off inter- national conflict and brought nations into alli- ance for a common cause. It has also improved THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 107 in quality, until, in the most enlightened hands, it has ceased to be a mere art of trickery and double-dealing; the diplomat is supposed to guard the honor of his country. It is a shock to the civilized world when an accredited represen- tative of a civilized nation takes advantage of the hospitality accorded him to exhibit the traits of uncivilization. In such a case, the govern- ment that sent him hastens to disavow and pun- ish his action, at least in form, unless it w'ishes to recognize him, and it, as correctly representing his country of origin and its degree of civiliza- tion. However, diplomacy is not the definite thing that can replace violent conflict between nations, as political competition has displaced the conflict in arms within the range of a central- ized governmental control. International com- petition has not yet arrived at any settled fonn of combination rei)resenting an adjustment that renders the primitive form of militancy obsolete. Within the smaller peace-group, with its politi- cal competition, the peace is to be kept, who- ever wins. Nothing such appears in the larger group. One nation is overreached in diplomacy, and at once gets ready to adjourn to another arena where diplomacy is not. But within both smaller and larger groups there is a further form 108 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE of peaceful competition, the industrial and com- mercial, or, to cover both terms with one, the economic. It is very largely in connection with this form of conflict that diplomacy has been developed. Commercial competition, in earlier times, was a development out of war-competition, and readily ran back into the violence out of which it came. Piracy was a sort of reverse side of early trade; for a long time the violent form persisted alongside the peaceful one, and the mer- chant was trader or pirate according to circum- stances. Trade wars were common even after the world-market began to develop; every rival nation was after a monopoly, which was succes- sively held by force, and lost to force, by Vene- tians, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutcli. Then came agreements of various sorts, arranged by diplomatic agents, and accompanied by the growth of the sentiment that they must be lived up to. When the international competition became also industrial, that is, when a market was sought for the products of national industries, the con- flict became even keener. But the competitors clung to peace as to an indispensable condition. In the economic field the trade-war was no longer a matter of guns. There was talk about trade THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 109 following the flag, while the world was not as yet partitioned oft' into spheres of influence and colonies ; but latterly it was seen by most civilized nations that, despite tariff barriers and other artificial hindrances, economic success went to the nation that could most efficiently produce and most skillfully market its wares. The economic competition was what engaged the at- tention of the most advanced nations, and the possibility of a resort to violence seemed, for the most part, remote. Few realized that Germany could not be content with her rapid and regular successes in this competition, but was eagerly awaiting the day Avhen she might destroy the great rival upon whom she was pressing, in legiti- mate wise, so closely. There was here, in form at least, a close approximation to the conditions obtaining in a real peace-group. As I have said, there was no controlling and guaranteeing international organization. Confi- dence in living on safely under keen economic competition rested in agreements of various sorts, guaranteed solely by the good faith of their makers. It was in the mores that nations should keep their word and s.erve their own honor. A " decent respect for the opinion of mankind " demanded that. It was so much a matter of no THROUGH WAR TO PEACE course that, when one of the leading competitors turned out to be treacherous^, the rest were taken almost completely by surprise. It is not to be understood that the nations were lookiiig out for one another's interests, in an altruistic way. That was not the reason for even that unparalleled British freedom of trade under which alone the economic successes of other nations in the world-market became pos- sible. No nation was ready, with self-abnega- tion, to fight another's battle, or in any way to support a competitor against its own interest. No nation cared to interfere witli another's more&, for example with polygamy, in a purely disinterested way. It was precisely because each was pursuing its own interests and securing agreements that furthered them that, as in the smaller peace-group, the inteiests of all were in the proper hands and came to be realized to a degree permitting of content under the system. Nations, like classes, knew tlieir own interests best, and in confining their attention to realizing them, were trying to do precisely what they were best fitted to do. The query emerged above as to whether there were any rights conferrable by the international peace-grou]), aside from the exercise of a violence, THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 111 or the threat of such, which, in action, would render the group no peace-group at all. It was found that the " judgment of civilization " was provided with no traditional meaus for enforcing its behests short of violence or the threat of it. The only other means in sight has been an auto- matic recession from economic relations with a nation that might exhibit signs of economic un- trustworthiness. In the economic competition, however, civilized nations have found honesty and honor, or at least the counterfeit present- ment of such, so good a policy that there has been little sinning, among themselves, against it. The opposite qualities have been the mark of un- civilization that no nation \\ished to bear. To keep agreements has been one of the basic quali- fications for membership in the concourse of civ- ilization. The possibility of ordering existence within any peace-group is dependent upon the presence of that practice in the mores. If the sword is to be renounced, there must be some- thing dependable in its place. Until the nature of the German code stood revealed, the world thought it had something dependable in its in- ternational treaties and covenants. Let us con- sider briefly the nature of that code in the light of which they meant nothing. XI. THE GERMAN CODE No nation, in the pre-war period, was succeed- ing better in the commercial and industrial com- petition between the nations than was Germany. It was she who injected into that competition an organization and system before unknown. The hard-headed English business man of the past, largely unaided by his government, had opened wide foreign markets with unparalleled success. The English method of trading abroad has been described as " individualism gone mad." It is only in relatively recent years, and then under the stimulus of German competition, that the British government has lent regular and systematic support to the British merchant. The German method was systematically pater- nalistic. The individual German trader was, in- deed, practical and systematic ; and he has been aided at every turn by government-fostered cor- porations and other trade-promoting agencies, and also directly by the state itself. " The one characteristic of the trade organization of Ger- 112 THE GERMAN CODE 113 many, which makes more toward efficiency than anything else is tlie cooperation which exists be- tween the government, on the one hand, and the business interests on the other.'' ^ There have been in Germany a number of organizations with interminable names and equally interminable enterprise and funds : The Imperial Consultative Board for the Elaboration of Commercial Measures, for example. The German consular service has advised the mer- chant at all times. The government has issued tons of literature for his instruction and profit. The railways have been caused to assist him, and the banks as well. The amount of official care taken in this matter is astonishing in its magnitude. All this is immensely costly — too costly for any other agency than the state — but it has seemed to prove itself worth the price. More than this, the government, meaning Bis- marck, a most skillful observer of the mores, was converted, along in the early eighties, to the creation of a colonial empire. It promptly seized three large areas and one small one in Africa ; a section of New Guinea and the adjacent Melane- sian archipelago, re-named " Bismarck-Archi- pel " ; a section of a province in China ; and cer- 1 Biahop, A. L., in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1914. 114 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tain small islands in the Pacific.^ The represen- tations of German merchants, and their plea for protection and for areas of trade-expansion, were largely responsible for this movement. This colonial empire was a veritable seizure from un- der the very paws of the British lion. The Ger- man Commissioner beat the British agent to Togo, the Cameroons, and Southwest Africa by hours, and the Melanesian holdings were taken in the face of British and Australian intentions of occupation. The Chinese station was exacted, under a ninety-nine year " lease," in consequence of the murder of certain German missionaries; and the current feeling as to the transaction found expression in the soliloquy attributed to the Kaiser by a comic paper : " If my mission- aries only hold out, I shall soon own the earth." East Africa was acquired by the efforts of three young adventurers who, sailing under assumed names and disguised as laborers, but with the support of the Society for German Colonization, bullied or cajoled a bundle of treaties, imper- fectly if at all understood, out of native chiefs. It was felt at the time that these proceedings partook of the cavalier nature, but the British 1 The story of German colonization is rehearsed in some detail in Keller, " Colonization." THE GERMAN CODE 115 statesmen were too dazed, under the calculated abruptness of Bismarck, to make objection. Such forceful methods had not been in use hith- erto, for the German sense of power had emerged but recently ; but they were passed over, and even somewhat admired. The important fact that issues from these details is that Ger- many went at the commercial and industrial competition in a highly organized and systematic way; and that it was, openly or covertly, the State that headed most of the projects and saw them through. The British system, or lack of system, had been far less of an organized and artificial and more of a " natural '' tjj)e. But this new sort of thing, while it was regarded as characteristic of German manners and lack of amenity, aroused no special opposition or even misgiving. Later on, however, certain statesmen became convinced that Germany was looking for trouble. The Kaiser's visit to the Holy Land, his proclama- tion of himself as protector of Islam, the incident of Manila Bay, the Moroccan difficulties, and other events of like color and betraying a cer- tain attitude of mind, came to be cited as indica- tive of a threat and a menace. The diplomats conceived a growing distaste for the behavior of 116 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE German agents around the international confer- ence-table. All these things could not be set down forthwith to the account of Teutonic boor- ishness; there was calculation behind them, and a policy that included an overbearing belliger- ency and a frequent laying of the fist upon the saber-hilt. But the apprehensions of the diplo- mats received no support in public opinion and there were comparatively few who were not sur- prised when they turned out to have a very real basis. The unusual and offensive conduct of the Ger- mans in their international relations is now seen to have been the inevitable reflection of their national code. The utter disgust expressed by Goethe, a century ago, for the Prussian, is seen to have been yet another of his exhibitions of insight. But now, shortly after the middle of the last century, there occurred a precipitation of the German national solution under the mas- ter-agitation of a powerful adherent of autocracy, and the dominant tinge of the final combination w^as Prussian. It has so remained. With re- lentless efficiency the appropriate mores have been suggested, transmitted, and inculcated in an apt human material. The Imperial State was constructed on a pedestal of iron, blood-bathed, THE GERMAN CODE 117 for the support of a ruler autocratic in his divine right. The whole complex of mores became more and more militaristic, the ostensible excuse for that retrograde tendency being the central posi- tion of the Fatherland, menaced on all sides by its " iron ring ■ ' of enemies. This code seemed to be succeeding well and be- came the prosperity-policy of the nation. Few cared or dared to question or criticize it. Then, coinciding with the natural self-assertive tend- ency of a newly unified people, the conviction as to its efficacy developed into a blind faith in its supreme potency, and, at length, into a de- gree of ethnocentrism unparalleled among intel- ligent races. And finally arose the dogma of its world-mission: to disseminate die edit deutsche Kultur to the benighted or decadent nations. Thus developed a doctrine. " If you want war,'' writes Sumner,^ " nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. The reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher, ' the balance of power,' ' no universal dominion,' ^ trade fol- 1 " Collected Essays," I, 36, 37, 38. 118 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE lows the flag,' ' he who holds the land will hold the sea/ ' the throne and the altar/ the revolu- tion, the faith — these are the things for which men liave given their lives. . . . Think what an abomination in statecraft an abstract doctrine must be. Any politician or editor can, at any moment, put a now extension on it. The people acquiesce in the doctrine and applaud it, be- cause they hear the politicians and editors repeat it, and the politicians and editors repeat it be- cause they think it is popular. So it grows." I hardly need to go into this matter further. He who runs may read the outcome of the Ger- man doctrine. It has led Germany to hate and envy her even partially successful peaceful rivals, and to risk all the substantial meat she had by snap])ing at the reflection in the water. She wanted, not her legitimate share under the rules of peaceful competition, but all. The only way to get all was to break the rules. Well, she was ready, in her state of mores, for even that. The contemporary disi)osition and code of the Germans have been vigorously summed up by Burroughs.^ He cites a number of their un- 1 " Can Peace Make Us Forget ? " A Plea for the Ostracism of all Tilings German, in the Xew York Tribune for December 14, 1917. THE GERMAN CODE 119 speakable atrocities ; protests rightly against tlie shallow sophistication that says : " Never mind ; let it all pass; business is business, and it will all be the same in a hundred years ; '' and writes of German ideas as follows. I have seen no better condensed summaiy. " We do not want their ideas or their methods. Their ideas are subversive of our democratic ideals, and their methods enslave the mind and lead to efficiency chiefly in the field of organized robbery. They are efficient as Krupp guns and asphyxiating gas and liquid fire are efficient. They invent nothing, but they add a Satanic touch to the inventions of others and turn them to infernal uses. They are without sentiment or imagination. They have broken comj)letely with the old Germany of Goethe, of Kant and Lessing, to whom we all owe a debt. They are learned in the roots of things, but their learning is dusty and musty with underground conditions. They know the ' Tree of Knowledge ' at the bottom, but not at the top in the air and sun, where are its leaves and flowers and fruit. They run to erudi- tion, but not to inspiration. They are a heavy, materialistic, grasping race, forceful but not cre- ative, military but not humanistic, aggressive but not heroic, religious but not spiritual; brave it 120 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE maj be, but not chivalrous, utterly selfish, thor- oughly scientific and efficient on a low plane, as organized force is always efficient. . . , " The Germans have not fought this war like brave, chivalrous men; they have fought it like sneaks and cutthroats; they have respected nothing human or divine. So far as they could make it so it has been an orgy of lust and destructiveness. When their armies are forced to retreat, so far as they can do it, they destroy the very earth behind them. They have done their utmost to make the reconquered territory of Northern France uninhabitable for genera- tions. If they could ])oison all the water, all the air, all the food of their enemies, is there any doubt that they would quicklj^ do so? If they could have scuttled or torpedoed the British Isles and sunk them like a ship, would they not have done it long ago? Of course they would have wanted to plunder the treasures and violate the women before doing so, and then the Kaiser, piously lifting his eyes before his people, would have again thanked God for His ' faithful coop- eration,' and again would have prated how he would continue to carry on the war with ' humil- ity and chivalry.' " An arrogant, grasping, and cruel winner; a THE GERMAN CODE 121 poor loser, cherishing a malignant envy toward rivals — in short, a poor player of the game, ready to break it up to secure an advantage. That is what the German code has made of the German. No wonder that the peaceful interna- tional competition was broken up by him ; for it demands the same good sportsmanship to play that tremendous game aright as to engage in any other social undertaking involving competition. No wonder the German code has developed into a momentous challenge to the code of modern civilization. XII. THE CHALLENGE TO THE INTER- NATIONAL CODE Because mj chief interest is selection by war, I have felt it necessary to consider rather care- fully the constitution of the peace-group, and of those accompanying adai)tations which allow of the peaceful settlement of issues, that is, of peace- ful conflict and selection. For war-selection has issued in these structures for peace, and can be understood only as one realizes that it has been succeeded by them, and is now resorted to that they may become the more secure. Through war to peace. For war is a temporary thing, and we shall presently return to peace and its methods — but not before a selection has been wrought at the hand of war which nothing else but war can bring to pass, and whose completion must not be stayed unless it is desirable to have war invoked again. The issue of the present is too big for any methods of peaceful settlement ever developed by the race. In this age, with the mores of civilization 122 THE CHALLENGE 123 always stressing toward peace, a world-conflict such as the present one cannot arise unless there is a vital issue, an issue over the essentials of civilization. To recur yet once again to the smaller peace-group : here the essentials are in the national code and are accepted by nearly all as axiomatic. But suppose these essentials are challenged. Then, while the minor cases of di- vergent interests are composed by peaceful com- petition, under the general code, and upon it as a sort of touchstone, the essentials cannot be so settled. For there can be no reference to a wider peaceful autliority over the challenging mores than the challenged code itself. It takes revolu- tion and civil war to bring about the composition of an issue as to the code itself. I refer again to the case of slavery in this counti*y. The lesser challenges to details of the national code have been settled with little and local violence; but when the peace-group could not continue to exist half one thing and half the other — without, that is, a clean-cut and profound selection — the violence has been enormous and nation-wide. Similarly in the case of the more comprehen- sive peace-group. There is now a Great War, enlisting nearly the whole of civilization, because there was a challenge to the essentials of the 124 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE code of the civilized world. Frantic efforts to localize the conflict have been of no avail because the challenge was directed unmistakably at the verj' heart of the code by which the civilized peo- ples had been living. It is true that the sweeping nature of the chal- lenge was not clear from the outset. It came, in fact, unexpectedly to most of the concourse of nations, and the gathering revelations of its character remained for some time incredible. Only gradually did the basic issue disengage itself from non-essentials and stand forth stark and bare before the unl)elievers. There is no object in recording in this place the successive stages of growing illumination and disillusion. The whole conflict has resolved itself into as pure a conflict of codes, joined on the grandest scale, as any the world ever saw on the smaller scale; and the selection is bound to be, now or later, as decisive on the grandest scale as any ever wit- nessed on the smaller. The civilized world can- not continue to exist half one thing and half the other. Unless we are to turn back on the course of societal evolution, which is uuthiukable in the absence of a summoning change in life-condi- tions, this challenge will be repelled and anni- hilated. It will certainly be so repelled, now THE CHALLENGE 125 or later, by the unhurried action of the elemental forces that are behind all societal evolution ; but we can save part of the cost of the process, paid in human suffering, by understanding and work- ing with those forces. Let us look into the nature of the challenge, as at length revealed in the event. Perhaps the central article of all, and the one upon which the President has unerringly fastened, is the flouting of international engagements and covenants. This strikes at the only formulation of the inter- national code ever attained, and at the only guaranteeing power behind agreements, which is national honor. No civilized nation has openly and deliberately assaulted those fundamentals before, and with a counter-system in mind. Evi- dently, however, the German intention is to dis- place them in favor of something else, namely, national necessity backed by highly organized force. But this, of course, would reduce the in- ternational peace-group to the violent chaos of aforetime, out of which it has slowly and pain- fully emerged at the cost of endless human woe. It is a negation of the very beginnings of law, and is equivalent to the theory that any indi- vidual may take the law into his own hands if he needs to and is strong enough to defy its 126 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE sponsors. One or the other of these tlieories must prevail ; they cannot go on side by side. Implicit in this item of challenge is the inten- tion of bending all other interests to German interests, and by violence or the threat of such. Consider the " will-to-power " of a self-styled supreme nation. But this idea is utterly incon- sonant with the international code, in so far as it has developed. That code contemplates an equality of nations in their dealings with one an- other. Its contention is on the order of " Live and Let Live.'' To the Germans the small and weak nations — weak because small — have no reason for or right to independent existence. The international code, voiced again by the Presi- dent, holds the opposite view. Here again is a contrast admitting of no compromise. It is no less a question than of how the world is to be run; and there is no doubt, now that the issue has been bared, about the world's opinion on that score. Challenge is thrown down, further, to the spirit of amity between nations upon a friendly footing; it is proposed, evidently, to return to suspicion, treachery, and h3'pocrisy; to cast aside tlie an- cient mores of guestfriendsliip and to betray and use hospitality for all it is wortli to the guest. THE CHALLENGE 127 No longer are we to trust the honor of a nation as signalized in the honorable conduct of its official representatives. This proposition strikes at the only settled method of composing peace- ably the divergent interests of nations. If every ambassador were a Luxburg, or a Dumba, of what possible utility for a peace-group could the whole system of representation of foreign in- terests be? Accredited representatives must all be honest and of goodwill, or they must all be regarded as enemies within our lines. The German and Austrian ambassador have been spies upon friends, relying ui)on virtues and kindliness in others in order to do them treach- erous damage with impunity. There is no possi- bility of compromise with this new theory of diplomatic relations. Duplicity or honesty — not half one thing and half the other. The challenge is, as we see, one involving the whole theory of the international peace-group. Germany will none of it. x\ whole treatise could be written around this contention. The issue at its broadest is whether civilization is to go on developing the international })eaoe-group or to go over to the substitute set of variations fathered by Germany, and now thrust forward with power. There has to be a selection here ; and there never 128 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE was any power short of the most strenuous selective factor ever developed, namely war, that has any remote chance of effecting the selection. Not a few minor items, but all the major essen- tials of the international code are involved in the challenge. No more clear-cut issue was ever pre- sented to human society for selection. But let us go on with other items of challenge to the code of civilization, not involving, perhaps, so direct an assault upon the existence of the peace-group, but seeking to abrogate the very mores of humanity and human pity which naked savages were already in primitive times respect- ing. For long ages, as I have shown, the methods of warfare have been rendered less harsh and bestial by the si>ontaneous development of chivalry and humanity. There are always in war certain loosenings of the cod<^s of individ- uals ; the baser sort are freed from restraints, in their relations with members of the " out-group," which they have perforce observed in those with fellow group-members. But even between na- tions at war certain taboos have been honored, at least in form and officially, which prohibited the most ruthless conduct. These the Germans have challenged, both informally and officially, cynically remarking that '" Kricg ist Krieg/' THE CHALLENGE 129 The world is too sophisticated to be impressed with war-paint and scalps, but it was thought that it could be cowed by a more elaborate, sys- tematic, and inhuman SchrecklichJceit. It is a libel on the Hun to use his face and figure to symbolize the Geiman. For a long time no right-minded man could believe that such things could be, or ever had been; but he can doubt no longer. This is no gentleman's war; it is not a war against ci\ilized people, for the code is the mark of civilization and the German code is beneath that of the Sioux in their blood- iest days. Is it needful to go into detail? Let the reader examine the reports of the Bryce and other commissions and reflect upon that evidence. It is an injustice to the most primitive man to call such calculated conduct barbarous or sav- age. It wants a parallel on earth. All this is part of the official program of frightfulness ; but the ultimate purpose is a jiopular one, or there would be protest, disobedience, or revolt. Fancy official orders to misuse women given to American soldiers; to an army whose penalty for rape is death. Yet the German soldiers have carried out the orders with gusto; they did not rebuke, nor were they rebuked. It is from the German nation, not from a few of its 130 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE rulers, that this challenge to humanity derives; and the nation thus betrays itself as essentially uncivilized. Its assault upon civilization must be repelled as former assaults have been, if the code that includes what we most prize is to live on. The world cannot go on half-humane and half Vandal, i^^chrccklichkeit and humanity do not mix. The latter awaits its deliverance — its Tours and its Martel. It is, in a sense, immaterial where this Ger- man variation on the world-code came from, ex- cept that it is not to be referred to individual, purposeful action. The situation, finally re- vealed, is the challenge of the loathsome thing, and the fact that the challenge has been at length realized and taken up by civilization. The pro- cess of selection is on, in its strongest and final form. There is no further appeal for us if war does not bring a decision. The issue is the grav- est that has ever confronted human society, and the selective agency is present in a power never before imagined. We face, indeed, a critical episode in societal evolution. And the appre- hension of the issues involved has led to an align- ment of world-opinion on a scale unparalleled in history. XIII. THE FORMATION OF A WORLD- OPINION The ^riking reversal of the world's opinion about Germany is one of the outstanding phe- nomena of the time. Nearly a score of nations have declared war on her, and a number of others have broken off relations. Openly on her side stand her three vassals — how willingly we can- not surely say. No other nation lias ever seen the public opinion of the world so massed against it. A thing of this sort does not happen without reason. But the significant fact about this mobilization of public opinion is the spontaneity of its response. The planning and the propa- ganda, along with the rest of the preparedness, were aimed in another direction. The masses of civilized nations did not figure out the broad issue, and have not yet done so; but they re- sented the exhibitions of malevolence and feared for their own interests. They went through no " Pentecost of Calamity," but they came to know what was being done in the way of murder, rob- 131 132 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE bery, violation, and desecration, and it shocked them. They knew, at length, what women and children had to expect from the German, and the moral gorge rose within them. To man}' came an accession of cold and relentless rage as they saw in the mind's eye their own wives and daugh- ters at the mercy of the apostles of Kultur, and their young children mangled or turned out to wander alone and helpless through a ruined land. With a " larger selfishuess " they rallied to the defense of the code of humanity. It took overt acts — conditions and not the- ories — to bring them to this ; and even then there was an interval, in the remoter c6untries, before incredulity gave way. It is siguiticant of much that German public opinion needed no such interval of accommodation ; it was not in a condition to be shocked or temporarily ])aralyzed by surprise. But the. masses in other nations were not prepared. They could not have known of the great Goethe's scathing comments on the Prussian. They could not sense the irritation of John Hay at Prussian " jackboo.tism." They knew nothing of German, atrocities in the col- onies, in apology for which even German official- dom adopted the term TropenkoUer^ or madness of the tropics. They were not in the way of FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 133 hearing of Treitschke or Der Tag. They re- garded the saber-rattling as an amusing piece of boorishness, and the " shining armor " as the theatrical posturing of an imperial gallery- player. They goodnatu redly accepted the ex- planation that '' war-lord '' was a mistranslation of a perfectly innocuous term, and they even ap- plauded, a few years ago, the Kaiser's pious re- minder, on the occasion of his quarter-centenary as ruler, that peace, not war, had been near his heart. True; there had been no war. There is always peace till there is not. They smiled at the old man's dreams — Lord Roberts, " good old Bobs," who, in his eagerness lest the common weal take harm, saw specters in broad daylight — and at the young man's visions. But the overt acts came, and there was no denying them; and there was found no appeal against them save to the s-word. Others were tried faithfully enough, and patience was stretched to the breaking-point. Time was lost, it may be, by our own long effort to restore the peace-group by peaceful means ; but the ultimate failure of that effort was more convincing to us and to the world than anything else could have been. It settled the fact that the essence of the international code had been deliberately chal- 134. THROUGH WAR TO PEACE lenged, and that war was the only possible ar- bitrament, for it was the only argument that the challenger could understand. Time was lost, it may be, but realization was sharpened. If our protracted patience, and our repeated and reiter- ated reference to the essentials of the code, to honor and humanity, had not availed, certainly no other and weaker nation could hope to convert and persuade by its representations. Irrespec- tive of his personal courage or faintheartedness, temporizing or farsightedness, the President, in his repeated notes, not only revealed that Ger- many was challenging the essentials of civiliza- tion, but also formulated, as it had not before been formulated, the code that was in jieril. It stood forth, in his hands, as something eminently desirable and indispensable. The vague con- ceptions of simpler minds were crystallized into delinite form, for the exjiosition of the essentials of international behavior was done with the same sort of simple clarity that Lincoln was master of. And it was not alone the simpler minds that were clarified — was it not Lincoln, again, who said that if a proposition is stated clearly enough for the simple to understand, the wise have no excuse for not understanding? In any case, the sentiment arose that, while there was an ap- FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 135 proved way for human beings and nations to live and act, Germany would have none of it, and meant to replace the traditional code by another of which she was making a repulsive exhibition. The alternative was to renounce the old code or fight ; and the decision of civilization was for the latter. Even the Allies, already in the field, saw better now what they were fighting for, and took heart when they knew that the rest of civilization was with them. Evidently the former international peace- group has broken down. There are now two peace-groups, of two different varieties, fighting one anotlier. The initial advantage was all on the challenging side, for, in addition to its status of readiness, its organization was better fitted for the exercise of violence. Apart from the pity of it, there was a question about the ability of essentially peaceful, industrial societies to go back and succeed in violent conflict, to which they had become disaccustomed, against an enemy that was never out of practice. It was and has re- mained a question whether a group of free and independent democracies could attain to the in- tegration of a group whose whole control lay in a single dominant body. It was a question of becoming ju-oficient, against the will, in a cruder 136 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE form of conflict than the one to whose condi- tions adjustment had been made. The antagonist had selected his own weapons, method of com- bat, and time; he had to be faced on his own selected ground. It has been a grand test of adaptability for the industrial nations. But the spirit of civilization has risen to meet the crisis. Here is something, however re- pugnant, that has to be done. Fire has to be fought with fire. It will be done, and done to the Queen's taste. It will be seen through to the end. Only — " Never Again I " This seems to be the mood of the defenders of civilization. It is in contrast with that of the assaulters who al- ready look forward to the " next war " ; for, in their code, war is, in and of itself, a good thing. So far are they removed from the consensus of civilization. But the contemptible decadent who did not worship " Gott '' — unsrrn alten Gott — has, despite desperate initial handicaps, frus- trated the deep-laid designs of Wcltmacht, and has shown that, when it is inevitable, he can play the game he does not wish to play. Swift adapt- ation to the militancy that they did not love has characterized the industrial nations; radical transformations of policy, as when America had recourse to the draft, have revealed an alertness FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 137 in adaptation that no one suspected. Such rad- ical means of adjustment could never have been put into operation among a free people if that people — the common people, the masses — had not sensed the peril to civilization and the pros- pect of losing that which had made life on earth, especiall}^ life in America, worth living. Once sensed, the movement to repel the peril was as spontaneous as the rushing together of isolated frontiersmen to meet the menace of an Indian raid. I have said that it took overt acts to rouse the world's public opinion. It is not yet fully roused because by many these acts are not yet visualized. There are i)eople who are deficient in imagination — in the power of visualization. They take in only dully and vaguely that which does not enter their minds by way of direct impression upon the senses. This is particularly true if their minds have been adjusted to altogether different sorts of things. Many an Englishman saw the light when he had viewed an air-raid, and had perhaps witnessed the mutilation of children and the despair of motliers. Friglitfulness did not intim- idate him, but roused and infuriated him, when once he had met it face to face. Pacifists in this country would not hold out long in their fatuity 138 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE if they were obliged, fast-bound, to witness the orgies of the German officer and soldier, par- ticularly if the victims were of their own house- hold. The man with imagination visualizes these horrors that shame the sun with tightening throat and implacable anger, and also with alarm. For there is nothing more inviolable in American young womanhood, nor more appealing in American babies, than there was in French and Belgian and Polish girlhood and childhood. To the unimaginative in this country has come, however, a series of shocks : the submarine war- fare, the malevolence and duplicity of diplo- matic agents, the revelations of the Zimmermann note, the unbelievable disclosures of the spy system, the uncovering of malignant plotting of every sort. Some of these things have struck very near home — near enough to be visualized. The government has doled out authenticated items, from time to time, wliich seem to be but part of a larger store. Our peo]de do not like war; they hate it. But all but the traitors and the incurably light-minded want it now — want " this one more war to kill war," as some one has well put it. And the more they shall suffer from war, and fear and hate it, the keener will they be to win this one. The opponents of war, like the FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 139 one-time hyphenated Americans, are not so nu- merous as they are noisy. We, like the English and French, are buckling dowTi soberl}- as a nation to the Augean task of cleaning out the stables of central Europe, hoping to lay hand, at length, upon a Circe's rod that will turn the Saunvensch into a human again. This is not militarism. It is militancy. We have been obliged to descend to the adversary's level, so far as to take up the gage from the ground upon which it was tlung; but war is no creed or " -ism " to the civilized nations now fac- ing Germany and her henchmen. Civilized public opinion can never tolerate remaining on the German level except to fight the extension of the German code ; and that is why " Never Again " means a definite decision now. If there is no decision, then we may all have to stay upon that lower level so long, and to remain militant in such an increasing and desperate degree, that we may unlearn our anti-militarism. There is danger in an approach to militarism ; for it has a glamor, is seductive, and is attended by what Franklin called the " pest of gloiy." It is es- sential to the selection that the present war is effecting that we liold tiglit to the code of civili- zation while we are utterly destroying the rank 140 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE growth that threatens it. It is this latter that must be " sunk without a trace,'' and quickly, too, I repeat; for if the war lasts on for years, speedily recurs, or, because no definitive decision is reached, threatens and demands a huge defen- sive organization, we shall run much risk of em- bracing the evil against which we are now em- battled. This gathering public opinion of the world is going to make itself felt, not alone in war, but also, in ways peculiar to itself, when the wai* is over. To it German}- is already outside the pale of civilization ; and this war means, therefore, in a ver3^ real sense, no break-up at all, but a cause of strengthening and cohesion, for the interna- tional peace-group. Turkey's jiast performances have never been taken to indicate anything con- cerning the status of the international code ; she simply did not count in respect to that. And Germany ranks with Turkey, though infinitely more treacherous and dangerous. Tliese birds of a feather are now snuggling harmoniously to- gether on the same roost. Germany's case is that of a renegade movement against civilization by a professed member and supporter of the interna- tional i)eace-group, who has secretly come to sneer at its code and has obseiwed its forms in FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 141 order the more securely to assault it. Expulsion from the group is the natural result. What that will mean during and after the war we can better judge, perhaps, when we have considered more generally the function, in societal evolution, of conflict by violence. XIV. SELECTION BY WAR The consideratiou ol' societal selectiou other tbau by war, though it has been treated not so much for itself as for its bearing upon war-selec- tion, has engaged us for some time; it has been protracted because of the number of aspects which it presents, and because much light is thrown upon \\'ar-selection by reflecting some- what carefully and fully over the other and milder forms that have superseded it to such a wide extent. Peaceful selection is indeed the en- lightened and evolved form upon which civiliza- tion has prided itself, and for which no excuses or disavowals ever need to be made. But now we have seen that it is too line an instrument for the settlement of the major and essential issues, when the latter involve a challenge to the death. This sort of crisis calls for the primordial and elemental blood and iron. We come, then, to an examination of the methods and results of selec- tion in the mores as effected by war. It has been noted that a " conflict of the mores " is a figure of speech ; the conflict is be- 142 SELECTION BY WAR 143 tween the adherents or exponents of the mores. If the adherents of one code are annihilated, selection has done its work in favor of the rival code. The simplest and most conclusive form of war-selection is therefore by annihilation. It was the primordial form, where there was no such thing as quarter. The Germans have practiced it in no small degree, and deliberately, not alone on the battle-field, but also in the prison-camp and the slave-quarters. To the conventional methods and instruments of destruction in battle have been added gas and fire attacks and the dis- semination of poison and disease. Once it was a thing to shudder at when one read of colonists leaving smallpox-infected garments where the Indians might find and use them; it was in- credibly inhuman and barbarous; but now we are used to worse tilings and have even had to de- scend to them in self-defense. The airship and submarine, in (icrman hands, represented cruel and unusual instrumentalities, not recognized by the Allies as allowable in civilized warfare. And as for the prisoners and non-combatants, the con- dition of the captured Germans should be com- pared with that of captives made by the Germans, or with tliat of the enslaved Belgians who have been returned to their homes, at length, wrecked 144 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE physically for life. It is clear enough that the Germans are not content with the toll of annihil- ation taken on the battlefield ; they have in mind no less than annihilation of any and all, and especially of the smaller nations, who may stand in their way. Belgium and Serbia have been systematically annihilated, in so far as was pos- sible. It is characteristic of the Teutonic half-knowl- edge that sucli procedure is justified by reference to the Darwinian theory. This would seem, at first sight, to be a mere subterfuge ; but there is a ponderous and muddled sincerity here. Ger- mans have always been strong in applying theory from one field to matters of a quite different quality in another range; it took Germans to work out in meticulous detail the analogy be- tween a society and an organism, and finally come to identify the two. There is no need of writing a book, as Nasmyth ' lias done, to prove that Darwin countenanced no such conclusions as have been drawn in his name ; even an elemen- tary analysis reveals the fact that organic and societal evolution are effective each on its own plane, and according to its own mode, and not otherwise. But a swift snatch at the analogy 1 " Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory." SELECTION BY WAR 145 was satisfactory to the German mind, especially since the crude conclusions were in consonance with German mores. It remains true, however, that the most ef- fective societal selection is secured through anni- hilation of one of the contending codes by the re- moval of the persons of its adherents. Doubt- less most of the earliest and most determinative selections in the course of societal evolution came about in this manner. They are the ones that have lasted and have laid down the lines for the subsequent development of society. But, while war has always implied i)artial annihilation, it came, after a while, to l)e restricted to that. When enough antagonists had been killed to weaken the enemy's power of resistance, the rest were enslaved. Our interest in such enslavement lies only in the bearing upon selection of this alternative to annihilation. In the subjection here referred to, there is no idea of deliberately producing tuberculous human wrecks, that is, of enslaving with the purpose of annihilation at leisure; the reference is to subjection by con- quest, after which masters and slaves live side by side in the same society. In such a case there ensues a selection in the mores, but by no means the prevalence of one code, even that of the 146 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE masters, in its original lines. Rather is there mutual transmission of mores and a composite product. The result is a compounding of the two classes and of their interests, and, at length, a merging of their identity. This is the way states have formed. If, however, the masters exert unremitting pressure to extend their own code over the conquered, and will none of the other, the two social strata remain in open or latent hostility, as in Alsace, and refuse to amalgamate, even under a combination of strenuous compulsion and occasional feigned complaisance. There can be no doubt that, if Germany were to win, there would be a farther and wider ex- hibition of what has occurred in her conquered provinces and in her so-called colonies. And that would mean that, sooner or later, there would be another conflict. Every one knows that Ger- many despaired of Germanizing Alsace-Lorraine except by executing or banishing the former in- habitants and filling their places with Germans — that is, by annihilation ; and in their tropical colonies the same insistence upon a code delivered to the chosen race has resulted in almost un- intermittent oppression of the natives and in recurrent revolts that have ushered in the better SELECTION BY WAR 147 understood and better beloved method of selec- tion by direct annihilation. But we need not analyze closely either selec- tion by annihilation or selection by subjugation and enslavement. We do not intend to use either of them, when our arms shall have pre- vailed. They are obvious enough, and if Ger- many wins we shall have an opportunity of ex- periencing them in our own persons. They be- long to the German mores, and are corollaries of the German code where they are not its major articles. When we are told that the Kaiser will stand no nonsense from America after the war, that is a threat of precisely the same mailed fist which has banged the council-tables of several decades, and has more recently smitten the crushed and helpless victim. However, I feel under no constraint to believe or fear that the present war is about to issue in the survival of the German code, and so 1 shall confine myself to considering how the conflict is going to eliminate that code. There is no prophecy here; the massed public opinion of the world is a guarantee that the challenge to the code of civilization will not, in the end, prevail. There is no such change in the conditons of the race's life as to call for a retrogression. There is 148 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE uo possibility that societal evolution will turu back upon its course and land us again in ante- savagery. If the Germans prevail and we are thus reduced, it will be time enough then to ex- plain how it was done. This present war-selec- tion is here contemplated from the standpoint of civilization and its interests, with the hope of better understanding the massive process so that it may not be hindered but allowed to go on to its full fruition. Toward furthering this end we do not expect to employ either annihilation or subjugation of the German type, and so these processes and their results need not be further considered. The Allied nations could have used these methods. In theory, that is, they could have done so. In practice they could not. This dis- ability, due to adherence to the civilized code, left them at a considerable material disadvantage. Not only could they not wantonly kill, murder, or enslave, but they also felt obliged to assist those who had l)een conquered and cold-bloodedly robbed by the adversary, and whom otherwise he would have enslaved or annihilated, or both. The Allies were even constrained by their code of humanity to help the enemy, or to buy him off from wholesale annihilation, by supplying Bel- SELECTION BY WAR 149 gians, Poles, Armenians, and other conquered peoples with the means for living. It has been a heavy task to fight with honorable scruple against an unscrupulous and dishonorable foe. For more than three years American eai-s could hardly fail to hear the derisive mirth of the Teuton as he reached out his hand to profit by the, to him, simple-minded and ridiculous humanity of America. What would he have done? Why, the logical thing, of course. Fancy the German, if the case were reversed, assisting the enemy by feeding and clothing the population of a ravaged district. In our place he would have withheld all help from the Belgians and Armenians; then the enemy could either have spent his resources in maintaining them, or have incurred the abhor- rence of the world by letting them perish. A per- fectly clear case of Realpolitik. But self-re- spect demanded of the chami)ions of civilization that, except wliere response in kind was clearly indicated as the sole measure of self-presei-vation, there should be no recourse to unsavory methods. Reprisals for air-raids have been delayed, even if they are to come at all ; reprisals on German prisoners for the miseries and broken bodies and spirits of French and English captives have not taken place. Doubtless, as to the savage, so to 150 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE the German, such scruples seem merely the evi- dence of weakness and even cowardice — in any case of decadence. Good old Gott could not countenance such soft procedure and must give the victory to his own true and hardy worshipers. It constitutes a real handicap, in such a conflict, to cherish such scruples. In general, then, the Allies are fighting in ac- cord with their civilized code; if there is a con- quest by them, there will be no annihilation or enslavement of the conquered. It is not that the adversary is not bad enough, but that " we are too good." Indeed, the cause foi* concern is quite other, namely, that there will be a mistaken magnanimity, a tendency to let bygones be by- gones and start again, a willingness to regard the criminal as repentant and reformed, if he says he is — and then turn him loose on the world again. This, as we shall see, will mean another war just as soon as Gemiany has recovered ; nothing could stop that except remaining armed to the teeth, and squandering the fruits of industry upon un- productive devices for destruction. Unless Ger- many were to renounce her code. Of course that is the essential — that that code shall be renounced. But how can that come about if there is to be no annihilation or subjection with control? SELECTION BY WAR 151 From the beginning there has been but one ef- fective agency that has led men to change their ways: discomfort amounting to sufifering and productive of disillusionment. If an indi\idual is miserable enough, he will overhaul his mode of life; if a society suffers sufficiently, it will at length question its code. The more successful the code has been, or has seemed to be, in the past — the more inveterate the belief in it — the slower will the awakening be. The case before us is, then, a hard one; for the German people have had their code so exalted before them, both blatantly and subtly, from babyhood up, that they are as yet incapable, even under great i)rovoca- tiou, of criticizing it. They are apparently in- curably docile, and unwilling to form or in- capable of forming an independent public opinion. This means that there is no use try- ing to reason with them — not yet. It means that they must suffer much before they will ques- tion, still less give up, their ways. It is, then, the line of action for the Allies to make them suffer much, and resolutely to turn a deaf ear to their rulers' calculating proposals to end the conflict, until there shall have appeared unmistakable fruits meet for repentance. Pro- tests are of no -further avail, while the code is 152 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE held; after it is renounced, it can be reasoned about — not before. The fate of naivete in this matter is being illustrated for us all by the Bol- sheviki. Tliere can be no compromise or recon- ciliation between the German code and the code we are engaged in defending, as I have sufficiently demonstrated above. The security of an inter- national peace-group is out of the question until this challenge to the international code has been eliminated. There is, I have said, no intention of annihilat- ing or enslaving the Gernuin nation. To try to do that would be to lend adherence to that course of conduct which has ostracized Germany from the concourse of civilized peoples. Mere military victory, by itself, can no more than quell the present assault upon the code of civilization. Unless that victory conies about — let us be clear on that — nothing else can be done; but if it is not followed up by alterations and adjustments of the German code by the German people, no profound and definitive selection will have taken place. Adjustment along the lines of the inter- national code, to be effective and lasting, must come from within. How, then, may war result in this inner alteration of the mores? XV. GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP Any nation's code is its prosperity-policy, and is clung to because of the conviction that it is an expedient and a winning policy in living. The Germans think that their militarism or Prussian- ism is a winning policy. They have seen some of the advantages whicli they have gained by it; and they have been adjured, since they were able to understand anything, to remember that their undoubted prosperity was due to the mili- tarist regime of the Hohenzollerns. That is doubtless the conviction of most Germans. ^^ Das kanonenfeste Deutschland" has long been paraded before a sentimental and suggestible people, not too well endowed with a sense of the ridiculous. The " shining armor " and other stage-properties dazzle their eyes. There dangles before their minds a conception of the State as a sort of divine entity, invincible, and personified ir the ruling dynasty, by whose benevolent, paternal, unerring, and resolute action they have been made the greatest of nations and the world's hope. This has become an obsession with them 153 154 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE and is correlative with the contempt, clumsily veiled or grossly exposed, which they feel for other nations. It renders possible the incredibly fatuous expressions of their public men, authors, and preachers. I do not need to cite illustra- tions of this colossal national self-satisfaction; Archer ^ and others have compiled typical speci- mens. The authorities, themselves at least partially auto-hypnotized by this same grandiose vision, have worked on fertile soil. It goes without the saying that they could not have raised the crop they have upon other ground, say in France or England. The situation, that is, is not refer- able to a single individual or group of individ- uals, but to the automatic development of a typical national character and code. The sophis- ticated leaders, above all Bismarck, repeatedly took advantage, sometimes with a candid cyni- cism, of the ground prejiared for them. The Ger- man people are fetish-worshipers, and their fetishes are the government and especially the army. The creed that forms the rallying-point for all their adulations is militarism. Their god, where he is not Odin or Thor of the Hammer, is at best the Yahweh that incited the peo^des 1 " Gems of German Thought." GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 155 of old to smite rival nations hip and thigh, with- out mercy. Though Germany has been nomi- nally Christian, not much has been heard of the New Dispensation. This militarist religion is the sanction of mili- tarist mores and supports them at every turn. It too has been tested up and found, in the Ger- man view, expedient and good. Only a powerful divinity could have presided over the demon- strated prosperity of the Empire. Witness the seizure of a million square miles of colonies, with a population of ten millions, accomplished with- in a year and from under the very nose of as- tonished England. Witness the German inroads upon the world-market, engineered by astute state paternalism. Witness the flocking of the nations to Germany in quest of knowledge and science at their source. It was without a sense of incon- sistency that all German literature, art, and music were referred to the same great fetish: Goethe and Beethoven, they too were children of the war-god and exponents of the absurd " will- to-power '' — discrepancies of an historical and biographical nature being irrelevant and negli- gible in the face of so blinding a revelation of na- tional superhuman superiority. Why should a nation not believe utterly in a code, or a pros- 156 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE perity-policy, that could produce all this and more? There were plenty of local magi who could prove indisputably what every one wanted to believe. Nowhere else has the truth of the say- ing that the raison d'etre of the human mind con- sists in the fact that it can always find good and sufficient reason for doing what its possessor wants to do, received more triumphant vindica- tion than in Germany. No wonder the German felt aggrieved, con- temptuous, and at length enraged, because he was not understood by other nations. With a sad but divine compassion Eucken writes: 'M>ur Ger- man Kultur has, in its unique depth, something shrinking and severe; it does not obtrude itself, or readily yield itself up; it must be earnestly sought after and lovingly assimilated from with- in. This love was lacking in our neighbors; wherefore they easily came to look upon us with the eyes of hatred." You must first accept the German code blindly and then you come, as one of the faithful, to comprehend its serene beauty. So might a paranoiac remark to a sane man who could not share his illusions, but was somewhat uneasy as to the matter of personal safety in their presence. This is precisely the way fanatics al- ways talk about their religions : " Believe first ; GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 157 don't think, weigh, and reflect. This revelation may seem to be contrary to knowledge and sense ; it is really not contrary to these, but above them." This is the time-honored " doctrine of mystery." Now this simple and childlike faith is what sanctions any and all departments of the German mores. By it the national code is transformed into a revelation. The mores, by themselves, can make anything right or wrong; and a super- natural sanction can add to these attributes so as to make anything also sacred or sacrilegious. Thus a holy joy may attend upon the sinking of a Lusitania; and a fanatical Hassgcsang and a Oott straje! may be launched at a nation whose action, however motived, crosses the German will in the form of an impiety sure to be divinely punished. It is all very ridiculous and even im- becile in its preposterous solemnity; no wonder Tommy causes Fritz to intone the TTymn of Hate, and joins uproariously in the chorus. Such a show has never been dreamt of before and will not come soon again. It confirms all the impres- sions derived from Punch and elsewhere, which the Germans have so deeply resented, as to Teu- tonic outlandishness. But now it is characteristic of a godlet like him of the Germans that he invariably " makes good." 158 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE He has to, for there is, iu his portentous solem- nity, no room for weakness or fallings-short. We gentile and un-chosen peoples can make al- lowances for our pet fetishes, such as the " people,'' and even joke at them a little, for we do not take them with such owl-like seriousness. Lese-majeste has never bothered us very much. We have no divinely anointed One who is vul- nerable and even sensitive to criticism, and who issues pronunciamentos, out of questionable in- spiration, on religion, art, uiusic, and all the rest. Also we have no statesmen, or even theologians, who will meekly recant in the face of a revela- tion vouchsafed by the mouth of authority. We have here no super-men, officially in the confi- dence of the Deity. One of us is just as likely to get a revelation as another. We could laugh ap- preciatively at an '' Ich un4 Gott ■' poem, even if it were written in derision of our pet statesman. No, we are not reverent in the Teutonic way. It is no wonder that our comprehension of Kultur leaves much to be desired. But, as I said, the German fetish must make good. He always does, even if it takes a special revelation to interpret some of his doings as suc- cess. He inspires to sweeping victories, after securing treason in the enemy's War Office, not GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 159 reporting that the adversaries had only crow-bars to fight with. And then he breathes into the mind of the generalissimo the master-conception of a victorious retreat. He is a curious conduct- ing medium for information from the outside world ; for out there too the will-to-power is never balked. England is already stai-ved out; the American soldiers cannot get across the ocean; they will not fight if they do ; presently the Sioux Indians will take New York — what is Mr. Dooley doing with his opportunities these days? If one marvels that trustful and devout people can be so taken in, let him reflect upon the skill with which the rest of the world, and even of the suspicious and hostile world, has been over- reached. The German system has made pretty good, so far as actual accomplishment goes, even in the eyes of those who would like to discredit it; this is ruefully admitted, although there is no desire to emulate its methods. What must it not enjoy of reputation amidst a worshipful people to whom it is uniformly and overwhelmingly suc- cessful and who are not critical of its methods or its reports? Is a people so worshipful, and at the same time so sure of the divine potency of its leadership, going to revolt with no provocation? Not much. 160 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE Is the dusky beneficiary going to throw over his old Mumbo Jumbo while the going is good and while the priest stands by to explain any ap- parent lapses, or even, by some wily hocus-pocus, to lend to real misfortune the appearance of divine beneficence? What is a little sutfering, with such prospects, such ends, and such a world- mission in plain view? The grumblers or critics are sacrilegious; they can be ignored or jailed. All great world-reforms deniund sacrifice and steadiness of faith. The devotion o-f the German people to an unworthy and a losing cause is truly pathetic, but there is no doubt about its unin- formed sincerity. This national devotion was grossly underestimated at first; there has been for us the same sort of disillusionment in this matter as there was concerning the essentially kindly and liumane character of the people. Some of us hoped for a protest of the ]K'ople against the atrocities of tlie army and navy, but there was, rather, a rejoicing among them and a pious satisfaction as of the saved viewing from the crystal battlements the lot of the damned. So that, although the reform of Ger- man ways must come from within, we have ceased to expect it so soon. As long as the present governmental system and methods are in opera- GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 161 tion, it is hardly possible to get the plain facts known by Germans, let alone interpreted from an unbiased and non-fantastic point of view. The avenues, temporal and spiritual, for the transmission of other mores are closed. There is no present utility (though there may well be a prospective one) in telling a fanatical people that we are not fighting them, but their prepossession and religion. Fancy announcing to a Mohammedan that we are not contending against him, but against the Prophet and all his works. So long as the Germans fervently believe in their fetish, they will hug it to them the more closely, especially if it begins to whine or bluster about the impiety of those who would put asunder what " our good old God " had joined irrevocably together. There is not much use to rain down facts and tracts out of aircraft; they are " English lies.^' The case of the Ger- mans is a refractory one and will not yield to such milder means any more than it did, preced- ing war, to diplomatic representations and con- cessions. Then, they thought, the Day of vindi- cation was at hand; now tliat Day is here; and there is as yet no serious doubt tliat it will bring what was promised for it. How foolish to falter when success is right at hand I 162 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE It is probable that the sufferings of some of Germany's vassals have not been sanctified unto them as part of a grandiose vindication of the fetish. M. Andre Cheradame ^ thinks that at least sections of the nations which Germany has " burglarized/' under the guise of alliance, are ripe for a change of heart, and argues for an at- tempt to enlighten them as to the issues at stake — at stake not only for the world, but for them- selves as well. He thinks that the projected Pan-Germany may thus explode from within. His ideas seem reasonable, for the insulating effect of the German obsession does not seem to have reached to the Czechs and other Slavic and otherwise alien races of the Dual Empire. Their severe sufferings and misgivings are not inter- pretable by the faith, as sacrifices to a cause, and propaganda might do much. It might, thinks this writer, pave the way for a decisive Gennan defeat. Therein lies its promise ; for there is no way out of this crucible of selection except through that eventuality. 1 " How to Destroy Pan-Germany," in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1917. XVI. THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH The Germans will endure pain and sacrifice without losing their patience or docility, so long as they are not disillusioned. I have said that their godlet has made good — or that they are convinced that he has, which amounts to the same thing. But suppose he fails so egregiously that there is no concealment or interpretation of the fact possible, and no method adequate to dem- onstrate that he has, after all, won out, or will certainly do so. Suppose that strategic and vic- torious retreats bring the ark back into Germany itself. Suppose that the army is actually, and undeniably, and even admittedly defeated, and the government overthrown. Suppose the loot of Belgium and the other conquests has to be assembled and restored, and the wantonness of destruction jjaid for. And suppose, along with such happenings, the German people finally learn the unadorned truth : that England is not starved out, that American soldiers are really in Europe and are there for business, and so on — and 163 164 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE above all the truth as to how the world's opinion stands regarding them. Suppose that they learn that, instead of being admired, envied, and feared, they are the objects of contempt, loathing, and bitter resentment. Here would be wholesale disillusionment. And here would be, in addition to the former suf- ferings — then sanctilied and offered on the altar; now, in retrospect, bearing a different semblance — forebodings of another and more racking torture, that of liviii,^ by tolerance in a world empty of friends. Once it was England and America that were to write off all the con- queror's obligations; now it is the conquered who must pay their own, and indemnity besides. No people has ever viewed a more waste and dreary future than will the Germans on the morrow of defeat. On all sides people who have lost by their action property, comfort, peace of mind, their dearest ones — not to mention those who have been actually oppressed and enslaved and whose life-treasures have been preyed upon by the orgy of murderousness and lust. All about them peoples who make no account of their word of honor and who have come to regard " German " as synonymous with all that is dishonorable, treacherous, and ignoble. THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 165 Many people do not wish their children to study the German language, and there is already a movement on foot to exclude it from the public schools of this country. There is more than a suspicion that hospitality to the language, in the past, has been craftily abused, to sow discord within the nation; and that not alone through the German press, but also through the school- books, with their everlasting laudation of the German fetish. In fact, whether or not the char- acter of text-books in German has been deliber- ately manipulated — and it is not at all unbe- lievable, in the light of what we have come to know — the prevailing fetish-worship cannot but come out in such publications. It comes out, offensively enough, even when the authors are not Germans. To one who hates what Ger- many stands for, it is revolting to see the pic- tures and read the legends that are characteristic of German primers; for they reek of the unclean thing. This revulsion goes even farther. A man has admired and loved German literature of the earlier and cleaner period, and in particular, let us say, Goethe's master-work. He knows Goethe's attitude to be Prussian in no respect. He recalls that Goethe could not write war-songs, much less Hymns of Hate, because he could not 166 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE hate his spiritual benefactors.^ And yet this man cannot now read Faust and the rest without offense. Schrecklich, let us say, occurs on this page, and what is the image it summons up? Here is a scene of peasant GemiltUchkcit, and one recalls whence he derived his original im- pression, now shattered. The lusts of Walpur- (jisnacht — have they not come to earth? The very words are offensive now — for how long, one cannot sa3\ May this soon pass I But were the poet's lines not prophetic? " Weh ! Weh ! Du hast sie zerstort, Die sehone "Welt, Mit miichtiger Faust; Sie stiirzt, sie zerfiillt! Wir tragen Die Triimmern ins Niehts liiniiber Und klagen Ueber die verlorne Sehone." 1 Eckermann, Gesprdche mit Goethe, entry for March 14, 1830. Relative to Prussianism: in a conversation with Ecker- mann, in March, 1828, Goethe deplores the repression of the (ierman youth, contrasting the system that makes thorn " pre- maturely tame " with the English " Gliick der persiinlichen Freiheit." The conversation is too long to be reproduced here, l>ut I cannot refrain from giving one extract. " Es darf kein Bube mit der Peitsche knallen, oder singen, oder rufen, sogleich ist die Polizei da, es ihm zu verbieten. Es geht bei uns alles dahin, die Hebe Jugend friihzeitig zahm zu machen und alle Xatur, alle Ori^inalitiit und alio Wildheit auszutreiben, sodass am Ende niehts iibrigbleibt ala der Philister." THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 167 Even in trade there will be an attitude differ- ent from the generous one encountered by Ger- mans while yet they were profiting so success- fully in the peaceful competition, enjoying the reality of the " free seas " for which they have lately clamored, and the host of other advan- tages accorded by an enlightened world to a re- spected and efficient competitor. Now it is seen that Germany is not, in any sense of the term, a " good sport,'' and still less a good loser ; for, while succeeding notably, she was willing to break the rules of the game and make a gross assault upon any and all competitors that were succeeding in any degree. It is the old and obso- lete ideal of world-monopoly that has animated her. But now some of Germany's enemies have learned, under necessity, to supply for them- selves demands that only Germany could form- erly meet ; they do not need Germany any more. Among other disservices that she has wrought to the world, Germany has staged a demonstra- tion of the necessity of national economic self- suflQciency, and so has contributed to put off the day when artificial barriers to freedom of trade will be a thing of the past. This is a part of the damage done to civilization which is not often mentioned, but it is a very real one. Some of 168 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE her fellow-nations will not need Germany, I have said; and there will be others which will shun her, because they have learned to suspect and dislike her. Who wants to do business with even a reformed pirate? It is said that Germany must be powerless or free — meaning, as we take it here, free, first of all, of her obsession. It is the contention here that if she is rendered powerless by being con- quered, she will become free; but that she has little or no chance of becoming free until she is decisively defeated. The obsession with the fetish acts as a sort of shell or insulation for the mores, rendering them inaccessible to outside influences and thus impairing their power of adaptation to conditions wliich are not sensed. The mores are thus not sensitive to environment ; they are stunted in the matter of variation, and the wholesome action of selection is impaired. The first need, for better adjustnu^nt, is to strip off the insulation, thus invading the isolation ; and to open before the mores a real, in place of an imaginary or constructed environment. This can be done only by tlie defeat of the supposedly invincible armies and the demonstration that militarism is not the master-key to national and international destiny. It is when Mumbo Jumbo THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 169 fails to make good that they take him out and beat him, or even pitch him into the river. A peace without victory could be too variously and ingeniously interpreted by interested parties; it would mean the persistence of the obsession and, of a consequence, further manifestations of un- civilized conduct in international affairs. It would mean at least uneasiness in the world for decades to come. There are those who cry out against such a conclusion, asserting that force never settles any- thing; that war is uniformly bad and has never brought about good results. People who really believe this are as impervious to reason and fact as the Germans themselves; only a demonstra- tion in which they personally figure can en- lighten them. But there are others who thought- lessly repeat such foolish assertions; and per- haps they are worth spending words upon. Such assertions represent sentimentality, not sense. War is like all the rest of human things : not all good, nor yet all bad, but mixed. It has done much in the past that nothing else could have accomplished ; it is now performing before us a selection not otherwise to be hoped for. I do not care to argue an obvious case, and shall leave the generalities about the good and evil of war 170 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE with these remarks and the implications of my general argument. But as to force never ac- complishing anything, that too is the nonsense of a fanatical utterance. Force has underlain all of the institutions upon which civilization has most prided itself: the family, law, govern- ment, rights, morals, and religion. How was the decision won over piracy, or slavery, or any other outworn practice that by its persistence constituted a menace to civilization? By argu- ing and passing a resolution? By tearful ex- postulation, or even by prayer? How did we get our national independence and start the infection of modem democracy? By moral suasion? It takes a conflict to secure selection and the sur- vival of the fit, I repeat, in the societal range as in the organic ; and the more vital the issue, the surer it is that that conflict will come down to the ultimate form of physical violence. If one wants to maintain that an issue must be settled by ax)peal to reason, then the answer is that both parties must see reason. There is no argument in the presence of homicidal mania except that of force and the strait-jacket. It is a pity that this is so, but it is no less so because it is a pity. So is it a pity that a baby, leaning too far out of a window, will fall to its death; but THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 171 shall we pass a resolution against gravitation? It is a pity, but yet it is a fact, that some people, especially if obsessed, will not see reason any more than an excited and overwrought child will, until the exuberance of their unreason is re- duced by punishment. The tense nerves are dis- charged. Then they are fit to be reasoned with, and not before. It is then that they become cap- able of seeing the light. England saw the light, not from Burke's ex- postulations but after her war with us, and has developed an astonishing capacity, out of the maladroitness of the " colonial system," for rul- ing peoples. The South saw the light, after the Civil War, and would no more go back to slavery now than would the North. The Boers have seen the light. The days of the Oom Pauls are over. No grander conception of the mission and destiny of the British Empire as an enlightened peace- group was ever expressed than that of a former Boer commander and man of vision,^ now one of the bulwarks of that Empire's Council. And here before us is an issue, which, as I have remarked, dwarfs into insignificance any other that the race has met. There has been no lack of attempts to settle it by way of peaceful 1 Gen. J. C. Smuts, " The British Commonwealth of Nations." 172 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE means, and they have one and all failed. It has come down to a matter of force, of killing, and of misery-making, and it must issue in decisive mili- tary defeat for the Germans if there is to be peace in the world and an extension of interna- tional relations of amitj^ All those who hate force and war can help to eliminate them, and also to shorten present suffering, by putting all their powers into the effort to reach the decision at the earliest possible moment. It is not a question of annihilating or enslav- ing Germany, as she would like to do to the rest of us. She expects that, doubtless, judging us by herself. It is a question of eradicating her fetish-worship by demonstrating that her idols have feet of clay. Nothing but defeat of the in- vincible army and government, and the conse- quent letting-in of light as to the world's opinion of her course can do that. If this is accomplished, she can make her own selection, by revolution or otherwise. This is a tremendous task, but there is no other way of getting the results. The Ger- man government has been prodigal of promises, concealments, and lies to cover partial failures. The people have trusted it implicitly. After de- feat there will be no more opportunity to conceal or deceive, and the past, present, and prospective THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 173 suffering of the people will cause them to ask : Who got us into this, and why? If the revulsion is sharp enough, the fact of maladjustment to the conditions of life in the world will be sufB- ciently evident in the national loss and pain. In such case there will be no desire to return to the gods that have led into nothing but desperate calamity. The first accounting in such a case is not with the mores, but with the false leaders; and with the autocracy and militarism will go, unless the Germans are malevolent by nature, in the very germ-plasm, that obsession and insula- tion which have drugged sensitiveness to environ- ment and thus prevented adjustment along mod- era lines. The process of selection, to be effective, is bound to be painful. It is an operation where, if there is faltering at the end, there might as well have been no cutting at all. To this point I shall return. But it is to be recalled that Ger- many is in the position, among nations, of a criminal outlaw among his fellow-men. It helps the wrong-doer to get on the right track if he is obliged to repair the damage he has done. The thief cannot be allowed, even in his own interest, to keep his plunder subsequent to his conversion. When the Allied spokesman demanded repara- 174 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE tion, restitution, and guarantees, he was calling for precisely those things which are best for Ger- many, as well as due her victims. Insistence upon these demands is indispensable. Much there is that Germany must pay for, in 3'ears to come — through the contempt and dislike of the world — for it cannot be atoned for in terms of material things, and no one who is civilized wants to see retaliation in kind. But what she can repair and restore she sliould be held to repair and restore to the last item. I have said that nothing but a military victory will do. That is because I can see no other way to upset the fetish, strip off the insulation, and thus expose the Crerman mores to the necessity of adjustment. The condition of conditions is the fall of the fetish. If that can be accom- plished in some other way that shall be decisive and definitive, well and good. Nevertheless whatever the nature of the last push that dis- places the tottering structure, military force will have been an indispensable factor; and any al- ternative way can scarcely be less terrible. XVII. ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH When the war began there was not a few of us who saw the issue as a local thing. Desperate efforts were being made to localize it. Only later did it appear that the very essence of civili- zation was challenged, and that the warnings of Washington about European entanglements were irrelevant to an issue that transcended any conti- nent or hemisphere. Some saw this after the rush through Belgium, others after the Lusitania episode; but it was over two years before public opinion, in this relatively remote land, had sensed the danger sufficiently to support armed intervention. Similarly slow has been the comprehension of the strength and system of preparedness of the enemy. It was incredible that he would do what he did in the line of atrocities; and it was also incredible that he had been working out his code and preparing so long and so successfully. Even now, with not a little bitter experience behind us, we are from day to day amazed and shocked 175 176 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE at the exhibitions of unscrupulous efficiency that are being revealed to us. It is easy enough to blame some one else, especially some one in power whom we do not like, for not appreciating the whole situation beforehand; but it is grace- less to charge any ruler of a civilized nation with sloth or cowardice because his mind was not at- tuned to take in the bearings of what he had to be brought by hard exi)erience to believe at all. If there had been another Kaiser at Washington, very likely he would have had a mind attuned to the situation as an American's was not. There is real ground for self-respect in the fact that we were not able readily to conceive of the incon- ceivably base. No one but the bitter partisan can jibe at the remark attributed to the Secretary of War: "I delight in the fact that when we entered this war we were not, like our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for it, and inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not ready." " The overwhelming majority of Ameri- can people," comments Professor Sherman,^ "will perfectly understand that utterance and sympathize with it. In exactly the same sense the English people, in the midst of a tremendous 1 " Why Mr. Roosevelt and the Rest of Us Are at War," in the New York Nation for November 15, 1917. ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 177 emergency, have very generally pointed, with a kind of tragic pride and joy, to the fact that they were not prepared^ as the irrefutable evidence of their pacific intentions and as the substantial vindication of their honor in the community of nations.'' This military unpreparedness, however, though we may rightly be proud of it and of the spirit behind it, has represented for us the same sort of handicap that an unarmed and peaceful citi- zen labors under when he is suddenly obliged to encounter a desperado witli a blackjack. We are finding that out. German efficiency has never been as great or as thorough as in the present struggle; that is no wonder, for it has put its best for decades into preparation against "The Day." At first it looked like an unequal contest, with such a preponderance of nations and numbers on the Allied side; but that the inequality lay in the other direction speedily became apparent. It will never cease to amaze most of us that the Germans did not at once take Paris; we were so frightened at that time that subsequent shocks have lost their power to ter- rify; we are almost ready to credit the tale that it was his gluttony and thirst for French champagne that defeated the invader. And 178 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE much of the initial advantage still remains — above all the centralization of control. The Allies have admittedly made error after error, where the enemy has made but few. This is natural enough, for, as we now know, the Allies were to the Germans as a novice in an odious trade to an enthusiastic devotee of the same. Except for the British navy. For the German naval programs and performances had been ob- served by the Admiralty, viewed with concern, protested against, and at length met with coun- ter-preparation. Here the German menace had been taken seriously and the defenses strength- ened. But it was defense only that was contem- plated ; as a matter of fact, the British navy has come to be one of the most powerful factors mak- ing for peace and freedom that the world has known, and it has been, in this war, the very bulwark of civilization. Germany points at British navalism as identical w'ith the militarism charged to her; but the character of the one dif- fers from that of the other by reason of the spirit in which the arm of power is used or designed to be used. There is no fetish about British " na- valism,'- if it is pleasing to call it that. There is really no -ism or doctrine. The doctrine behind German militarism is now clearly enough re- ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 179 vealed ; but there is as little of that sort of dogma in British navalism as behind our new American militancy. Either may lead to an -ism if the nation in question becomes sufficiently obsessed and retrogressive; but there is as yet no British or American tendency toward beating with the heated and unbalanced head in the dust before the fetish -stool. The initial lack of preparedness is being rap- idly overcome. Says one of the Cabinet officers : " A democracy making war is never an agreeable sight, for it is not in its normal line of life. And those who sneer or jeer because it does not play the game as well as might be, pay an uncon- scious compliment to the merits of free institu- tions. It takes time to accustom men to the short, hard words of command, and to the sur- render of personal judgment. It is not easy, either, for a nation to turn its back upon the con- ception of a world where justice works out its ends by quiet processes, and in its stead come to the stern belief that the ultimate court is a battle- field. So, if there is wrenching and side-slip- ping and confusion, there should be no surprise. The surprise to me has been with what compara- tive ease the transition has been made, and how much unconscious preparation for the new work 180 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE had been already made." It is remarkable that democracies where freedom of opinion makes for diffusion, have adjusted themselves so rapidly and effectively to unexpected and poorly under- stood conditions. It simply goes to show the adaptability of a public oi)inion unused to direc- tion and repression. A nation which has faced for generations toward production and peace must now aim at destruction and war. It is no slight task to swing the massive engine about. It takes time to beat the plow-share into a sword and to make of a professional producer an expert destroyer. But there is another thing that is still liarder to do^ and that is to steel the hearts of humane men of peace against premature pity and softening; to have them hold relentlessly to the noisome task until it is done for good and all ; to have no faltering before or at the finish. Our adversaries have no such prospect to cause them concern; no hearts need to be steeled against human pity. We are, again, plainly at a material disadvantage. It is we, not the adver- sary, who have lost precious lives by humanity and chivalry. Our foes do not mind crying " Kamerad I " and then opening ranks for the hidden machine-guns to play upon the unsuspect- ing. It is they who will try, in straits, to net us ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 181 by plausible duplicity, to our destruction. We do not want to practice any of these things ; we are too proud to fight in that way ; but we must not be taken in any more by reason of our humane impulses. Particularly do we Americans run the risk of insisting foolishly and ignorantly upon stopping the conflict before selection is accomplished. Not a few of us seem to be impressed by the Rus- sian formula of " No annexations and no indem- nities." It is a fair guess that that formula originated in a German head. What is happen- ing in Russia as the result of fantastic and Utop- ian procedures ought to give even a sentimental- ist pause. The trouble, as I have said, is the in- capacity of many people for \dsualization of actualities not right at hand. Such persons are bleared as to the mind's eye. All right-minded men want the war to stoj); but they want it to stay stopped. The only important question is as to how soon it can stop, on condition that it shall satisfy justice, perform its selection, and so stop for good. How soon can " Never Again I " in the matter of this great issue, be transformed from a fervent purpose into an assured reality? Now what some of us fear, in connection with this " no-indemnities " suggestion, is that certain 182 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE sentimentalists, by raising a rhythmic clamor that shall beat intolerably upon the ears of a tired world, will succeed in staying the hand of justice in the matter of restitution, reparation, and guarantees ; and thus operate to prevent the cleaning-up of this whole job in workmanlike style. ^ Presumably such a movement will not originate in Belgium, or France, or, indeed, among any other of the victims of Germany's bar- barities; nor yet among those who have been near enough to see and know, and to experience righteous indignation. It will be among the ethical theorists whose phantasms have not been tested by reference to fact, and who can voice a lofty magnanimity from a protected station. Of all the Allies, we Americans are farthest removed from a realization of what the Germans have planned and done. Even the French have felt that they must keep an account of the details of German ferocity agaiust the day of settlement. Over here we do not know even by hearsay — least of all have we yet experienced — the bar- barities which the French are afraid they may forget, as the weariness grows more mortal and 1 The rest of this chapter is derived, with insignificant altera- tion, from a letter of the author, entitled " On Faltering at the Finish," in the New York Nation for June 7, 1917. ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 183 the sensibilities are dulled through the long months of trials and efforts. But now we shall have a weighty voice in the settlement of things. And if the end should come before we experience the losses and the heart-ache, we shall be too likely to minimize the wantonness committed against others, and shall perhaps wish to con- clude the task without bringing it to a finish. Some of us will harp on the familiar sentiment that the criminal is not responsible, that punish- ment should not be vindictive, that severity never acts as a deterrent; others will appeal to the chivalry that will not strike the opponent when he is down. A number of people will want to be content with the treatment of symptoms, and to neglect the extirpation of the lurking disease. Other scruples will appear which do more credit to the heart than to the head. And then, if the evil is not resolutely cut out, it will resume its growth and the suffering and loss will have to be incurred again, in more disastrous form, later on. The distinction between hostility to the Ger- man government and that toward the German people will again be drawn. It is risky to make a distinction of this kind. The issue is not, at bottom, hostility to any persons; it is reproba- tion of what the persons stand for. But there 184 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE is no doubt, as we have said, that the German people, Socialists and all, have stood for what the German government and armies have done. They have been deceived, no doubt; but the re- sponsibility for that cannot rest elsewhere than on themselves. They have been dominated by a fetish; but they bent gladly in tlieir adulation. If they were merely in error, yet it is the way of the world that people must sulYer for their own errors. It is thus that they learn to correct themselves — not by being instructed and ex- cused, over and over, but by bitter experience. It is not just that those who were not dominated by illusion, or had worked themselves out of it, should i)ay for the damage resulting from the ecstasy and intoxication of the obsessed. The German i)eople have stood for the destruction and rape that have been perpetrated upon other people's homes and women ; it is right that they should expiate all this in the small and insuffi- cient degree possible. Much is irreparable; re- paration for the reparable should be sternly ex- acted. Only thus can the illusion and obsession be dispelled. The way to see one's actions as they are is to be held accountable for their re- sults; and many a man changes his ways when he is once forced to visualize tJiem as others see ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 185 them. There are no fruits more meet for re- pentance than those tendered, voluntarily or not, in restitution and reparation. There has got to be a real right-about here. Life would not be livable for most of humanity if the German ideas and power should prevail. The fact that most of humanity now sees the peril and is in arms against the dominance of that for which Germany stands is eloquent wit- ness to this contention. Here is the revelation of a startling danger to the world. It is like the discovery of an unsuspected malignant tumor in the body. Now that we have had to go in with the knife and have uncovered an insidiousness of menace that is simply incredible, the operation should not be stayed by false humanitarianism until the roots of the disorder are removed. This is not vindictiveness or inhumanity; it is, on the contrary, common sense and an exhibition of the highest humanity. The wholesome devel- opment of human society is unthinkable with this menace always in its vitals. And as for hitting an enemy when down, who would apply that rule of chivalry to a serpent? It is not the men that are the target for the blows, I repeat — it is the thing the men stand for; only, as long as they stand for the venomous and detestable thing and 186 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE hug it to them, they should expect to stop the blows that are levelled at it. The victory is uot here, but it is only delayed. However long the delay, it is not too early to con- sider the terms of settlement. Whatever these are to be, this country has no business to intro- duce palliation for the culprit where it has not done the suffering. If an3' of the belligerents who has borne the burden and pain of oppression and humiliation wants to ease up on the de- feated aggressor — if Belgium or France, for ex- ample, wishes so to do — that is in order. But for us, who for mauy months liave i'e})osed in a safety bought by others' sacritices, to introduce any element of condonement is worse than im- pertinent. Our attitude should be an humble one until we have suffered something of what the rest have suffered and attained something of the dignity that goes with it. The Allies are not revengeful barbarians; they will be magnanimous enough without us to teach them. They have met the peril face to face, and they agree that they want restitution, reparation, and guaran- tees. Entering fresh, as we do, later in the struggle, we might easily, when it comes to a settlement, introduce an element of easygoing and careless generosity which would amount to ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 187 faltering at the finish. Our part is to realize the seriousness of this situation, drop all dallying with preconceptions and soft imaginings, and see it through to a genuine end. XVIII. ON INTELLIGENT ADJUST- MENT TO THE INEVITABLE This gigantic world-convulsion is not the end of all things. It may seem so to the simple- minded individual whose horizon is bounded by his suffering. Similar periods in the world's history have led to despairing prophecies of the world's end or of the advent of some super- natural iiower, as alone competent to bring order out of bewilderment and confusion. This is only the end of some things and the beginning of others. If the great issue is decided now, we shall eventually enter, not upon a new and strange societal order, but upon one which has shaken off enormous impediments and may now attain, unhampered, to closer adjustment to life- conditions along the lines of its vindicated code. If, on the contrary, the decision is lost by us, or drawn, or not carried to its linish, we shall go on to the next stage of a protracted period of con- flict and selection, with all its attendant misery. If the civilized world cannot now rise in its 188 INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 189 might, it will have to do so, later on, amidst throes of human pain to which the present ones are as preliminary twinges. But the selection will take place — then, if not now. This war is not an unique affair, except in the matter of scale. It is discharging war's normal function, just as it did when Roman fought Car- thaginian or when Napoleon's armies swept over Europe. Evei^ such war uprooted some codes and societal structures and made room for the persistence and growth of others. Now, in the perspective of history, reason generally applauds the results. In any case they are what has enabled the modern world to become what it is. These results are also in sequence, exhibiting a trend from a code we call savage, through the barbaric, to the civilized. Occasional retrograde movements are to be found, but they are pres- ently made up for. Judging by the past, it is unbelievable that civilization can go back on its course and stay there. This is the broad reason for inferring that the cause of the Allies, backed by the approval of most of what used to be reck- oned as the civilized world, cannot permanently fail. It cannot, because the code it defends is one long ago proved to be a better adaptation to the life-conditions of societies than a code includ- 190 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE in«r the elements which characterize the present challenging code. The extension of the peace-group is a scarcely interrupted evolutionary process, and there is no discoverable reason why it should not be further extended, this present vicious challenge once re- pelled. The code of this peace-group, in so far as the latter had taken form previous to the chal- lenge, has shown no change in its essentials as it has expanded over a wider and wider clientage. Its democracy is in the air and has been auto- matically enlarging its sphere of influence, dec- ade by decade, until the challenge came. War, on the contrary, with militarism and autocracy, has been on the steady decline for a long time, and even the warlike, militaristic, and autocratic peoples have nominally repudiated it. This pres- ent war is really between peoples who say they are peace-loving, industrial, and democratic, and are, and peoples who say they are all these things, and are not. Both sides lay claim to the more expedient code of peace, and thereby vindicate its prospects of extension ; both sides claim to abhor the code of violence and thereby point to its eventual decline, if not elimination. In view of such considerations, I cannot see a lasting vie- INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 191 tory for any other code of international conduct than the one now challenged. With such con- victions, it is impossible to be permanently de- pressed over the incidents of the selective process. It matters, of course, that the Bolsheviki are writing themselves down in the Shakespearean fashion ; but it does not matter vitally. It mat- ters when you are among the trees but not when you view the woods. This whole situation is quite out of the hands of individuals like Lenin, or Hindenburg, or the Kaiser. Individuals mat- ter some, but not much, or vitally, or in the long run. We see the chijis, but it is the tide that counts. This human fragment is borne promi- nently upon a tide of rebellion; the tide rushes on to dominance and he is the founder of a new nation or dispensation ; the tide is checked and turned back, and he is a traitor of inglorious memory; the tide sweeps forward again, with renewed power, and he is a martyr, born before his time. Societal evolution is a vast process, where the forces are massive and act with unhurried delib- eration, endlessly interlocking, within a spacious field. " Ein wechselnd Weben, Ein gluhend Leben." There are dim ages of the process be- 192 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE hind us, and ages untold yet to come. Selection occurs at every stage, and is but an episode along the course. How then can men do anything, if all is deter- mined by such cosmic power? Why struggle? Well, man can do something with gravitation, with the expansive power of steam, with the germ-plasm stream, although he can control the processes themselves in no degree. He can move things about, into the path or out of the path of natural forces. He can fix the mill-wheel be- neath the falling water. He can place the cylin- der in the way of the steam. He can isolate or bring together the sexes of animals. This has been done so successfully for man's interests and welfare that man has conceived tlie idea tliat he is master of nature. But wliat he has done is to learn nature's ways and adapt his action to them. At a pinch he is nature's play tiling and victim : the earth shakes a little, and his great works collapse; the volcano spills a little gas over its crater-rim upon a town, and the lords of nature lay them down and are still. It is not otherwise with the elemental forces of the societal realm. They cannot be mastered; they must be studied and known and adjusted to, as a condition of societal well-being. The INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 193 efforts of many a would-be benefactor and up- lifter of the race are sterile or even harmful be- cause he is trying to do what he would realize, if he knew what a society is, and what can and can- not be done with it, to be out of the question. Every one knows that water will not run uphill ; yet in the societal realm there have been plenty of well-meaning people, through the ages, who have worn out and wasted their lives in unhappi- ness, trying ineffectually to overcome a societal tendency and law which are equally inevitable. If an ignoramus plays about in a chemical labo- ratory, we keep our distance, for we expect trou- ble as a result of ignorance of chemical sub- stances and laws. Knowledge of the experi- menter's good intentions does not reassure us at all. But we easily permit the uninformed med- dler to prowl about the structure of society, pok- ing and tinkering, apparently in the belief that, provided his intentions are good, nothing but human weal can result. We are bound to learn, sometime, that powerful forces are at work with- in the societal range, and that ignorant tamper- ing is even more dangerous here than elsewhere because so many more people have to endure the consequences. Then we shall want more knowl- edge of these forces, that we may adjust to them. 194 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE The present is a sort of orgy of dislocation and of alteration in the conditions of society's life. In the early pages of this little book I have cited a selection of unplanned and unforeseen adjust- ments that are already in the process of painful birth. And I have gone on to show some of the exhibitions of the societal forces, in this their period and phase of inexorable stress and strain. Many of the barriers which we have raised be- tween ourselves and the raw and remorseless vio- lence of primordial power have now broken down and must be painfully built up again. It is a time for knowledge and for the broadest outlook. It is a time for perspective of the past, that we may not become involved in vain hopes or un- called-for despairs. It is a time when we must understand the forces determining the evolution and life of human society as well as possible, that we may move things into and out of their path with the idea of utilizing their power in the interest of human well-being. Intelligent adjustment to the known inevitable is as rare on earth as automatic adjustment to the unknown inevitable is common. But the former is an abridged and less painful process. Adaptation is sure, because it is the condition of comfort and of life itself. Adaptability is that INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 195 which hurries and eases the process. Of all earthly things that which possesses the supreme capacity for swift adaptation is the human mind. But that capacity is undeveloped, fettered in its action by pseudo-knowledge, bias, caprice, and sentimentality — except where tests and verifica- tion are immediate and conclusive, and where, therefore, knowledge is almost automatically ac- quired. Nowhere is real knowledge and science so little in intelligent demand as in the societal realm, for the latter is self-sown to whims and dreams of all varieties. It is thought that man can here have his own will ; here, at last and at least, he is lord. He senses no elemental powers in the field. Here, of all places, he needs but to plan and " create " ; pass resolutions and regula- tions ; think out Utopias in bed and then rise and gird himself to their realization; abolish prop- erty or the family, or government, or religion. Naturally he is taken by the theory that societal evolution is by individual purposeful action. Naturally he regards insistence upon the control exerted by spontaneous, automatic, and imper- sonal forces as an assault upon his " free will." Sometimes, in a crisis, the verities stand forth and enforce to themselves an attention which they do not get in ordinary times. Many people 196 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE are now perplexed and in weak despair because their comfortable little formulas crack and break under the weight of explanation laid upon them. Perhaps it is a favorable occasion to offer the contention that " social theory '' is not wholly academic after all. But the thesis of this little book is not thus general. I have aimed at an entirely practical application of evolutionary theory to a particu- lar episode in the evolution of human society. For those whose convictions run with mine, a quite definite line of action is indicated. It is possible enough to arrive at the same convictions without going through a course of reasoning in self-justification; but, as I said at the outset, no faith was ever weakened by the support of reason. PBIKTED IN THB tTNTTED STATES OF AMERICA I Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: .,.„ „ MAY 2001 PreservationTechnologiei A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOt LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 007 628 869 4