lEni rinJ|Tuil[rm3ITiHl[ruil[li^ m m ill m m m lU HI E I THE LIBRARIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY General Library f^ m m m m m m m m m \n] rLnJ[iirilirTJiJ[]iJ? ninJ| fini[n^ With Mitchell Kennorley' t compliments n THE MENACE OF PEACE THE MENACE OF PEACE BY GEORGE D. HERRON NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY 1917 G'ih of the President svn 2 0*17 THE MENACE OP PEACE AS deviously and vastly as Germany pre- ^ pared for war, so deviously and vastly is ^ she now preparing for peace. The same pes- tilential espionage, so repulsive yet pervasive and prevailing; the same loathsome perfection of forgery, falsehood, and intrigue; the same stark insensibility to the usual decencies, the j"^ common nobilities, of the game of life; the same shameless rejoicing in every form of human infidelity and dishonour: these, with added modes and messengers polluting, are now co-ordinated in a ramified propaganda for a peace that shall leave Germany relatively un- defeated, if not obviously victorious. And with these, in muddling and mindless array, march the publicists and the pacifists who 6 THE MENACE OF PEACE would have it that the sources and issues of the war are too obscure for intellectual judgment or spiritual discernment. They clamour for a peace that shall leave the causes unknown, the embattled questions unanswered — even by a conflict that is destroying our present civiliza- tion, and joining the flower of Europe's man- hood to them we call the dead. We hear it said, on every hand, that it does not matter which side wins so far as the human future is concerned. We must treat the war as if it were really about nothing at all; as if it were but the rage of competing peoples, and to be ended with neither victory nor defeat accruing to the one or the other group of competitors. This has been typically expressed by Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, in a recent number of the New York Independent, To his eyes "the one ray of hope out of the dark- ness is that this war may, because of the inlier- ent forces at work, necessarily end in a draw." *'As soon as it becomes a settled judgment of the world that nothing can be gained and much THE MENACE OF PEACE 7 lost by continuing the war, the time will have arrived to conclude it and to get at the task of ending war in general." We are substantially- asked to conclude that the most stupendous con- flict of history, unalterably charged with the world's destiny, means nothing that is discov- erable and we are to make its lack of meaning a reason for peace. If this be true, then of course it matters not who the victors are, nor when the war ends; nor does anything matter that man has to do with, and his destiny is of no concern. II jyUT it is not true. It matters infinitely -^-^ which side shall win, and what shall he the vision and the judgment of man as to the issues involved in the war. And the thing that urges and counts is, not when the war shall end, hut what it shall he seen to mean. For the war to close, and the world not know what it has heen fighting ahout, would he the su- preme catastrophe of history, Terrihle as the war is, the peace which the pacifists propose would he more terrible, A compromise he- tween the contending helligerents would he a hetrayal of the peoples of every nation, and would issue in universal mental and moral con- fusion. A peace that leaves the nations where they were, that recognizes neither victor nor vanquished, that ignores the conflict's causes and questions, that evades all judgment as to 8 THE MENACE OF PEACE 9 the right or wrong of the matter — such a peace would be the last disaster of mankind. The millions who have died would have died in vain. The lessons of the last two thousand years would have been written in the sands. The hard ascent of the race, from its beginning until now, would have conveyed no convoking and uniting purpose, no empowering and com- pelling prospect. The judgment day would have come and gone without our discerning the judgment passed upon us, or even knowing we had been judged. The supreme opportunity of man would have proved itself greater than man. As one who hopes passionately for the vic- tory of the Allies, I would say that a complete Prussian triumph would be preferable to a compromise between the contending peoples and principles. For even under the baleful bondage of a German dominion mankind might still, through high rebelhon, through hard suffering, awaken to its mission in the universe — to cosmic intimacy and to infinite 10 THE MENACE OF PEACE choice. But if the war end in universal eva- sion, if the race refuse its hour of great de- cision, then downward, into long and impene- trable darkness, we shall surely go. One can imagine such an issue as the very despair of the heart of God, vainly broken for a dastard and derelict humanity. Yet it is for a peace based upon just such an evasion that the pacifists are working — and working, however unconsciously, as the serv- ants of the Prussian military purpose and power. They prate of pity : but they know not the moral content of the pity that is true and triumphant. They babble of brotherly love: but they see not that the love that is creative and redemptive hath flame and granite and steel among its elements. The true lovers of man are the relentless haters of lies; and they have blood in their veins, and bones in their bodies, and weapons in their hands. It is not love, but the lack of love, the lack of spiritual brain and nerve, that evades judgment, avoids justice, and seeks compromise. And the com- THE MENACE OF PEACE 11 promise the pacifist plotters propose would not be peace, but perpetual war. There is no peace without justice, no justice without truth, and no truth that is not the achievement of the love that takes sides and conquers — ^takes sides passionately and conquers definitely. Peace and justice are the same, and so are love and fraternity and ti^uth, and also freedom and faith. They are but different names for the Power that holds the balance of the world. These are the times in which to read, regard- less of one's behefs, the Apocalypse of the apostle who saw the wrath of the Lamb con- suming the kingdom and systems that were completing their cycle under the exhausting rule of Rome. There is no better tonic for a wearied and baffled goodwill; no stronger solace for the hearts that have hoped for social liberation and international fraternity, and that now beat low amid the shadows of divine dis- appointment. Here, in this Book of the Wars of the Christ, the symbol of the ultimate peace is the lake of glass mingled with fire. It is the 12 THE MENACE OF PEACE peace that, burning with an unresting, infinite ardour, prevails at the end of love's conquest of truth, love's achievement of justice. It is the peace of the Power we are created to know and to become intimate with, first as families and individuals, then as nations and societies, and at last as a wedded race. And it is the peace whose beginnings this unimaginable war is divinely meant to precipitate. Ill AND what is the war about? There are answers, enough and to spare, that deal with phases of the conflict. It is a renewal, the historians tell us, of the ever-recurring col- lision of rival racial movements : there is an in- cidental truth in the answer, but nothing more. There are voices declaring the source of the struggle to be in the mutual jealousies of Ger- man and Anglo-Saxon, each seeking to pre- vent the predominance of the other: and this, too, is true in part. The Radicals expose and denounce the financial causes of the conflict: and they are nearer the truth than the others. For it is true that Governments, the decisions of rulers and ministers and parliaments, are in the hands of one or another of great banking groups. In their hands is practically all of the world's industrial activity, and the making 13 14« THE MENACE OF PEACE of peace or war. The back-doors between the money-marts of London and Paris and Berlin, between those of Berlin and Rome and Vienna, are always open : the messengers of the profit- makers go in and out the reeking portals. Probably two hundred men control the war's resources; and they will have a mortgage on the world when the war is done. Let us admit the whole ghastly truth: the war that now en- gages the nations has its setting and sustenance in a financial avidity and rottenness that are beyond the common mind's measure. Even so, the economic interpretation of the war is but superficially true. If man were merely a mechanism, the explanation might be sufficient. But man is more than a mechanism ; and the action of the mechanism itself is merely an expression of man's spiritual quality, of the degree of his self-realization. Economic modes and social forms, and the industrial and national conflicts they engender, are but ob- jectifications of man's inner mind and manner. This is especially true of the capitalist sys- THE MENACE OF PEACE 15 tern of production. Capitalism is not a thing in itself: it is but the manifestation of a thing: it is a revelation of both the social and the average individual thought or desire. Capital- ism is a state of mind: when brotherhood in- forms the social and the average mind, then brotherhood will organize the world's produc- tion and distribution, and the capital therein engaged will be social and sacramental. We must look beneath our economic modes and strifes for the meaning of the war — for even so much of the meaning as man may read and apply. The war may indeed have spiritual sources beyond our present ken. Of the cosmic tides that beat upon the world we know nearly nothing. Pragmatically speaking, this convulsion of the nations may be but an in- cident of some struggle that involves the stars and the spaces — an eddy in the course of a strife too vast for our caged and planetary com- prehension. But, historically speaking, we may find this war — perhaps all wars — ^to be but the conflict between two rival principles of col- 16 THE MENACE OF PEACE lective life and conduct. History is the dis- closure of this conflict — the record, tortuous and treacherous, of the slow and hard struggle between the autocratic and the democratic principles for the direction of the human climb. Or, to put it otherwise, our history is decid- ing whether the will that proceeds from mutual love, from an affection that is collective and fraternal, or the will of sheer mechanic might, shall be the power that finally and commonly prevails. Shall the will to love, or shall the will to power, be the chosen law of human rela- tions—of all our collective and individual pro- cedure? Shall the peoples be governed by a power imposed upon them by a master-might or a master-class, justifying itself by the strength of its right hand? Or shall they co- operate with a power that springs from a Di- vine Presence within, co-ordinating them in a common growth, in equal opportunity, in social goodness and spiritual gladness ? Not all the prophets and teachers, not all reformers and saviours, have trusted the demo- THE MENACE OF PEACE 17 cratic or fraternizing principle; not all have prepared its way. Such as the Buddha and the Christ have worked with it. So have the mystics of the time of the Germanica Theo- logica. Rousseau and Lamennais and Maz- zini, the English Wycliff, the Swiss Zwingli, the American Lincoln, have all striven to create power within men rather than to exercise power over them. Not far from these are Aurelius, Epictetus, and the later Stoics. These all dreamed the dream, each within the circle of his own experience, his time, and his philosophy, of the divinely self-governing in- dividual, of the mutualistic society. On the other and opposing side, following the auto- cratic principle, are such as the Csesars and the not wholly blind Napoleon, the great Hilde- brand and the stern Cromwell, even the Savon- arolas and Luthers. Here the whole govern- mental and papal conception of society en- camps. On this foundation rose the Bis- marckian State, and even what is known as German social democracy. These all essayed 18 THE MENACE OF PEACE to make people good, or orderly, or co-opera- tive by authority. They have identified their conceptions of human relations with an ex- ternal political or hierarchical might. IV THE supreme expression of the will to love, of the power that springs from an inner and common Divine Presence, is in Him we call the Christ. But the Christian spring- time was brief, and the winter of the world has been long. For a little while, among won- drous and willing communities of martyrs, His law of love seemed to prevail. Earth seemed on the threshold of the just and joyous society. But soon was He hidden from men by the rulers and the priests, and His idea has had few and vagrant voices and manifestations. Institutions and tyrannies have arisen in His name since His words shook Jerusalem and the Galilean hills, but they have been the negation of all He taught and promised. And now, in the collapse of our fabled Christian civiliza- tion, are writers and reformers proclaiming the 19 20 THE MENACE OF PEACE failure of the idea for which Jesus stood. Were they not as moles that burrow in the earth, they would discern that the world's col- lapse is precisely due to His rejection — to the rejection of the principle which Jesus believed to be the only practicable basis for social secur- ity, for individual sanity. Our civilization is J f alUng in upon itself, like a falsely constructed building, because it is based upon the will to power instead of upon the will to love. For the basal brotherhood of human relations, the universal democracy of love, these are no more mere sentiments than gravitation is a mere sen- timent — no more than the movements of the tides or the highways of the stars are senti- ments. For love is the eternal and inviolable consti- tution of our being. What builds not upon love and according to the order and freedom that are love's correlatives, builds always for ultimate disaster and death. Above the pres- ence and the power of this love we have no choice : our choice is limited to accepting or re- THE MENACE OF PEACE 21 jecting it. We may obey it — and the world shall become the kingdom of heaven. We may reject it — and the world shall be ground to powder. The wreck and welter we now be- hold, the possible dissolution of our civihza- tion, is nothing else than the world's collision with love. (au^^ f^^^>S li^ ^^-^^' UL. V Now the complete opposite of the mind of Christ is the Prussian idea of the State, and of the quahty of individual man thereby- required. The conception that the might and glory of the State are the true end of man, and especially that the State is superior to morals — doubtless this has been the basis of much of the world's governmental procedure. But other nations at least have had their ideals of a nobler politic ; it is only in Prussia that this conception is the written law and gospel of national ac- tion. It is this Prussian quest for an objective and material might, and not for an inner and spirit- ual right, that Germany has pursued and pur- sues. And it is the absence of a truly spiritual ideal that has debarred the German peoples from political knowledge or initiative. 22 THE MENACE OF PEACE 23 For the German Empire is not a political organization; neither has it a political genesis. There was a romantic feeling for unity among German States, but it was not strong enough to prevent their docile submission to the Prus- sian yoke. The passionate aspiration that led to the liberation and unity of Italy, and that now pervades the heroic remnants of the Serv- ian and Belgian peoples, is foreign to Ger- man experience and understanding. The long political evolution of the French and Anglo- Saxon peoples is likewise alien to German de- velopment. The German Empire is purely the arbitrary and accidental creation of the Prussian sword. It has no indigenous roots, no historical reason for being, in the German peoples themselves. The Empire is a military organization, operated for commercial ends. Or, rather, it is a business corporation, equipped for military conquest and the economic mastery of the world. In no true sense is Germany a | political State. We must remember that much of the land y 24 THE MENACE OF PEACE now occupied by East Germans, and prac- tically the whole of Prussia, excepting Han- over, was wrested from the Slavs by sheer mil- itary theft and systematic extermination — ^by the familiar modes of the Teutonic Knights, the most brutal and burglarious of all the rob- ber baron hordes; whence Prussia remains to this day not a nation in fact, but a robber baron locality with a robber baron psychology. Neither the method nor the mind of Prussia could be better expressed than in the words of Krizanic, a Croat Catholic priest and a Pan- Slav apostle, who went to Petrograd about the year 1660, and who was a great and devout figure in the Slav world of that time: "The Germans have driven us (Slavs) from whole districts — Moravia, Pomerania, Silesia, Prus- sia. In Bohemia there are only very few Slavs left. In Poland all the towns are full of strangers and we are their slaves ; it is for them that we till the soil, for them that we make war, and they remain to feast in their houses, and treat us as dogs and pigs. By their incessant THE MENACE OF PEACE 25 attacks and insults they have reduced many Slavs who live among them to such a situation of despair that they are ashamed of their lan- guage and race, and give themselves out as members of another nation. The Germans, after introducing themselves into all the Slav States, are furious at not having been able yet to reduce to their power the Russian Empire, which God has always preserved from their yoke. Hence of all Slavs they most detest the Russians, and do all they can to harm them, and spread the most infamous reports about them. They have managed to make the Russians ab- solutely despised in Europe and to divide them, continually sowing among them causes of in- testinal quarrel." We have here in the preda- tory process described by Krizanic a perfect picture of Prussian ethic and action. And the ethic and action are the same, bedizened and sublimated by the professors, as the avowed principle and practice of the Prussia of to- day. The world cannot tolerate a nation proceed- 26 THE MENACE OF PEACE ing upon the Prussian theory. The doctrine that might makes right is the arch-lie of history. According to this he, the State is justified by whatever it does, if thereby it increases its wealth and dominion. Its rightness inheres in its success ; and by its success it claims the sanc- tion of the teachers and the blessing of the preachers. Or rather, whatever enhances the might and the glory of the State is more than right. For the State, by this doctrine, is super- moral, is above considerations of right and wrong. It has nothing to do v/ith justice or injustice in its relation to other States, to the outer world : it has only to do with its own self - enhancement, its own self -extension. What- ever accomplishes its own increase is higher than the rights of States or peoples weaker than itself: its conquering will needs no other justi- fication than the proof of its power to conquer. VI THE Prussian political philosophy is no secret; it is not something that has to be deduced or searched for. It is the foundation upon which Germany builds. It is the primal principle of her present educational system. It has been proclaimed from all the pinnacles of German aspiration and achievement. It is the root and reason of the "Kultur" which Ger- many would impose upon the world by the sword. Her philoso^Dhers, saving Kant, have largely laboured in its behalf. The final mean- ing of Hegel, in so far as he means anything at all, resolves itself into a tricky and transcen- dentalized Prussian pohtic. William James was frank enough to say that neither he nor any man could truthfully assert he knew what Hegel meant. But when this master-charla- tan of philosophy is hunted to his verbarian 27 28 THE MENACE OF PEACE lair, and his historical philosophy there sub- jected to such analysis as we can give it, we find it to be but the monumental mystification and sanctification of the self -same theory that Bernhardi upholds and that Bismarck acted upon. The Hegelian notion of the State as the self-unf oldment of the divine idea is but the brazen setting-forth of sheer national might as the world and will of God. There are pages of even Fichte — who attempts to justify and defend Machiavelli — ^that come to the same self-sufficient and rapacious conclusion. Man is reduced to the status of a political beast, and his beasthood invested with a kind of monstrous mysticism. But the sum of the Prussian idea is best given by Heinrich von Treitschke. '*If we now," he says, *'apply this standard of truly Christian morality to the State, and if we re- member that the essence of this great collective personality is Power, then it is the highest moral duty of the State to be concerned for its Power." He then declares that "the Christian THE MENACE OF PEACE 29 duty of self-sacrifice for something higher has no existence whatever for the State, for there is nothing whatever beyond it in world history ; consequently it cannot sacrifice itself for any- thing higher." He thus naturally concludes "that we must distinguish between public and private morality. Since the State is Power, the sequence and ordering of its various ob- ligations must be quite other than that applic- able to the individual. A whole series of these duties incumbent upon him are not to be thought of for the State. For it the supreme commandment is self-assertion; for it that is absolutely moral. And therefore we must de- clare that of all political sins that of weakness is the most reprehensible and contemptible; it is in politics the sin against the Holy Ghost." This means, consequently, that every Ger- man, when acting as a political or military be- ing, when serving as an agent of the Father- land, is absolved from pity and scruples. The Fatherland becomes an end that justifies the most immoral and inhuman of means. To be 30 THE MENACE OF PEACE a spy and a traitor in the house of a French or EngHsh friend, to accept personal or na- tional hospitahty as a means of destroying the host, becomes righteous and glorious. The lowest human actions become sacraments of a super-patriotism worthy of Hassan ben Sab- bah — a patriotism that supersedes all truth, all honour, even natural feelings that are common to man and the beasts. The progress of Ger- man "Kultur" is thus synonymous with the spiritual destruction of the world. For it is impossible that we separate one part of being from another. If a man is absolved from moral obligation in one sphere, he will at last so act in every sphere. If a nation ab- solve itself from moral relations with other na- tions, it becomes a vampire upon the universal body. And this the Germany of the last half- century has consistently and constantly demon- strated. She stood against reform in Russia, she thwarted, by her own military persistence, the pacifist desires of France; she blocked the wheels of social reconstruction in England ; she THE MENACE OF PEACE 31 has been a source of national disintegration in America ; she plunged the Turk into irretrieva- ble ruin; she turned the Balkan peoples upon each other when they were on the way to federa- tion; she kept the Hague tribunal from becom- ing effectual; her intrigues with the Vatican, her financial aggressions in Italy have been the kingdom's deep and disturbing disease. Gov- ernmental Gervmny has steadfastly stood for international distrust, disruption, and debauch- ery. She has religiously laboured for the deg- radation of the nations, in order that she might so reduce their defensive power as to bring them into subjection to herself. There is not a principle of universal public law or better- ment that Germany has not combated or de- feated. There is not an effort toward inter- national faith or fraternity that Germany has not derided or baffled. She has literally turned back the hands on the clock of the world's prog- ress. She stands squarely in the world's way into a new and nobler era. Humanity is at a standstill before the Prussian sword and sys- 32 THE MENACE OF PEACE tern. There can he no peace, nor can the race take another onward step, until that sword and that system are destroyed. And the would-be makers of another peace than this, no matter who they are, nor how high their motives, are no less than Satanic seducers of the soul of the world. VII IT is not that the German peoples are bad, or that the peoples who constitute the Allies are good. By no such childish comparisons is the conflict or its question to be understood. The virtues of the average German, in com- parison with the virtues of the average Eng- lishman, have nothing to do with the decision we must each make as to what the war is about, and as to which of the two lines of battle we shall render such service as we may. The standard and practice of the individual Ger- man might be higher than the standard and practice of the individual Englishman, and still the German be fighting for a leadership that is anti-human and Satanic. The German man and woman might be dutiful, home-loving, and industrious beyond the man or woman of France, and yet the mind of the German col- 33 34 THE MENACE OF PEACE lectivity be perverse in its purpose, and the German kind of progress be a reversion of the divine course of history. The good man may become insane through following a false or mistaken idea, and that despite his goodness; the wise or the sweet or the brave may pass un- der the power of a destructive sophistry. So a great people may become collectively and darkly obsessed by a damning idea, a stu- pendous delusion. In the American Civil War the average Southern leader was undoubt- edly a more admirable gentleman than the average leader of the North ; but the collective Southern mind was for disunion and slavery, and the collective Northern mind was for na- tional unity and the freedom of the slave. History is not poor in examples of individually superior peoples fighting collectively for causes that were dark and debasing. I am not for a moment admitting the truth of the German as- sumption of a superior culture and citizenry: I am only saying that, even were the assump- tion true, it would not necessarily bear upon the THE MENACE OF PEACE 35 issue raised by the war. The notion that the right or wrong of the war can be decided by de- bating or comparing the average individual vir- tues of the respective combatants proceeds from a pitiful ignorance of either individual or social psychology. Let us remember, besides, that a wrong cause generally appears in a more plausible and ap- pealing garb than the cause that is right. The cause that is just, the truth that cleaves through the foundations of entrenched and honoured wrong, rarely presents itself in a comeliness comparable with that of its opponents. The strong and sustained delusions are usually ar- rayed in an appearance of power and benefic- ence that make them seem desirable. The great wolves of history have always presented themselves as good shepherds and saviours of the nations upon which they preyed. The force that has been personalized as Satan never appears, in the crises of men, as other than an angel of light. How else should it appear? It is we who are fools, but no fool is Satan. It 36 THE MENACE OF PEACE is the good who are slow and stupid and bhnd: it is the evil that sees, that seizes, that executes. It is the Prussian mind that has permeated the world, and therethrough implanted itself or its seed, beyond aught the world now knows; while such as literally believe in the Christ, such as have confidence in the efficient power of his love to organize the world — ^these are an un- heeded and baffled few, a scattered and shame- faced remnant. VIII GERMANY has had her ideahsm, it is true. I am not forgetting her philosophers and theologians, her poets and romanticists. Nor do I forget that music, the first and last lan- guage of the soul, is especially a German de- velopment. I remember that Beethoven — perhaps the largest German intellect as well as a supreme expresser of the upward yearnings of European man — was also a hater of tyrants and tyrannies. I remember, too, that it was Kant who definitely proposed arbitration be- tween the nations. Yet it is Germany herself that has been false to the nobler side of Kant, and that has forsaken the freedom Beethoven so passionately loved. And leaving these two for the moment, we must observe that German idealism, on the whole, belongs within vague and narrow boundaries of time and percep- 37 38 THE MENACE OF PEACE tion; and also that it has largely partaken of the nature of a spiritual and intellectual self- indulgence. German idealism has been neither national nor synthetic. It has been expressive of no unifying aspiration or purpose among the German peoples. It has never been widely or profoundly human. Goethe is the princely anarchist, and Schiller the sentimentalist who could never escape being sickly as well as sub- lime. Goethe had httle interest in a German nation, and was as provincial and parochial in one sense as he was universal in another. It mattered little to him whether Napoleon or the feudal princelings — at once comic and bar- barous — ruled the German States. He was quite content if his Weimar and his Thurin- gian woods were preserved for his pedal and mental peregrinations. If we think of Dante's identification of himself with Italy, if we think how England fills Shakespeare's perspective, and then of how little Germany has to do with Goethe's intellections, we glimpse the differ- ence between a poet who incarnates the soul of THE MENACE OF PEACE 39 a nation and one for whom the nation scarcely exists, or for whom it is a matter of incidental concern. Where the idealists of France are revolutionary and creative, where England's idealists are always appealing for a sublimer national being, the German idealists are ro- . . mantic, discursive, and irresponsible. There is a sort of super-puerility, a metaphysical, whine, a self-gratifying pessimism, seldom ab- sent from the German attitude toward life. . The religious emotionalism produced by an ] abundance of beer, and by the cherished sor- rows of transient but remembered loves, trans- ; mute themselves into theology and mystical philosophy. Of course the world should not be without Germany's conceptual and speculative philoso- phy ; nor without her religious ratiocinations or her romantic literature. For they bring an idealism that is a precious and perpetual con- tribution to the birth and growth of the ulti- mate world-soul ; an idealism we shall the bet- ter love and cherish when nation understands ./" 40 THE MENACE OF PEACE nation, and the world has become one. But, even so, the distinctly German mood is neither manful nor uniting; nor has it been creative of a true mental or spiritual universality. It has produced no such rebels of God as Socrates and Jesus, Dante and Mazzini, Milton and Vol- taire, Emerson and Whitman; and the mind of the German Empire has been made by her Hohenzollerns and Bismarcks. It is the mind that now seeks world-dominion through mih- tary might; through industrial technique and commercial conquest. And into her present thought and action, the idealisms of the Ger- many of the past have been received as a kind of ruminative beverage. They are in no wise inspirative of national nobility, nor do they neutralize the issue that Germany has so stealthily and ruthlessly thrust upon the peo- ples beyond her borders. IX THE German peril cannot be disproved by the superior efficiency of German organ- ization. Let us grant the superiority at once. The German collectivity is established and sus- tained by a skill and a responsibihty that no other nation approaches. No other collectiv- ity has developed so shrewd a social foresight ; such perfection of industrial technique; such application of scientific inquiry to productive processes, to tangible facts and forces. No other collectivity so grasps and directs its ma- terials; so removes the element of chance; so provides for the material security and physical ease of its members. In all that pertains to the objective well-being of labour, to the eco- nomic and cultural care of motherhood and childhood, to provision against sickness and old age, Germany leads the world. She also leads 41 42 THE MENACE OF PEACE it in matters of technical education, and in the training of each man as a unit of the national whole. Her autocratic will and method have accomplished, on behalf of the average man, that social shelter and assurance, that protec- tion from harm and hunger, which the demo- cratic nations have so stubbornly and ignor- antly refused. We must not deny — we must admit to our infinite shame — that German or- ganization is proficient and providential be- yond anything that English or French or American organization has considered or at- tempted. In fact, it is only in Germany that / social organization may be said to exist at all. The collectivities of France and England are I unorganized; and America is not a collectivity I but a heterogeneous mass, a social and in- dustrial anarchy. Yet having ungrudgingly confessed the su- periority of the German social arrangements, having rehearsed their wide and common ma- terial beneficence, it remains for us to inquire as to their effect upon the individual, and upon THE MENACE OF PEACE 43 Germany's conception of her place among the nations. It is good to be well housed and well fed; good to be protected in the performance of one's labour ; good to be provided for in sick- ness and old age; good to be fitted into one's place in a perfected economic machine. But if these values are obtained at the expense of infinitely greater values; if they are made the end instead of the means of well-being; if they derive from such a source, if they proceed upon such a principle, as to make of the average man a mere automaton; if they are destructive in- stead of creative of personality; then the best organization the autocratic principle can achieve is but a deathful illusion. It is an effi- ciency fraught with spiritual atrophy, dissipat- ing instead of conserving the final values. For objective order and coherency are not ends in themselves; nor in themselves do they consti- tute the well-being of either society or the individual. Their purpose is to afford oppor- tunity for well-being, but they are not well-be- ing itself. 44 THE MENACE OF PEACE Furthermore, it is not possible that auto- cratic might may conceive or construct social right ; not possible for it to provide a true rea- son for social being. Nor may it set before the collectivity an upleading social goal. In- deed, the most perfect organization autocracy may provide inevitably must result in social paralysis, in spiritual death. The highest ma- terial efficiency might be so conceived and made effectual as to prove itself the product and pro- ducer of a fatal spiritual inefficiency. And precisely this has happened in Ger- many. The very docility of the people under the dominion of the Prussian idea and system, their childish belief in the hes laid upon them by their masters, are proof enough of the spirit- ual fatuity of German material and technical co-ordination. The wise farmer would rela- tively do for his cattle, the wise slave-holder would relatively do for his slaves, the things so well done by the Prussian State for the Prus- sian people. But the cattle would be no less cattle for being well-fed and well-herded; the THE MENACE OF PEACE 45 slave would be rendered no less a slave by the self-interested care of his owner ; and the Prus- sian is no less an automaton because the State so provides for his life as to make him an effi- cient instrument of war and production. The end of German social organization is not human well-being^ but material and military conquest. It is not motived in the develop- ment of personality, but in the depersonaliza- tion of man, making him a perfected mechanic means to a devouring mechanic end, and re- sulting in the falsification of both faith and ac- tion. Its end is the materialization of the spiritual, and not the spiritualization of the ma- terial. Masquerading as an approach to so- cialism, it is the precise enemy and opposite of the socialism that is essential or real. In fine, the social efficiency of the German State, fun- damentally effecting the unmaking of man, is but an inward manifestation of the idea whose outward manifestation is the lawless quest for world-dominion. It is merely the preliminary of the Prussian will to power — the prepara- 46 THE MENACE OF PEACE tory process of the might that regards itself as superior to right, and as divinely appointed to destroy the old world and to create a new world in its own monstrous image. Thus the Prussian social theory is as fatuous as the Prussian doctrine of dominion. No strongest nor securest State, nor any super- powers, may do for the peoples the things that they must fraternally and freely do for them- selves; and every semblance of common well- being procured from without or from above is but the ultimate undoing of both the single man and the social people. If democracy cannot acquire the requisite technique for its own ef- fectuation in labour and life; if freedom and order are not able to march together; if fra- ternity cannot a thousandfold fulfil the effi- ciencies inhering in the ablest autocracy ; if uni- versal and individual well-being can be pro- cured only of men commonly consenting to be sheep in times of peace and hyenas in times of war, instead of men resolving to be the unhin- dered and adventuring sons of God; then the THE MENACE OF PEACE 47 human game is not worth the candle. Assured j physical well-being is not worth the Prussian j spiritual price. X WE may not evade deciding between the Germanic powers and the Allies by re- citing the sins of England, of France, or of Russia. The choice which Germany now forces upon the world cannot be dissolved in a Cossack peril or hidden in the wrongs of Ire- land. I will not dispute the despotic deeds of Russian rulers or the sorrows of the Russian peoples. Say what you will of England's duplicities, of her historical hypocrisies and stupidities ; you may not thus becloud or dissi- pate the issue raised by the German challenge. Irrespective of Anglo-Saxon or Russian merits or demerits, the fact remains that the German and the Turkish armies are led to battle on be- half of the autocratic principle and its Prus- sian prevailment. They are fighting, however blindly, to establish the biological or mechan- 48 THE MENACE OF PEACE 49 istic conception of man. On the other hand, with all their faults, the Allies are fighting for the establishment of the democratic or mutual- istic principle. Their goal is the right of each people, large or small, to be loosed from foreign dominion, to follow the law of its own being and development, and to be freed from the ex- hausting necessity of military defence. For the Allies are also making war against t war. They would disarm the Prussian mil- i itarism in order that they may be free to disarm j themselves. And the armies of the Allies are more and more conscious of what they are fight- ing for; and if the soldiers return to their homes victorious, the things they are fighting for they will have ; nor capitalists nor political plotters will be able to prevent their coming into their own. Nor is the militarism of Prussia counter- balanced, as the pacifists say, by the navalism of England. The claim of Germany that she is fighting for the freedom of the seas is as truthless as her earlier claim that she was de- 50 THE MENACE OF PEACE fending herself against Russian invasion. Germany has had the freedom of the seas, / She has built up her phenomenal merchant I marine without let or hindrance from the Brit- ish fleet, entering the ports of the world at will, ' She has been absorbing England's ancient trade practically under the protection of Eng- land's ships of war. Bear in mind that it is but a few years since the British fleet was I rapidly becoming obsolete. It was the build- I ing of the German Navy, and the constant I threat of German attack, that impelled Eng- ! land to a rebuilding of her fleet. Nothing but \ the German menace produced England's naval \ renaissance. Had Germany pursued commer- \ cial methods alone, her ships might have sailed \ the seas unchallenged, and much of the mari- time conmierce of the world have been freely hers. Then, aside from the question of the seas, is it not time to change, or at least to modify, the ancient fashion of rehearsing the perfidies of Albion? Would it not be decent and prof- THE MENACE OF PEACE 51 itable, on the part of individuals and nations, to consider what the whole race of men has received from England? Consider the king- doms and the countries which the empires of old have conquered and absorbed and ex- hausted; and then look at the brotherhood of self-governing and democratic States that are linked together under England's flag — Can- ada, Australia, New Zealand, and the lesser colonies. Let those of us who so vehemently denounced the conquest of the Boers now ac- knowledge the wonder of South Africa, rejoic- ing in freedom and unity, in the opportunity for national greatness, received so generously and promptly from England's hand. Let us look upon the great Republic that England begot in America — even though she was a peevish and uncomprehending mother awhile. And if India and Egypt become nations in fact, if they become free and self-governing, it is from England they will have received the train- ing and the power so to become — and this in spite of the greed and the grievous wrongs 52 THE MENACE OF PEACE that have gone with England's government of ahen peoples. Nor should we forget what Italy and Greece owe to England; nor forget that even Prussia, alas ! owes the opportunities she has used for her dread self -enhancement to England's direct and indirect actions. If we are honest and just in our historical perspec- tive, we are bound to place beside her famed and familiar perfidies the other fact that Eng- land, almost alone among the nations, has, often blunderingly enough, fought for the free- dom of the world. Where other empires have / destroyed, the British Empire has built and j restored. Among historic nations, England is supremely the builder. If we except the ? tragedy of Ireland, if we acknowledge the shame of India, we must consent that the course of England in the world has been, on the whole, and that through a millennium of time, con- structive and redemptive. Blindly if you will, and all unconscious of what she is doing, and amidst interminable muddles and delays, amidst an unceasing self-criticism as well, it is THE MENACE OF PEACE 53 England — yes, it is England — ^that literally has been preparing the world for fraternal fed- eration. Let us hold our tongues for a day, and bow before the stupendous fact, divine despite its deep and many flaws. Nor is Russia a justification for Germany. | The struggle of Russia is now, and has been for ! two hundred years, to free herself from Ger- man masters. The political conniptions of Russia are of German origin. The Russian bureaucracy is not Russian, but German. Every effort of Russia toward liberty, or to- i ward the protection of the smaller Slav peo- ples, has been thwarted by the threat of the German sword. And Russia is full of the ma- terials requisite for the building of the new heaven and the new earth. In her broad communistic base, in her profound mystical| heredity, is the promise of a sweeter and braver society than mankind has yet known. And France ! Before the inevitabihtv of de- fending herself against Germany became ob- 54 THE MENACE OF PEACE vious, France was rapidly on the way to pac- ifism. It was the aggressive attitude of Ger- many that compelled France, against her will, to become again a military nation. And the soldiers of France, unprepared as they were, have been the living wall against which the dis- ciphned German hordes have beat in vain. It is France, after the sublime and unprecedented self-sacrifice of Belgimn, that has borne the brunt of the German assault upon humanity. "We are fighting not merely for the interests of our respective countries," said General Joffre, "but also for the liberation of the world, and we shall not stop until the Uberties of the world are definitely assured." General Joffre spake truly. The France that destroyed feu- dalism in Europe and gave freedom to Amer- ica, the France that receives and deserves the love of the world as no other nation has ever received or deserved it, is again bearing the burden of the world's destiny; and bearing it vicariously. Yes, the France of to-day is lit- erally Messianic, dying for the salvation of the THE MENACE OF PEACE 55 race, suffering in order that freedom and frater- nal faith may have a future in the world. And with France marches Italy, not only struggling to realize her national soul, but to free herself from the yoke of a brutal German finance. Her part in the war, whatever its preliminary diplomatic twistings and turnings, is her affirmation of her right to be, of her right to give herself. And when the victory is won, Italy, supported by her understanding king, so quiet yet heroic in word and action, will stand once again for a united humanity. The idea of a human race become as one fold and one family, its activities infinitely diversified and individualized, yet proceeding from one di- vinely comprehensive source and centre — this is the vital force, the very life-blood, indeed, of Italy's being. It is the one word her great voices have all sounded forth — from Vir- gil to Carducci, from St. Francis to Mazzini. And it is the fundamental and indispensable contribution which Italy, finally free and self- realizing, will give to the world. XI BUT think not that in opposing the Prus- sian idea, in condemning the Germany to which that idea has become an obsession, and in approving the French and Enghsh de- fence of the world, I thereby support, as some would say, the whole of French and English historical action. Nor do I thereby support Russian despotism or Italian Machiavellism. It is true, as I have admitted, that England has often been false to the principle for which she now fights. It is true that France has not fol- lowed the logic of her great Revolution in her social development. It is true that the Italy of the past generation has been false to the faith of Mazzini, to the work of Cavour. It is true that the Russian State is far from expressing the dreams of Dostoievsky or Tolstoy or Gorky. But it is also true that each of these nations has had ideals of fraternity and free- 56 THE MENACE OF PEACE 57 dom, and has at least proclaimed them, while Germany has had but the ideal of dominion, both in her inward development and her out- ward attitude. In the whole course of her his- tory Germany has produced not a single ex- ponent of an inclusive or comprehensive free- j dom. Even the socialism of Marx is based upon the idea of dominion : the dominion of the many instead of the few; the dominion of the social totality over the social units. Of an actual in- dustrial and social democracy, of the adminis- trative fellowship of co-equal workers, he had no true understanding. He had no feeling, mental or moral, for the things that are fra- ternal and federal. Marx was not an apostle of freedom : his was not a democratic socialism, but a blended intellectual and proletarian autoc- racy. His socialism was substantially Prus- sian in character; and the German party built upon the Marxian foundation is anti-socialist in principle, in practice, and results. It has no shadow of right to its name. Of essential 58 THE MENACE OF PEACE socialism, of fundamental democracy, the Ger- man Social Democratic Party is the practical opponent. The social philosophy of Marx is the historical philosophy of Hegel and Treit- schke in another form. Now the Allies — including even Russia — have had apostles who believed, with Christ, in a self-governing Divine Presence in man. The idea of an earthly kingdom of heaven has been generic in their political and ideahstic philoso- phies. England has had her Milton, pro- claiming the nation to be but a huge Christian personage, and the members thereof ordained to be fitly joined together. Alfred the Great — perhaps the greatest ruler among the sons of men — naively regarded the Sermon on the Mount as the natural constitution of the State. Nor ever has some such idea been without wit- nesses in England. Scores of writers in re- cent times — writers of such different mentali- ties as John Stuart Mill, Frederick Maurice, John Ruskin, William Morris, Alfred Tenny- son, H. M. Hyndman, Bernard Shaw, and Ed- THE MENACE OF PEACE 59 ward Carpenter — have been among these wit- nesses. False to the idea as England has often been, it has never been absent from the national heart. And the France that looked upon the light of Louis IX, of Joan of Arc and Abe- lard, in a later time produced the starry men of the Revolution, making the gospel of Rous- seau — not very far from the gospel of Naz- areth — her national summons and creed; and from France went forth the faith of Saint- Simon and Fourrier. And Italy's Mazzini — more nearly akin to Christ than any other modern historical character — remains, in spite of all he has suffered at the hands of his own, the true expression and prophecy of the Italian national soul. Germany has had no such apostles, no such ideals. She has not produced a single spirit kindred to Mazzini or Rousseau or Milton. Count, if you can, the mental leagues that lie between Alfred's conception of the State and that of Treitschke. Or try to measure the spiritual spaces that stretch from Mazzini to 60 THE MENACE OF PEACE Beriihardi, from Bismarck to Lincoln. Con- sider the spiritual sphere that gave birth to I Tolstoy or Maeterlinck, to Bergson or Jaures or the saintly Paul Sabatier, and then consider the mental world that produced that incredible farrago — the appeal prepared by Germany's most honoured theologians, historians, and scientists, and sent forth to the world in her defence. The childish servility of the German intellect, shepherded as it is by the Prussian \ purpose, could never be better demonstrated. Nor could there be a better demonsti^ation of the fact that it is only in the sphere or in the pursuit of freedom that the stalwart mind un- folds. Whatever its scholastic or scientific at- tainments, the mentaUty that issues from the Prussian system will never be else than servile and self-indulgent. No manful idea will ever proceed from so suborned and herded an intel- \ lectualism. Even German scholarship has been enor- mously over-estimated as to its human values. It is a scholarship that has imposed upon the THE MENACE OF PEACE 61 world by sheer bulk, by its pretentious and in- terminable babble. We have been awed, we have been hypnotized, by its very unintelligi- bility, as well as by its pomp and its quantity. Thus it has made for a sort of universal intel- lectual humbuggery. None of our minds can digest the grist that comes from the German mill. None of us know what the German man- darins mean. And the true reason we do not understand them is because there is so little to understand. We know this well enough, but we have not the manhood to say so. We se- cretly see how wasteful it is — this exercising the golden years of the mind upon dialectic chat- ter and chaff; but we go on pretending to our- selves and the world that the chaff is precious grain, and the chatter a flow of knowledge. We go on dissolving the soul's integrity in these deceptive pedantries. For they are ped- antries, at once childish and Cyclopic, making impostors of both learned professor and street propagandist. The socialist who pretends to a deep understanding of his Marx, the aca- 62 THE MENACE OF PEACE demic man who professes a clear comprehen- sion of German intellections — they belong to the same category : they are each of them plain and preposterous liars. It is indeed an inhu- man scholarship, a particularist and disinte- grating culture, which Germany would have us accept at the point of the sword. And the forcing of this culture upon the world by mili- tary might has the look of a cosmical joke — as if Satan were permitted to satisfy, for once, his uttermost sense of humour. XII So we are at war, not with German armies merely, but with the German world-mind and world-manners — with Germany's doctrines and deeds, so far as they are directed toward the lands beyond her frontiers. Had she been content to keep her mind and her manners at home, applying them only to her own develop- ment, the nations could have had nothing to say. But she has not been so content. Her manners toward the nations, her conception of her super-place among them, her purpose to impose her culture by the might of her arms, were making a peaceful development of the race impossible. Long before the war, the world was held in a tightening tension, was in- creasingly embroiled and degraded by the men- ace of German arms and the completeness of German espionage. But now that the issue between Germany and humanity has been 63 64 THE MENACE OF PEACE joined, there must be no turning back on the part of the Allies; nor must any concealment or evasion of the issues on the part of the paci- fists or neutrals be permitted. Even where, as in the case of Switzerland, an enforced political neutrality is the basis of national existence, the Swiss as individuals are not released from the spiritual obligation of deciding between autocracy and democracy. The strength and glamour of Imperial Ger- many must not blind them to the question that is the core of the war. Shall Switzerland for- get the source from which she sprang? Shall it be that, in the hour when the world was com- pelled to choose between the glory and the power of material might and the promise and progress that inhere in freedom's world-ad- venture — shall it be that, in such an hour, the Switzerland of Zwingli and the Three Cantons gave her heart to Kaisers and Empires, and that her sympathies forsook the France to whom her own John Calvin gave spiritual sus- tenance, to whom her own Rousseau gave a THE MENACE OF PEACE 65 gospel of freedom? And is not the Helvetic confederation finally the result of French in- tervention? Let Swiss souls give heed to the words of one of her profoundest and devoutest teachers, Professor Ragaz of Zurich, who tells them that it is their own lack of spiritual ideals, their apostacy to their own purer past, that makes them partially responsive to the German purpose and power. Let Switzerland develop the ideal of democracy that is native to her na- tional soul, intensifying and spiritualizing that ideal, applying that democracy to social libera- tion and industrial organization — and, by so doing, and while maintaining her political neu- trality, will she best fulfil her part in effecting that democratic and spiritual future of man- kind which France, her republican neighbour, pursues. Before Switzerland at last, before Europe and America, there are but two alternatives. One is surrender to Prussia, and the other is the extinction of Prussianism. The failure to wrest from Prussia her sword will result in the 66 THE MENACE OF PEACE swift and certain establishment of that sword's universal hegemony. And once the hegemony is established, it will be followed by so swift a stultification of the race, by a descent so deep, a darkness so abysmal, that the best human gains which the centuries have achieved will be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye. XIII IN an hour so solemn and stupendous, so fraught and so swift, there is no place for compromise, there is no time for neutrals. In such a crisis of the world, neutrality is hy- pocrisy or delusion. Whatever else He is or is not, God is not a neutral. The God of the Christ takes sides, and takes sides terribly and constantly. Nor Christ nor Socrates went to death for lack of convictions. Whatever we pretend to ourselves or to others, we, too, take sides: if we are not with Belgium and Serbia, with France and England, we are then with the German and the Turk. When the souls of men are balanced against each other by such a conflict, there is no escape from making choice. Humanity's days of judgment recog- nize no neutrals. And there are none in fact. What passes for neutrality, if it is not a covert 67 68 THE MENACE OF PEACE treason to the right, is always an evasion, springing from self-deception or cowardice; it is always a moral incapacity, a spiritual sick- liness. In a war between good and evil, the failure to discern and support the good is an essential choice of the evil. Confounding as they do the crisis, confusing as they do the issue, and mixing the light and the darkness in one grey dusk of doubt and indecision, the neutrals but prevent the truth from appearing, the good from defining itself ; and thus are they the falsehood's effectual and favoured friends. For it is always to the interest of the lie to have a region of confusion between itself and the truth; while it is alwaj^s to the interest of the truth to come directly to grips with the lie. So if you have doubts as to the right or the wrong of any given crisis, you have but to observe whence the neutrals receive their protection and applause. You may be sure that it is always the false or evil cause to which the neutrals are dear and necessary. Thus, and with perfect logic, it is from Ger- THE MENACE OF PEACE 69 many the neutrals and pacifists receive their inspiration and approbation, while it is the Alhes who will have none of them or their proposals. It is pacifist France, it is slow- moving England, that insists the war must continue till its issues are defined, till a definite decision is reached. It is militarist Prussia that sustains or sends forth the peace-making emissaries now beclamouring the world. It ought to be apparent to the blind that the paci- fists are workers in effect for Prussia, and the actual enemies of France and England. I have met nor neutrals nor pacifists — and I have met them by the hundreds — who were not se- cretly hoping or working for a German victory. Ostensible peace-makers they are: but it is practically a German peace they pursue — a peace that will leave Germany undefeated, if not immediately victorious, and in a position to equip and the better effectuate her will to subdue and rule mankind. XIV /T is for just such a veiled and invidious vic- tory the whole of the genius that is Prus- sian now works. Since the immediate triumph of her arms seems impossible,, if she may con- clude the war as a draw, if she may darken the mind of the world as to its meaning, then Ger- many mjDLy yet turn her momentary military failure into an unexampled historical triumph. For a peace that leaves Germany undefeated is essentially a German victory, and straight- way leads to the Germanization of the world, A peace hased upon a drawn battle between the Germanic Powers and the Allies is nothing else than the capitulation of the world to Prus- sian might and mastery. And it would not only be a German triumph that such a peace would procure, but a triumph immeasurably more terrible, in its full and final results, than 70 THE MENACE OF PEACE 71 Germany could have won by force of arms, even had they been successful. For such a peace could issue only from a veritable fall of man. The world would have refused its hour of great decision, and would sink into universal apathy and docility under the Prussian rule and discipline. It would inevitably be so, for the refusal to decide is always, in effect, a de- cision for the downward way. XV /'^R, we may ask, does the present spiritual ^^ condition of the world require new ages of darkness? Is the Prussian way inevitable? Does the undeveloped or irresponsible soul of the world require this discipline? Was the former Romanization of the world necessary? I know that great issues may grow and mature under the shelter of the blackest human night, or amidst the wildest human wanderings. But must we always choose the way of the wilder- ness, with the Promised Land plainly in view? We must decide soon; for, make no mistake about it, the danger of the Germanization of the world was never so gi^eat as now. Even to-day, while the body of humanity bleeds from the desperate wounds inflicted thereupon by the unique and unbelievable German savagery — even now is Germany, by her extraordinary 72 THE MENACE OF PEACE 73 capacity for a persistent and concentrated du- plicity, by her insidious and coercive intellec- tual brutality, by her superior power to bemaze and corrupt the mind of the world — even thus and now, is Germany winning a psychic victory over the nations. Behind the backs of the peoples, a peace is being prepared, or prepared for, that will leave Germany, though not ap- parently victorious, yet practically stronger than she was before the war. Germanv is to- day in substantial possession of Middle Eu- rope, and of the road to Asia Minor. Even in military defeat, if peace comes soon, she will have largely accomplished her ends; and, ten or twenty years hence, Europe will be under her rule. She will have adopted a pseudo-so- cialism that will in reality be such an organiza- tion of capitalism as no Socialist prophet ever dreamed of. With France exhausted, with England unable to act upon the Continent, with Russia and Italy and the Balkans already in the German grasp, there would be, in a very few years, a Germanized and capitalized 74 THE MENACE OF PEACE Europe that would postpone the day of the democratic and co-operative society to an in- definite and costly future. XVI THEN, working with Germany for a peace in her favour, are two great international interests that are powerful enough, if their workings are not discerned and thwarted, to shape the course of the nations. One is the capital that has been so largely invested in the manufacture of munitions and the machinery of war; the other is the Roman Catholic Hier- archy. It seems incredible and paradoxical to say that American munition-makers who are sup- plying the Allies, and who formerly and self- ishly favoured them, are now desirous of a peace that shall as nearly as possible restore the European status existing before the war. But incredible as the statement is, it is no less true ; and if we analyse the peace that would be based upon the preservation of the Ger- manic Powers, and if we compare it with a 75 76 THE MENACE OF PEACE peace based upon the victory of the Allies, the fact is not paradoxical. It is, indeed, wholly logical that munition-makers in particular, and the international financial monopoly in general, should desire to arrest the war before it ends in a conclusive German defeat. For the ex- tinction of the Prussian governmental and mili- tary system will undoubtedly be followed by the extinction of militarism in Europe; and the extinction of militarism in Europe means the extinction of the profits — possibly the prin- cipal — of the billions invested in the manufac- ture of equipments of war, and in the con- tinuity of colossal public debts. For the armament-makers of the world are also its war-makers ; and the greater the wars, the greater their harvests. But they look not only to immediate but to future gains. It is to their interests to conclude any given war at such a time and in such a manner as to make it the seed of future wars. A condition of in- ternational peace, wherein the disputes of na- tions are settled before an authoritative tri- THE MENACE OF PEACE 77 bunal, would deprive the munition-makers of their markets, and expose to the world the per- fidious power of the international dealers in na- tional debts. Now it is certain that the national mind of each of the Allied Powers is increasingly de- termined this war shall be the last. Soldiers of France and England intend that the like of this catastrophe shall never again come to the children of men. If there are vast capitalist interests and professional militarists that speak to the contrary, the time is nevertheless near when these will no longer be heard; soon will they have played their final part in the admin- istration of society. If the citizen-soldiers of the Allied Nations make up their minds that this war shall be the last, the last it will be. But, as I have said and must say, the achievement of such a Messianic end depends upon the extinction of the Prussian system. I believe I am safe in predicting that the victory of the Allies will lead to the banishment of war from our planet. But if Germany remains g sy 78 THE MENACE OF PEACE armed, the rest of the world must remain armed also, and the armaments increase in- stead of decrease. A defeated Germany is the only condition of universal peace. A peace that left Germany with her weapons in her hands would be no peace, but a preparation for wars immeasurably more terrible than the one that now baffles our hopes for humanity. Gernaany would soon be ready to fight more advantageously than she is fighting now; and, against the gi^eater German menace, England and France would be obliged to maintain the large conscriptive armies their peoples detest. Thus it is easily understandable that the American capitalism which was a year ago on the side of the Allies is now changing to the side of Germany. It is logical that, at this moment, when the Allies are hopeful of victory, the munition-makers should become peace-makers. It is to their interest to make an early and impermanent peace, based upon the presumption that the war is a draw, in order that an armed and unrepentant Germany THE MENACE OF PEACE 79 may provide them with further world-harvest. It is also a low and reacting self-interest that aligns the Catholic Hierarchy with the Ger- man side. There is an midoubted though un- written understanding between the Central Powers and the Vatican that the defeat of Italy and their own triumph may lead to a res- toration of the papal monarchy. For this are Pope Benedict and his cabinet bargaining away their supreme and unreturning opportunity. Not in centuries has a Pope had so golden and commanding a chance as was offered by the in- vasion of Belgium and Serbia. If the voice of the Church had then been heard upon the side of justice; if *'the Rector of the Globe," the "Viceroy of God," had then lifted up the cross in defence of the small and invaded na- tions; if he had then denounced the strong Powers that trampled the weak, that violated sacred and protective treaties, and that well- nigh destroyed the faith of mankind; then the Church, thus proving its possession of a spir- itual authority, would also have earned a right 80 THE MENACE OF PEACE to counsel the nations. But, alas! "the Shep- herd of the Peoples" sold his unquestioned birthright for a miserable pottage; and even his pottage shall he lose in the end. The Vat- ican, which might have become the throne of an unprecedented moral splendour, became the kennel of an unexampled cowardice. And this betrayal of Christ and His peoples by the Church continues and increases. By many lab- yrinthine methods the Roman Hierarchy is working for a German peace ; and the collateral restoration of the temporal power is in the air as it has not been since the liberation and union of Italy. Recently and mysteriously there came to Switzerland from Berlin a member of the so- called Stockholm Congress of Neutrals. Though he came as a professional pacifist, yet always he let it be known that he considered Germany really victorious, and that the neutral nations ought to compel an instant peace upon that basis. It would end the useless flow of blood — which Germany so deeply deplored, and THE MENACE OF PEACE 81 for which the stubborn Allies were responsible. He sympathized deeply with the misunder- stood Germans, and explained how foolishly the Belgians had acted in resisting the German invasion of their country. To his mental proc- esses, Germany was the martyr-nation, and the Belgians an obdurate people who had brought just punishment upon themselves. This paci- fist is also a writer of signed editorials for an important and influential syndicate of Ameri- can newspapers. He returned to Berlin, where he has since resided, and where he is now engaged in writing editorials, not only in fa- vour of Germany, but also suggestive of the restoration of some form of temporal power to the Pope. This last he conceives to be a reasonable solution of the problem of the Vat- ican. I cite this example because it is typical. In innumerable instances — more than the Allies are aware of, more than even Italy is aware of — are intrigues for some form of papal restora- tion filling the Western world. Ajid it is pre- 82 THE MENACE OF PEACE liminary to this that the Catholic Church and its governing Jesuit Order are working for a German peace. They are thereby working in their own behalf: they know there is no hope for temporal sovereignty through the victory of England and France: in the victory or the preservation of the Germanic Powers hes the only reasonable papal expectation. The preservation of militarist Germany — even the Land of Luther— is now a papal sine qua non. With the victory of the Allies, not only is the dream of temporal restoration dis- solved, but even the continued papal residence in Italy may become impracticable; for the wounds which the intrigues of the Vatican have inflicted upon the national soul of Italy are deep, and they will not be easily healed. But with Germany in a position to recover, and with the Hapsburg monarchy still in existence, there is still a chance that the phantom of a papal kingdom may become substantial. But the practical alliance of the Vatican with Germany is based not only on the hope THE MENACE OF PEACE 83 of temporal power, but upon the desire to pre- serve the autocratic principle as the social basis. There is no longer any doubt that the victory of the Allies will be followed by profound and democratic reconstructions. English soldiers are saying: "If we can organize so well for war, we can also organize for peace; if we can have such communism in destruction, we can also have communism in production and dis- tribution." It will be a democratized England that appears, and that within a short space of time, when her victorious soldiers come home. The same will be true of France, and vast changes will follow in Russia. There will be quick social developments in Italy also — the Italy whose king is in deep sympathy with the democratic aspirations and economic needs of his people. Now the Catholic power depends upon the subjection of the peoples. Every democratic advance is an undermining of the authority of the Church. It is therefore consistent that the Vatican should seek foT a peace that leaves au- 84 THE MENACE OF PEACE tocratic Germany undiminished in power. If autocracy perishes in Germany, it will speedily perish from the world. But .if a peace can be made that is favourable to Germany, and so made as to conceal the real meaning of the war, then not only in Germany is the autocratic principle preserved: it is likewise preserved in the Catholic Church. Even liberal nations will feel impelled toward autocracy, in order to maintain the military efficiency wherewith to defend themselves against the renascent Ger- man purpose. It is one and the self -same principle that underlies the German Empire, the papacy, and the international financial monopoly. These three, like Pilate and Herod and Caiaphas, have become friends in the day of the cruci- fixion of humanity — have become friends in the hope that they may prevent humanity from ris- ing again. XVII BUT the most menacing of these is Ger- many. Not merely the mihtarism of Germany: for that, after all, might be sub- dued and dissolved. It is rather the whole so- cial concept of the German collectivity, the whole attitude of that collectivity toward other nations or collectivities, the whole German per- spective and philosophy, that we distrust and combat. The present German mind is in truth the deadliest enemy, the harshest and yet sub- tlest seducer, that the soul of the world has ever had to meet. Few, even the wisest and most discerning, even those with the clearest spiritual vision, have begun to apprehend what a racial devolu- tion would ensue the laying of this mind upon Europe and America, and thence upon Asia. It is a compelling and coercive mind, prevailing through its undoubting self-confidence, its 85 86 THE MENACE OF PEACE unquestioning assumption of the inferiority of all other minds and their cultures, and its ma- terial and official competence. Even through its seeming timidities it keeps on its way, con- quering by its unchanging and tortuous per- sistence. Betimes it may be anxious about the opinion of the world concerning its concep- tions or actions; but it has no capacity for questioning the utter rightness of the concep- tions and actions themselves. It never occurs to this mind that there is a possibility of its be- ing wrong: it never occurs to it that the mind of another people may be its equal. And, not- withstanding its technical craft and compre- hensiveness, there is an undefinable moral vagueness about the German mind, a childish disregard of self-contradiction, an insensibility to factual truth, that is banefully attractive to a world enfeebled — as our world now is — by material absorption, by social inconsequence and futility. The German mentality invites mankind into a sphere of both physical comfort and spiritual THE MENACE OF PEACE 87 irresponsibility. There would be ample eating and drinking therein, and a common freedom from material stress, from economic doubt, from personal care. It would be a world en- circled by pleasant and endlessly ruminative clouds, and filled with the soothing toxins of a profound intellectual miasma. A strangely paradoxical world it would be — a world in which the ruthlessly hard and the degradingly soft would be blended; a world ensphered in a devouring death that would seem, for awhile, to be the very triumph of life. It would in- deed be a world that stood against all that the prophets, of whatever time or clime, have con- ceived to be the purpose of God or the mean- ing of man. XVIII SAY not we are the enemies of the Ger- man race who thus speak. Not we but themselves are the real enemies of the German peoples. We stand against that for which Germany fights; we are against the Prussian idea, against its power over Germany, against its purpose to conquer; but for the German peoples we wish only well. It is for their free- dom as well as for ours we contend, and contend with pain in our hearts. Germany's true lovers are they who now stand against her — they who make war upon the lie that enslaves and slays her soul. The France that Germany has in- vaded is sacrificing her sons for Germany as well as for herself. There are Germans — ^yes, there are thousands of understanding Germans — ^who are to-day praying for Germany's de- feat as her only hope of salvation. As Ed- 88 THE MENACE OF PEACE 89 ward Bernstein has recently said, "unless the war ends for Germany in definite defeat," her middle-class parties will, "by hook or crook," maintain her existing militarism. And the maintenance of German militarism means the eventual madness of mankind. XIX LET us never forget that Germanism is, above and before all, a religion; and that it is the rare German who is not this religion's unscrupulous and sleepless priest. And not only is Germanism a religion, with its altars dedicate to material might, with its worship of the will to power, with its rituals of blood and iron : it is a renaissance of all the ancient gods and worships, of all the wills and weapons, that war against the central conception of Christ. Germanism is the antagonist and the exact an- tithesis of Christianism. It is a kind of uni- versal spiritual chemicalization — a precipita- tion, throughout the whole body of humanity, of the evil elements of evolution. The ani- malistic forces of history, darkly and tremen- dously quickened, are re-rising in Prussian polity and practice, and thence permeating and poisoning all peoples, even to the rims and 90 THE MENACE OF PEACE 91 edges of the world. The gods we long thought dead — ^the gods of the prehistoric human night, the gods of the dusk before the dawn, the gods of the forest tribes and the pagan cities — are all back upon their thrones, confederate in a Prussian resurrection, and striving against the light that would release the Christ from his institutional tomb; striving to repeal and to surpass the law and leadership, the common justice and the social joy, that inhere in the application of his love to the totality of life and labour. They are all here, these old and terrible gods — these mental shapes of natural force and primitive fear; and the magic and the mysteries performed by their priests, they are here also, renewed and monstrously sub- limed, stupendously and definitely determined, in the Germanism of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow. XX LEST now the reader should think I have over-stated the sense of super-humanity which the German avows, and which his teachers cultivate, let me quote a few typical sentences from the teachers themselves/ Says Professor Eucken, the German philosopher of things spiritual, and greatly influencing the English religious philosophy of recent years: "To us, more than to any other nation, is en- trusted the true structure of human existence." Said Fichte to the Germans of his day: "It is you, among all modern nations, that have in special measure received into your keeping the seeds of human perfection." Says Dr. Las- son to the Germans of to-day: "We are morally and intellectually superior, beyond all comparison, as to our organization and insti- 1 For the translations which follow, the writer is indebted to an article entitled "The Philosophy of Terrorism," in the October number of the Unpopular Review of New York. 92 THE MENACE OF PEACE 93 tutions." Professor von Stengel of Munich avows, at the end of the second year of the war: *'The nations, and especially the neu- tral nations, have only one means of leading a profitable existence. It is to submit to our guidance, which is superior from every point of view. . . . For we not only have the power and force necessary for this mission, but we also possess all the spiritual gifts to the high- est degree, and in all creation it is we who con- stitute the crown of civilization." Nor need we be surprised at hearing Professor Momm- sen scoff at the actions and ideals of self-sacri- fice by which Celtic heroes have expressed their devotion to their peoples; nor marvel at Pro- fessor Paulsen's declaration to the students of Berlin that "the very words of virtue and duty have an antiquated sound in our ears"; nor doubt the laugh that ran round the hall when he used the phrase, "Happiness of the hu- man race" — "Gliickseligkeit des Menschen- geschlechts." The mind of the German genus which was 94 THE MENACE OF PEACE SO abhorrent to Tacitus, and of which Dante wrote with so great a disgust, is transcenden- talized but not changed in the German phi- losopher or historian of to-day. And does the reader remember his Heine ? Let him turn once again to Heine's warning to France, sounded eighty years ago: "The scientific philosopher (who followed Kant and Fichte) is to be feared on account of his connections with the primitive forces of nature, of his abiUty to evoke the daemonic powers of old German Pantheism, and awaken that joy in fighting which we find among the ancient Germans, and which fights neither to annihilate nor to subdue, but solely for the pleasure of fighting. Christianity — and this is its noblest merit — has somewhat tamed this brutal German joy in combat, though unable to destroy it ; and if once the re- straining Talisman, the Cross, goes to pieces . . . then will the old stone gods raise them- selves from their immemorial rubbish-heaps and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor, with his giant's hammer, will THE MENACE OF PEACE 95 at last spring forth and smash the Gothic cathedrals to bits. When you neighbouring children of men, you French, hear the tumult and the clash, take heed to yourselves and do not try to mix in the business that we are ac- complishing in Germany. ... At the sound of it the eagles will fall dead from the air, and the lions in the farthest desert of Africa will droop their tails and creep into their royal lairs. A drama will be played in Germany which will make the French Revolution seem like a harmless idvll. . . . You have more to fear from a free Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance and all the Croats and Cos- sacks put together. . . . Let what will happen in Germany, let the Crown Prince of Prussia or Doctor Wirth come to power, keep your- selves always armed, stay quiet at your posts, with musket on arm." XXI HEINE'S prophecy has been more than fulfilled. Beyond his ken, beyond the ken of any man now living, are the accruing consequences of Germany's assault upon civili- zation. The German has wrought not only un- reckonable iTiin upon France: he has brought the whole family of man to the brink of millen- nial catastrophe and reversion. We are thus in the midst of a crisis that carries in its issue the world's fundamental reconstruction or its pos- sible dissolution. Humanity halts at the cross- roads of history, and the question mark of God there stands. We are deciding, whether we will or no, either by conscious choice or by eva- sion, the destiny of the race for long centuries to come. It is not possible to exaggerate, it is impossible that we yet comprehend or encom- pass, the height and the depth and the reach of the question now before us. If ever there 96 THE MENACE OF PEACE 97 was a war between good and evil, it is now. If ever hath Ormazd striven against Ahriman, it is in the conflict between the Allies and the Germanic Powers. And shall it be with the light or the darkness the nations soon gather together? According as the answer shall be, so shall the years hence turn to man's true be- ginning, or to his dread and necessitated end. The faith effected by a mere decision as to the world-war's meaning — if the decision ac- cord with the cosmic urge — if it come from the conscious choice of the world — this, in itself, will be a tremendous act of creation, changing in a moment the course of history, wheeling the world into new meridians, pitching the progress of man upon a plane that shall march his mind with the mind of God. I XXII T may be that it will take us long to learn the lesson, so red and ineradicable, which the war is writing. It may be that we are but having the overture, and that the real drama is yet to unfold. To-morrow's curtain may rise upon scenes that will make the tragedy of to- day seem juvenile and joyful. It is possible that, through a false and evasive peace, this fy war will prove to be the prelude of other and vaster wars ; of revolutions aimless and every- where; of a common anguish and misery be- yond measure and imagination. It may need to be so — may need to be so because of the moral indolence now restricting and stupefy- ing the race. It is not only that now, as al- ways, the good are dull-witted and doubtful, slow of sight and slothful in action, while evil is eager and active and watchful — not this only. It is that there has grown up in the modern world a strange incapacity of soul, a paralysis 98 THE MENACE OF PEACE 99 of power to think forward. We have lost the courage to face great questions openly and definitely. Candour of soul and frankness of action, and most of the true spiritual arts and integrities, seem lost amidst the dust of doubted or deserted conventions. The age of material bigness has produced an age of spiritual little- ness. Through application to detail we have dissolved the capacity to conceive or to con- template a human totality. Or it is possible that the war may end, sud- denly and unexpectedly, in a common repent- ance of the nations. The Day of the Lord may come as a thief in the night, and the peo- ples together be changed. From one great emotion of mutual sympathy, the purpose that unites the peoples may be born, and the boun- daries between nations and classes melt away, with the old limitations of the mind, the old frontiers of the soul. A sudden sword of light may cleave our thick mental walls, may slay the delusions that divide us, and heaven and earth begin to mingle. 100 THE MENACE OF PEACE Or yet from the German, in an horn* of apocalyptic defeat, the uniting word may go forth. To some of us who stand sharp against her in the present hour, Germany is still the land of emotional resource and sacred romance and stored spiritual treasure. We still drink deeply her wells of knowledge, and the springs of song and story and devotion that flow from her forests, her rivers, and her ancient towns. We still believe in her godly latencies, her heartful homes, her family piety. We trust her buried but not dead diviner being will yet awake, will yet arise. And it may be that, when the Prussian night is gone, when the Ger- man mind grows sane, then the great spiritual renewal which the world awaits will spring from German soil. Let us pray that, if the victory be with the Allies, no cry for revenge will profane their lips. Let England and France, let Italy and Russia, let Belgium and Serbia, once they have won, be true to the principle emblazoned upon their banners. They may level and plough the / JR^ -n^- ^\*% THE MENACE OF PEACE 101 Krupp acres, if they will; they may dismiss the HohenzoLerns and the Hapsburgs from the thrones of Europe ; they may disarm the Prus- sian State and reduce it to its due proportions ; but let them then also disarm themselves, and leave the German peoples to work out their own redemption, to choose their own future. Let there be no needless humiliations, no tri- imiphal entry into Berlin, no prolonged occu- pation of German lands. Let the action of the Allies be such as to convince the German na- tion that its fellowship is desired in a new and a real international fraternity. Let the civi- lization that has preserved its essential values from Prussian destruction convince the Ger- man peoples, by its generous justice and for- bearance, that their own Prussian masters and none others have been their enemies. Thus the deep and hid springs of the German soul may be uncovered, and flow for the world's healing; and the victory of the Allies over Germany may thus prove to be a victory of the Divine Presence in man. XXIII BUT whether from Germany or from France, whether from the East or the West, and whether early or late, from some- where the word that unites the world must go forth — or the world cease to be. By the mouths of Cyclopean cannons, by the miles and millions of the dead, by the wails of the widows and the woes of the children, God is asking if we are now able to receive such a word. We shall have to give God His answer. We shall have no peace till we do. Nor shall we then have peace, if the answer be not on the side of the truth that is in Christ. For God thinks, I opine, that it is better that our world should perish than that it should any longer believe and build upon lies. 102 XXIV WE should not have to wait. The answer is due. All things are prepared. For the first time, the eyes of the world are cen- tred upon a single stage. For two years we have watched a world drama unfold, and have been learning to think in world-terms. When the curtain rings down upon the war the world- stage will remain, the eyes of mankind still fixed thereupon, waiting for the rise of the curtain to rise upon the profounded drama to follow. The changes that succeed the war will prove so much more dramatic, so much more predestinating, that the war's wide scenes and sorrows, immeasurable and consuming as they were, will seem as the brutish play of primitive children. Be sure that, if a true and final peace prevails, there will be no past. Unless the human experiment shall totally fail, the world will never go back to its former divisive 103 104 THE MENACE OF PEACE modes and manners. In one way or another, humanity will have begun to realize itself as one organism, of which nations and individuals are inseparable and responsible members. XXV ALL of us, whether sceptic or girt with faith — or all of us who think and care — conceive that our human pilgrimage is com- pelled, both within and without, towards some spiritual upland, whereon we shall strike the unshadowed ways, and proceed harmoniously together. We somehow and hopefully infer that the chief factors of the human push, of the blind and bewildered climb of man, are as yet unseen and rarely vocal. There are hints that our confused and visible history, so obscure in its causes and effects, its records so contradic- tory and unreal, be-shadows a history that is real and not yet revealed. We are being led onward, we believe, even though we but guess the goal, but glimpse the glory. The goal and the glory are there ; unimaginable breadth and brightness of being await us, somewhere amidst the clouded heights up which we toil so hardly, so haltingly. Of this we are somehow sure. 105 106 THE MENACE OF PEACE A magnificence of hope remains, even to our mangled world. Probably there was never so much faith as now — never even an approach to such faith as now bottoms the soul of each na- tion. The old things are passing away, it is true, and with a noise and a sorrow that seem beyond mortal enduring, while the pattern of the new is wrapped in a strange divine reti- cence; nor know we if the time of revealment be to-day or to-morrow. But the peoples are filled with a premonition, unspoken and form- less yet, that some vast realization, in which all humanity is to share, is not far off. Behind the thunderous Tartarian night, enrif ting the death and the dread thereof, and striking the scales from our eyes betimes, gleam the streets and the fields of a new earth, the poise and the peace of a heavenly society. These cannot be taken by violence ; we may not rudely rend the veil; but they are there, and they are ours. And when our dragons of egoism and division are slain, the flaming ramparts will fall away, and the City of God be our home. XXVI AND who knows if this world-war be not a hinging of heavenly gates? None of us can say, but each of us may decide and do ; nor only may but must. For now the one un- pardonable sin, the most vicious of all delusions, is the attitude of detachment. They who feel the questions of the war too gross for their con- sideration, they who think themselves superior to its debates and battles, they who imagine themselves in spiritual altitudes above it all — these are the low and the ignoble of to-day. Does it not occur to them that, in their im- agined superiority, they are making themselves above the Christ who died at the hands of both rulers and mobs? Do they not see that they are exalting themselves above God? For whatever God is. He is not above but within the war, bearing its dirt and blood and bestial fury, and the whole of its pain and shame, 107 108 THE MENACE OF PEACE Now, as always, the heart of God beats surest where the struggle of man is hardest, where the woe is wildest. And he who enters the war's encircling hell most deeply and redemp- tively, he is the man who walks and works with God; he is the one whose heart is highest, whose soul is purest, and who holds humanity true to its divine election. It is better — a thousand times better — to take the side of the wrong than to be on no side at all. For even amidst the uttermost ranks of the wrong we are nearer the right than such as consider themselves cloistered from a conflict that is shattering life's former foundations. XXVII THEN let us decide, eacH of us according as seemeth to him good. If to you Ger- many's cause be just, then with Germany take your stand. If to you the Alhes are fighting, albeit blindly, for a fairer human future, for a free and fraternal world, then give to the AlHes such service as you may. To me there are no two ways, there is but one way, wherein behevers in freedom and fra- ternity, or they who hold to a true socialist faith, or the followers of the faith that was in Christ, may consistently walk. Before us, beckoning along that way, are the banners of Alfred of England and Albert of Belgium. The swords of Jeanne d'Arc and St. Louis are there; and the tread of the Garibaldians and the first French Republicans ; and the voices of Milton and Mazzini and Lincoln; and the vi- sions of the divine Assisian and the Patmos apostle. 109 110 THE MENACE OF PEACE Ours is the time of the real Crusades, com- pared with which the Crusades of old were but nursery parades. The AlUes are fighting, though they know it not, for a universal rescue of the good that is in Christ. The Central Powers, with the Bulgar and the Turk, are fighting to destroy that good, and to supplant it with the palaeolithic good of Prussian phi- losophy and practice. It is indeed no fantasy or fanaticism to which I thus give utterance. It is for no less than the enthronement of the anti- Christ principle that Germany has made war upon humanity. She incarnates and she is, in her divinization of physical and moral vio- lence, the veritable anti-Christ of the early Christian seers. Our choice is between Ger- manism and Christ — ^that, nor else than pre- ^ cisely that at last, is the matchless meaning of the war; and the choice we make will be ir- revocable and eternal. THE END r\ 940.91 H436 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 0043191266 DUE DATE Giy iiinv i/tioUi r ^i [ * 1 { : \ Printed in USA JUL 2 E 187J