D in fi:^ i 1 11.^^ 1. ^,„/' i^^.^ vv/-\i\ R.I CHARD \VI LSON B.OYNTON Coipglit)^'^. COPYRIGHT DEPOHIli The Vital Issues of the War THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR BY RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON BOSTON THE BEACON PRESS 19 18 -^5 '^io'h Copyright, 1918, by RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON C1.A508020 • NOV -2 1918 THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED WITH PROFOUND RESPECT AND ADMIRATION TO WOODROW WILSON PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA He is the true history of the American People in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of one hundred millions throbbing in his heart, the^thought of their minds articulated by his tongue. — Adapted from Emerson's Tribute to Lincoln. PREFACE The first seven sermons in this volume were preached on successive Sundays in April and May and the eighth in September of the present year. Now that the church seems, in the eyes of many, to have fallen from the high esteem in which it was held by a former generation, no doubt a volume of sermons, even on "The Vital Issues of the War,*' runs grave risk of not being read. Since the war began, however, sharp criticism has been visited upon the pulpit for evading the discussion of its compelling moral and spiritual problems; it needs, therefore, to be made known that all pulpits, to say the least, have not deserved the reproach of failing to utilize this unique opportunity. So my book goes forth, quite without apology, for what it is — the messages of a preacher to his people in the regular course of his ministry, printed as they were delivered, with only the slight revision de- sirable for publication. Such utterances inevitably reflect a point of view determined in part by the time at which they were spoken. In this they are in nowise exceptional. Magazine articles, or the chapters of a book, must be finished sometime, and must bear internal evi- dences of their date of composition. Later impres- sions, especially of the swiftly-moving panorama of a world-war, would modify certain details. Thus, one could not speak now with as much optimism of the Bolshevik rule in Russia as was possible when Sermon IV was preached last April. Still, I have decided to let the sermon stand, as perhaps an over-sympathetic interpretation of the obscure strivings of the Russian democracy, the final out- come of which is still far from apparent. In such a case, one would rather err by undue generosity than by cold-blooded cynicism, which the sermon was intended to rebuke. vii With reference to conditions here at home, one's attitude naturally becomes more critical. In writ- ing Sermon VI, I found it impossible to sustain the tone of unqualified eulogy of American democracy typical of so many of its contemporary prophets. The seamy side of our experiment forced itself per- sistently upon my thoughts. Nothing could be more pertinent to our needful preparation for the ap- palling task of fitting democracy to world-organiza- tion than the resolute facing of our own internal difficulties and dangers, if indeed they are real and not imaginary. Let this imply no disloyalty to the true spirit of American democracy; quite the con- trary! My estimate of the quality of our men in public life is perhaps too low, but I retract nothing of the call to a searching national self-examina- tion. Special attention may be called to the con- ception of a United States of Europe, outlined in the closing sermon — a conception which seems destined to come more and more to the front, as the practically insuperable difficulty of constituting a stable Europe on the basis of present national am- bitions, with their unavoidable conflicts, becomes clear. I have hesitated long before adding even this modest volume to the ever-mounting flood of war- books. Yet nowhere have I, at least, come upon any that tries to do what this proposes — to define and clarify the leading issues for busy people, who in their casual reading catch only fragments of the full truth regarding the world-situation and our national purpose as a growing factor in it. I may be allowed to hope that open-minded readers will find here suggestions impelling them to further thought and study regarding these great matters, which must so powerfully affect our common future. RICHARD WILSON BOYNTON. Study of the First Unitarian Church, Buffalo, New York, September 24, 1918. Vlll CONTENTS Page Preface ------------- vii Sermon I Germany's Will to World Power ----- 3 Sermon II The Gospel of Militarism - - - - - - - . 21 Sermon III The Gospel of Pacifism --------37 Sermon IV The War and the Social Revolution - - - - 53 Sermon Y The Influence of Sea Power in the War - - - 71 Sermon VI • Making the World Safe for Democracy - - - 87 Sermon VII * * America's Leadership in the World of Tomorrow ----------- 103 Sermon VIII / The United States of Europe ------ 119 Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reprint copyrighted material in made as follows: To Mr. Rudyard Kipling for the "Recessional," from "The Five Nations," published by Charles Scribner's Sons of New York. To Mr. Philip Becker Goetz and* The New York Times Company for "To a Fallen Foe." To the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, publishers of "The Poems and Dramas of William Vaughn Moody," for the stanzas from "Gloucester Moors." To Mr. Alfred Noyes and The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, for "The Search-lights." The Vital Issues of the War SERMON I GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER Not hy might nor by power, hut by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts. — Zeohaeiah iv. 6. I here begin a series of seven ^sermons on the Vital Issues of the War. I do so at this time when the greatest, and perhaps the final, decisive campaign in four years' agony of slaughter is going forward because, while there is the utmost urgency of need for putting forth every ounce of national energy in despatching the largest possible number of men and ships and airplanes, and the greatest possible amount of food, to France in this hour of unparalleled crisis, there is equal and quite as urgent need for clear and true thinking and heroic, unbending resolution here at home. The nation must stand as a unit back of the men who are over there on the battle front, behind the guns. Only so can we strive and endure success- fully, so as to ensure the victory that is bound to be ours if we do not flinch. Grod helping us — no petty tribal God, but the infinite G-od of eternal justice and right — ^w^e cannot do otherwise than push on and see this thing through to the end. THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR As President Wilson declared yesterday at Balti- more : "Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right, as America conceives it, or dominion, as she conceives it, shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response pos- sible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion d'own in the dust." Every higher ideal that has gladdened and glorified the long struggle of man npward, to tame the beast in himself and ^'let the ape and tiger die, ' ' is now at stake.- It is not for us who are here to fight, but we can be, and should be, more than mere passive watchers in this conflict. It is at heart a spiritual warfare, a clash of world-ideals. Nothing more far-reaching and fundamental has happened in the world's experience, since the be- ginning of human history. If our opponents pre- vail, it will be one kind of a world in which we and all humanity will henceforth have to live. If we and our associates prevail, it will be another. That is the great and unes capable issue around which all the minor issues group themselves. I shall define these, beginning with our opponents and ending with ourselves. Let me urge each one of you to resolve in fairness to hear me through to the end. No single sermon of the series can ex- press my whole thought. It will appear in its completeness only when the series is done. If any have come here expecting to hear from me a bitter and unqualified, and especially an unfair, denun- ciation of Germany, they are bound to be disap- GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER pointed. Nothing would be easier than that. The temptation to indulge in it, to relieve your minds and mine, is great ; but I shall resist it. Not for an instant do I forget that some of you before me have your own flesh and blood, dearer far than your own life, at the fighting front, or preparing soon to go across. Let it be understood that I do not in any degree constitute myself an advocate of the German policies and ideals that I mean, with as much fairness as I can at such a time, to describe. There is no more senseless folly, in such an issue as this, than to underrate your opponent. We have against us a great people, very great in some ways, though not in all. The Germans are strong in ways where we are weak. In the end, they must learn from us ; they must be forced to learn, since they will have it that way. But we can, and should, learn from them — if not as they are, at least as they have been. An impartial writer — no friend of Germany — has said, ^^ There are elements of great vigor and great virtue in the German habit of mind; all the world could learn much from them.'' The same writer asserts, and it is true, that this war possesses, for the immense majority of the German people, something of the nature of a crusade. It has a kind of religious fervor back of it. Though their main reliance is on military 'force, they could not, with three lesser allies, have stood off the rest of the world, and achieved the marvels of strength and persistence which they have achieved through all these months, without something more than that behind. What is it that THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR drives those tliousands of strong young G-erman men in successive waves against the deadly artil- lery fire from the Allied lines! Let us try today to do (Something like justice in our own minds to the German point of view. I can make this request of you, because since my return from my summer vacation in September, 1914, the voice of this pulpit has been clear and unequivocal, especially since the sinking of the Lusitania, in May, 1915. None of you who have heard me regularly can question that my whole heart and soul and strength have been in the cause of freedom and democracy. I ask you to bear that in mind today. There is not a drop of pro-German blood in my veins, though I like and respect some who have those sympathies which are alien to my o^m. I shall give you but half of my thought in depicting Germany's will to world power, though I shall not fail to utter my moral judgment at the end. But the graver indictment must be postponed until next week, when the Ger- man gospel of militarism will be our subject. I do not forget that this is, or aspires to be, a Christian pulpit, in the broader and higher sense of that much-abused term. I preach here no gos- pel of hate. I do not ask you to love your enemies ; not just yet — ^not until defeat has done something to make them more lovable. But I do ask you to try, with me, to see what they are aiming to do.' Hate and contempt, when they come into our hearts, are too closely allied to secret and un- avowed fear. Let us be brave enough to see Ger- many as she actually is. Out of this fuller compre- GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER hension should spring the resolution that she shall be different — ^that we will help to make her differ- ent than she is — before we are done with her. We are different, are we not, from what we were in June, 1914'? That difference is largely of Ger- many's doing. It came home to me afresh last night when I isaw the new 74th Regiment of the New York State Guard, recruited for home defense, on parade to receive a stand of colors in their armory. What started all those feet to marching in unison? What put all those peaceable citizens into uniforms ? It was Germany, was it not, in the last analysis 1 It helps to show at least with what astounding might she has shaken the earth. Our appeal is to a might greater than hers — ^to the might of an aroused human and divine spirit. Not by might, nor by power, shall ye prevail, but by my spirit, said the Lord of Hosts, by the mouth of one of his prophets, to a prince of ancient Is- rael. By that sign we propose to conquer. But first let us look squarely at the embattled powers that strive against us. The phrase ^'will to power'' is taken from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I am one of those who think that, while the influence of this gifted writer may have been one ingredient in the state of mind with which Germany went into this conflict, still he is in no way responsible for the conflict itself. Those who think otherwise, in my opinion, know little of Germany, and less of Nietzsche. There is nothing purely Nietzschean or German about the will to power. Every great people has had it and in some sense must have it. THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Britain's far-flung empire is built on it, and it is what makes her cling tenaciously to her historic dominion over the seven seas, so essential to her national existence. We ourselves have it, as the whole world has clearly seen since the utterance of the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823, and especially since the unlooked-for results that followed our late miniature war with Spain. President Roose- velt displayed it in one of its less admirable forms when, according to his own statement, he ''took'' the Panama Canal Zone from the tiny republic of Colombia, and the nation as a whole approved. No one thought of quoting Nietzsche to justify that act. Nations cannot live and hold together without some will to power. Not, then, the will to power, but the kind of will and the kind of power that are involved, is what comes in question. To make clear Germany's will to world power, let us look at her position in Europe in contrast with our own on this North American continent. She has some sixty-five million people, we have one hundred million. Counting only the white race, our whole population exceeds hers only by some twenty per cent. Yet our area has from ten to fifteen times the extent of hers. She endeavors to maintain that vast population in a territory, not over-fertile, about the size of the State of Texas or the province of Ontario. One hundred years ago her people were mostly agricultural and so self-sustaining. But since the middle of the nineteenth century Germany has undergone the same industrial revolution that Great Britain underwent half a century earlier. She has become GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER the second manufacturing and the second export- ing state in the world. We think we have done wonders in this country, but in many respects Germany has outstripped us. Her people are not equally great in all direc- tions. In theoretical and applied science, in in- dustry and technology, in medicine, in historical and learned research, in many aspects of educa- tion, and in the general literacy of her entire pop- ulation, that is, the almost complete absence of illiteracy, Germany leads the world. We recog- nized all this as true before the war began — there is no just ground for denying it now. But, as re- gards international morality, they have shown themselves to be the most backward of all great peoples. Politically, and in the application of the democratic spirit to government, they have hardly emerged from ithe Middle Ages. Yet their city administration makes us blush for ours, and our lynchings make us seem to them little better than savages. It is almost inconceivable that such a defiance of public law as occurs periodically in our southern states could occur in their well-ordered and well- disciplined population. We may be very sure that the German people, who do not know what we know of the atrocities in Belgium, or do not believe what we believe about them, will be fully informed of the act of mob violence in Il- linois this past week when a German enemy alien, who protested his peaceable intentions, was taken from the public authorities and hanged without having a chance to defend himself. An act like that is surely no credit to our Americanism. THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Let us consider Germany's situation in another aspect. Except for our northern boundary run- ning west from Lake Superior, and the western part of our Mexican border, the United States possesses the finest natural frontiers of any na- tion in the world. With the Atlantic Ocean on one side of us, and the Pacific on the other, and with our nearly unlimited possibilities of self-support, we are practically impregnable to outside attack. Those who fear an invasion by Japan ought for this reason, if for no other, to be ashamed to be knoAvn as Americans. Then we have on the north the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence river, and to the south the Gulf of Mexico and the Eio Grande. By contrast, Germany has no natural frontiers, except the Baltic Sea, and a short stretch of the Atlantic. Otherwise she lies open to attack on every side. Moreover, while no nation on the western hemisphere comes anywhere near our size and strength, Britain and Russia among her immediate neighbors are potentially stronger than she is. France, Italy and the Balkan States, if once they were united, are nearly as strong. Germany's exposure to danger is thus real, not theoretical. Century after century she has been torn by for- eign invaders. The fearful harrowing to which her people were subjected under Napoleon only a little over a hundred years ago, may explain, though it does not excuse, her ^^f rightfulness" now. It also accounts for, if it does not wholly jusftify, her dominant militarism. She has long been afraid of the rest of Europe, and the rest of 10 GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER Europe has been equally afraid of lier. This was the reason for the mad race in armament during the forty years of so-called armed peace. Nor was the fear on both sides merely imaginary. The deepest foundations of this world- war were laid in that deplorable mutual distrust. If some timid Americans fear what Japan might do to us, ^ve thousand miles away and about half as big as we are in her resources, what would be their state of mind if we lived with five or six Japans, some of them stronger than ourselves, as close as Can- ada or Mexico? One is doubtful if even a sana- torium could hold them. After all, the average German is human, even if those who control him have shown themselves to be inhuman. They had some reas'on to be afraid and to arm themselves, though they terribly overdid both. The world in which we live is a world of many different levels, of high and low civilization and of barbarism. A few peoples, through a superior endowment and energy, have risen far above the rest and have come, for the better ordering of the world-life, to exercise the will to power over them. Thus some sixty millions of the British race dom- inate some four hundred millions of ^ inferior'' peoples in Africa and India. Thus we ourselves control the destiny of our Negroes, Indians and Filipinos, and insist on keeping a predominant in- fluence over the entire South American continent. The base of every such world-empire rests on phy- sical force, and most of it has had to be cemented in human blood. Each leading and powerful race is gifted with a sublime faith in its own mode of 11 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR life, and regards itself as called upon to civilize the backward races by inoculating tliem witli its own special Kultur. Eadi in a way regards itself as a chosen people. It believes that the greatest favor it can confer upon the backward races is to mould them after its own pattern. That word Kultur, which since the war broke out has been given a sinister meaning for those who do not understand German, means to the Germans them- selves essentially what we mean when we talk about Americanism — what we are trying to give to our immigrants, and to our dependent races like the Negroes and Filipinos. We can think of nothing better than to make them over into Americans. I do not say that our Kultur is not in some respects finer than theirs — Heaven save the mark! — but theirs we need to remember has also its noble and valuable aspects and is not merely what this war has shown of its seamy side. There are 'some things even in this blessed America which we may hope 'that our Filipino wards will not try to imitate! Germany is as proud of her Kultur and as loyal to it as we are to ours; probably more so. She is quite as anxioas to extend it world-wide, as we to spread ours. We have been a united nation since 1783, Ger- many only since 1871. Problems within her own borders occupied her statesmen until about 1890, as our domestic concerns sufficed for us until about 1898. Then she awakened suddenly to the world situation which has so rapidly developed since. Two primary needs of every modern progressive people had to be met — first, her 12 GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER crowded populaition, increasing at the rate of over 800,000 annually with practically no emigration, had to be fed; and second, she had to find mar- kets, mostly foreign, for her manufactured goods. She then stood at the parting of the ways. If she had but known, these are processes requiring peace. Not to have realized that was her deeply tragic error. The lands from which she was fed, and the richest customers for her teeming wares, were precisely the great civilized powers, her world-neighbors, like ourselves, Argentina, Bra- zil, Russia, Britain and France. But she, and especially Prussia, her leading state, had a deep- rooted and on the whole temptingly successful military tradition, which had been fatally quick- ened by the career of Bismarck, and especially by his crushing victory over France in 1870-71. Also, it had become the fashion for the sitrong European states to plant colonies in outlying portions of the globe for increase of trade and extension of their special type of Kultur. Far in the lead was the British Empire, with France next and other world powers — even ourselves — following. Few avail- able spots in the sun were left, and these not of the best. Germany, distanced in the race by her late entrance into the group of world powers, seized what she could — vast tropical domains in Africa, of little immediate promise, and certain islands in the Pacific. Standing between the nations of the highest and those of the lowest civilization, there are more- over in many parts of the world, semi-civilized peoples, in hereditary possession of great and rich 13 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR territories, which the superior races think they have the rigM, and even the mission, to aid in developing. We ourselves take this attitude to- ward Mexico. Our mining and mechanical engi- neers, our railroad builders and business organ- izers, go into Mexico to develop the country and incidentally to exploit it for the profit of our in- vestors. For centuries Britain has done this in India and more recently in South Africa. It has led her into a long succession of bloody and only in part justifiable wars, the latest of these the war with the Boers. France has done it in Algiers and Morocco, Madagascar and Indo-China. Naturally Germany wanted to try her hand. This kind of exploitation offers the romance of international trade. It returns the largest dividends and min- isters most to pride of ownership, and in this Ger- many up to 1914 was but following the procession. Now I want to ask you to prepare your minds to be generous, in spite of the almost insurmount- able prejudice — and I grant it to be a legitimate prejudice — ^that Germany's conduct in the war has generated in all of us. Let us for a moment try to forget the last four years. I want to persuade you to admit that Germany, up to the summer of four years ago, deserved to have her place in the sun, that she had earned it, and was amply worthy of it. Bear with me a little if you find this too hard to admit, after all that has happened. I at least shall contend that before the war she had an equal right, in this reg'ard, with other nations of her strength and standing, an equal right to be a world-power, with England, France, Russia and 14 GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER ourselves. Not to be Deutschland ueber AMes, — words like those, like ''Britannia rules the waves," like our spread-eagle, Fourth of July declama- tions, represent only national egotism and boast- fulness. We ought not to give them undue weight. Germany is more boastful than we, because her expansion in prosperity came quickly and some- what as a surprise. She is the nouveau riche among the nations, while Britain has held posses- sion so long, she has had the enjoyment of her immense wealth for so many generations, that she has found boastfulness to be not quite good form. The Germans, and perhaps we, may learn it some day. Now where was Germany to turn, with her mounting capital and her abounding ability and enterprise, for a region among the half-developed parts of the earth where she might send her sons and spread her type of civilization? Millions of her children had emigrated to the United States and had given to this nation some of the best blood it contains; but they were in process of being subjected to our American and Anglo-Saxon Kultur. No doubt Germany has done much, both openly and secretly, to hold these German- Americans loyal to herself ; but in spite of all we know of the attitude of a fraction among them, the result of her efforts has not been brilliant, and could not in the nature of things be lasting. In the end, as the loyalty of the younger generation shows with singularly few exceptions, the Ameri- can spirit is bound to win them. Of that we may now rest assured. Other thousands of Germans IS THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR had gone to soutlTern Brazil, Where they still form a compact mass, in language and KuUur more homogeneous than anywhere among us. But Ger- many cannot unite them to herself as a subject state, because of our will to power as expressed in the Monroe Doctrine. We have expressly for- bidden that. We have ^liitenVerhoten over the whole continent to the south of us ; and Germany well understands what that means, when it is backed by force. Rather than permit her expan- sion there, we have always been ready to fight. Only a single promising direction was left, and Germany took that. It led to her famous Drang nach Osten, her push toward the east. '^West- ward the course of empire takes its way," had sung the good Bishop Berkeley in the eighteenth century. But in the nineteenth century, Euro^Dean imperialism took its way in the opposite direction, toward the east. Southeastward from Germany and her sister empire of Austria, across the Balkans and beyond the famous straits over which the apostle Paul brought his new religion to Europe, lay the his- toric lands of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia — ^once the garden spot of the world, with a won- derful geniality of climate, and full of unbounded possibilities of revival under the magic touch of modern enterpriae. Lying practically neglected between the empires of Russia and Britain, these countries seemed the predestined spot on th'e globe . for Germany's commercial expansion and exploit- ation. This was the renowned Pan-German scheme, on which M. Cheradame has expended so 16 GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER much fervid eloquence — all of it intensely hostile, and much of it, in my opinion, grossly misleading — in the Atlantic Monthly. I hold that it was, and is, absolutely legitimate . for German capital and enterprise to undertake the peaceable develop- ment of these neg-lected lands. Why should there not be Pan-Germans as there were Pan-Angles, Pan- Americans, Pan-Slavs and Pan- Japanese f I can conceive of no earthly reason why there should not be, as the world was before the war broke out. That, of course, has changed everything. After Germany ^s defeat we shall possibly see a change back again, and it may be that something of this great scheme on commercial, not on militar- istic, lines will yet be worked out. You are perhaps growing a little impatient with me for these recurring comparisons in which Ger- many who, since July, 1914, has increasingly made herself the moral pariah among nations, is shown to be only tarred a little more deeply than the rest of us with the same brush of aggressive im- perialism. It is true that a world-wide difference is made by what has happened in the last four years. It demonstrates that the rest of us are disposed to be fair, and Germany is not. The tendency of British and American imperialism is to lift and free the subject peoples, of which the most outstanding miracle was Britain's treatment of the Boers, and our own treatment of the Fili- pinos ; while the tendency of German expansion is to a brutal enslavement of lesser races and the binding of them to her car of conquest. The events of the last four years have only too painfully 17 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR shown that Prussian autocracy and militarism had become dangerous, with its spying and undermin- ing, its jealousy and rutlilessness, to the safety and peace of the world. Ay, there's the rub! Now we are coming to the real point. You will see that it concerns my next week's subject, the gospel of militarism. That is the other half of the case, that I could only begin to present today, as I amply warned you. Two parties have divided Germany between them, the commercialists and the militarists, and suddenly after long prepara- tion the militarists leaped into the saddle in the summer of 1914, and took the lead that brought about Germany's impending ruin. Let me sum up. The outcome of my thought thus far is this : Germany, as one of the four or five most progressive peoples of the world, had until war broke upon us the same right to her will to world power as the rest of the great leading nations. Humanity needed, and it will always need, her ability, her energy, her science and her enterprise. So long as she kept to the ways of peace, she was honored, respected, admired and imitated. Moreover, she was prosperous, more swiftly than any people had ever been. She has been insisting on her right to freedom of the seas — ^but the seas were open to her legitimate errands. '^Made in Germany" was the mark to be observed on thousands of articles in commonest use. The pioneers of her commerce were in every market. Eager students of her Kultur flocked to her uni- versities from the four corners of the globe. All that she threw away for the deceptive shimmer of 18 GERMANY'S WILL TO WORLD POWER military glory. ^^0 what a fall was there, my countrymen ! ' ' She fell, the day the German legions crossed the Belgian frontier, as Satan fell headlong from heaven into the deepest pit. Plato tells us that the best, when it is corrupted, turns to the worst. The crimes of militant Germany shout to the skies. Her good name is branded by some of them for all future time. And why? Because she followed false guides, because she worshipped a tribal God, because she turned her back. on conscience, because she gave her soul for a mess of pottage, because ''not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit'' do nations grow and flourish, now as of old. She that was so great has been cast down, and no one can say how or when she will regain the place that she so recklessly and so desperately forfeited. Twenty-one years ago, at the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, a thing happened which we now see is the only thing that will remain forever in memory of all that pomp and ceremony, — the pub- lication of Kipling's "Recessional," that great hymn of warning and contrition in which the laur- eate of British Imperialism solemnly recalled his countrymen to the thought of the moral and spir- itual foundations of enduring earthly power. Ger- many as yet has found no poet, no prophet, no philosopher, no statesman — unless we except Karl Liebknecht in his prison or the recently published revelations of Prince Lichnowsky, her ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war — to bring to her a similar admonition. That is why she has fallen as she has. That is the message from the 19 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Lord of Hosts which she most needs to hear, and must hear before she can be forgiven and restored to the respect of mankind. God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine — Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart; • Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice. An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget — le.st we forget! Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe. Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law — Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard. All valiant dust that builds on dust. And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word — Thy mercy on Thy people. Lord! 20 SERMON II THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM Whether one member suffer^ all the members suffer with it: or one member is honored^ all the members rejoice with it. — I Coeinthians xii. 26. No such awful situation as that into which the world has been plunged for the last four years could ever have arisen without the long working of deep-seated causes that only now are being revealed in their appropriate effects. The most visibly evident of these causes is the world-disease to which we give the name of militarism. I shall try, in this second sermon, to trace that dread visitation back to its origins, to define its true character, and finally to ask if there can be any possible remedy for it, — anything that will save future generations from the incalculable harm which it has done to this one. It is easy now for us to see that the nations, as members of the one body that we call humanity, can only stand or fall together; that no one of them can suffer without all the others suffering likewise. We are so closely bound together that it must be so. The situation in which we find ourselves is only one more illus- tration of the enduring truth of our text: *^ Whether one member suffer, all the members 21 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR suffer with it.'' One cannot be hurt or healed without all being made to suffer or rejoice at the same time. "What do we mean by militarism? Can it be so described that we can easily discriminate it from that totally different thing which externally can hardly be distinguished from it — that compara- tively harmless arming of themselves by nations for self-defense that superficially looks to be the same? We have to recognize that in certain cases, between things that are fundamentally alike, dif- ferences in degree may become so great as to amount to differences in kind. Thus charcoal and diamonds are both forms of one basic substance — carbon, variously organized and compressed. The familiar drug, nux vomica, when used in mild dilution makes an excellent tonic, but when con- centrated is a deadly poison. The cow-pox, spread by means of vaccination, is in nearly all cases a harmless substitute for the far more virulent small-pox which, when it was allowed in former times to run unchecked, used to ravage whole com- munities, with serious results. The best definition of militarism that I am able to frame is that it is an extreme and exaggerated form of the primitive necessity, for all human communities and individ- uals, of self-defense. Self-defense is the mild and harmless degree of that same thing of which mili- tarism is the extreme degree, carried by fanaticism to the verge, if not beyond the verge, of insanity. The difference in degree has come to be so great as to be a difference in kind. It is just as if a little fire should start in your house. If you con- 22 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM trol it quickly it may do no great damage, but if you neglect it, or especially if you pour gasoline on it, then it takes a supreme effort to put it out. Militarism fans the flames of our natural impulse to self-defense, until it raises a conflagration. Let us clear our minds of cant! Armed force in some form always has existed and — short of the millenium — always will exist, among the societies of men. We meet it in every-day experience in one of its simpler forms in the guise of the police- man. The quiet officer, who walks past your home by day or by night, makes no parade of his weight- ed club or loaded revolver, but you feel a great deal safer as a member of the community to know that those weapons are at hand, for use in case of. need. Knowledge that they are there is often enough for potential evil-doers. Highwaymen or housebreakers will think twice before they go to work in a well-guarded town or city. If we have highwaymen or housebreakers in our community, it is because we are not properly protected. The whole system of our courts and jails for dealing with the criminally inclined rests on an armed force of policemen or soldiers in the background. Otherwise, any settled society would be impossible. It would become a prey to the violent and disor- derly elements that never yet have been wholly suppressed anywhere in the world. What is thus true of community relations holds equally true of world relations. There are dan- gerously disturbing factors in the life of even those peoples that are farthest advanced toward political security. Differences of race, of religion, 23 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR of economic outlook, and above all of national as- piration make even the peacefully inclined nations subject to grave disturbances of their equilibrium. At the present stage of human evolution, one can see no way of escape from these conditions. All of us have not equal ability. We do not look at things from the spme angle. Our purposes often conflict. What is true of individuals is equally true of nations. Some are strong, others weak; some aggressive, others sluggish ; some ambitious to add to their possessions, others content with what they have. Especially in the world-situation, as it had developed by the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century, trade competition on an international scale had been added lo these other disturbing factors. Here we see the human roots of that scourge of militarism which, after growing to colossal proportions almost under our very eyes, has ended by plunging mankind — to call it civilized would seem almost too sharp a satire — into this Armageddon of mutual destruction. The point that I am concerned to establish, be- yond any reasonable dispute, is that some degree of armed force is essential and indispensable for any ordered life, on the great scale of the world, as on the lesser scale of the single community. The plausible but mistaken hope that the world can do without any armed force will be the subject of next Sunday's sermon, on the Grospel of Pa- cifism. That is the other extreme from militarism, which is what concerns us now. Militarism, then, which has come so suddenly — thoug'h not without 24 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM long preparation and ample warning — to bear its direful frnit, is to be thought of as the mad and fatal excess of those needful measures that have to be taken by the world in its sober senses for self-protection against the lurking foes of its higher civilization. We have to have some degree of it, but we do not have to have this extreme degree. A nation may always need to be able to defend itself from attack. No nation ever need be deliberately organized for purposes of ag- gression. Militarism, then, is not merely a matter of ar- maments, military or naval. These are its instru- ments, but they neither determine its nature, nor of themselves indicate its presence. No sane per- son would ever call Great Britain — though she possesses the greatest navy in the world, and has fought an unending succession of wars, small and great, in most parts of the globe — a militaristic nation. That she had immense, little developed, military capacity Germany, who was disposed to think otherwise, is now finding out to her sorrow. Also, one feels confident in asserting that the United States is no more militaristic today, not- withstanding the gigantic army we are creating and the stern task that lies just ahead of us, than it was a year ago when that army had not begun to be recruited. I cannot prove these sw^eeping judgments. To the convinced pacifist, who sees militarism wherever he sees armaments, they would seem utterly void of truth. But I can and do affirm them ; and I add without hesitation that any one who thinks otherwise of the British and 25 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR American people can never hope to understand what they are undertaking to accomplish in this war. Further, any one who does so think is in- capable of grasping the distinction between what looks like militarism from the outside, as much as one pea looks like another pea, yet is divided from it by the whole diameter of right from wrong. The chosen exponent of militarism in its most hideous form is, of course, modern, imperialist Germany. But we shall do Germany a grave and gratuitous injustice — which we are not warranted in doing her, though she is our enemy, — if we as- sume that militarism has always been, or is with- out qualification even now, triumphant among her people, or monopolized by them. No, the case is not so simple as that. All crime is not on one side and all virtue on the other. It is an open secret, to those who know the European nation- alities at first-hand, that France, glorious France, has been for a long time almost as militaristic as her more powerful neighbor, Germany. The two peoples have acted and reacted on each other with constant mutual irritation. The Bonapartist tra- dition is far from dead yet. The French people, with their easily excited imagination, have always responded to the glamor of military glory. It was the inherent militarism of the French national character that pushed Napoleon III into his ghastly betrayal of the nation in 1870 ; and that at a later date, within our own remembrance, almost led them into war behind that shoddy adventurer, General Boulanger. Powerful influences of the newer time have worked against this form of na- 26 THE GOSPELOF MILITARISM tional insanity, more in France than in Germany, but they have never prevailed to the same extent as in Britain and with us. No doubt it may be said, in view of what happened in 1914 — for- tunately for poor, stricken, heroic, noble France, they did not prevail ! The Russia of the Czars was militaristic, as the Russia of the Bolshevik revo- lution emphatically is not. We could even wish it were more so. Japan is probably militaristic, and that is w^hy the recent landing of her troops in Vladivostock, even though Great Britain is said to have joined her in it, is a matter for some anxiety for those — like myself — who still have a confident hope of the soundness of the new Rus- sian democracy, over and above all appearances to the contrary. One feels that the New Russia needs time and great patience to work out her own fate under the heavy yoke that conquering Ger- many is trying to impose upon her. The German defeat on the western front, when it comes — and it may not be so long in coming — will soon check further progress of her tyranny in Russia. Militarism is a spirit, a state of mind, an atti- tude toward other nations and the world situation generally, of which Germany offers the most ex- aggerated instance, but in which other powerful and ambitious peoples share in varying degrees. This seems to me to be the essential distinction : — militarism prevails to some extent with every people that earnestly wants to gain something it has not now. Its purpose is frankly aggressive, — not defense, but plunder. One can even conceive of conditions under which the British and our- 27 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR selves, who are relatively free from it, might be- come tainted with it. If a victory for Germany were conceivable, now that our great weight is being thrown into the scale against her, the worst result to be apprehended would be the enforced militarism on our part that would almost certainly follow. To a lasting domination by Grerman arms the United States would never submit — never ! To have such a people over us we would not endure. Much as they have to teach us in some ways, there are other things we do not care to learn from them. That, would mean the straining of every nerve to equip ourselves for the next conflict, so completely as to ensure Germany's downfall. Dark as the outlook on the surface may seem today, that can- not be-in store for us or for our children. It may be more difficult than it would have been four years ago to suppose any longer that the German mind is transparently honest. But, in any case, at moments it is brutally frank. If the innocent and unsuspecting world before the war — not knowing that the pit of hell was yawning so near us — could not be brought to credit the Ger- man militaristic ideals, it was not because any effort had been made to conceal them — quite the contrary. Their writers and publicists had long openly avowed them ; only, they were too horrible to be believed. Some representative books like those of Treitschke and Bernhardi have been put into English, where any one may read them. I can assure you from recent experience that it is an in- forming exercise to read these books. The only pity is that those whose place it was to guide the 28 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM destinies of the western nations had not taken to reading them earlier. Except for Colonel Roose- velt and a few others, we were all of us living in a fooPs paradise of ignorance and complacency. I have come upon a reference to a German work on war by a certain Wagner — not, of course, the composer — which is said to make Bernhardi's writings sound effeminate. This must have been the text-book studied by those who despoiled Bel- gium and depopulated Armenia. It is stated on good authority that the number of books published in the German Empire on the subject of war alone in the year 1913 was some eight hundred. It had become an obsession. War was not looked upon as a rare incident, something that might come once in a generation, or once in a lifetime. It was some- thing inevitable. To prepare for it and to wage it was the chief of national industries ; to urge it was the crowning glory of German idealism. Bern- hardi unblushingly asserts all this and more. One does not see how Wagner could go any farther. War, says Bernhardi, is not alone a biological ne- cessity ; it is a moral duty. Might is the supreme right, because from its decisions there can be no earthly appeal. It is curious that these writers seem never to have considered that the decision mi^ht some day go against the Fatherland. Yet the fanaticism of Bernhardi — his blind idolatory of war under all conditions — would have been equal even to that. In one passage, he refers to the political regenera- tion of Prussia as having been brought about by her series of crushing defeats under Napoleon, 29 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR from 1807 to 1815. War was good for Prussia even when she was whipped ! That is certainly carrying things to extreme conclusions. This part, however, of his otherwise dubious prophecy may turn out to be true. For a defeated Germany will be ready for political regeneration as a vic- torious Germany would not. When the autocracy and the military caste are hurled down from their seats of criminal power, then the long-postponed political revolution will be due. When at last it has the opportunity to rouse itself, the German democracy, long bound to the car of conquest and led to inconceivable slaughter, will begin to come into its own. May God speed the day! Now what is the philosophy of nationality on which this astounding structure of militarism has been raised in the mind and life of Germany! We find it cogently stated in the ^'Polities'' of Treit- schke. I do not want to give the impression that he or any of these writers was a mere monstrosity. My purpose is too high and serious, and I hope too fair and just, to permit me to fall into the method of caricature. I am trying to tell the truth just aS I see it, without bias to one side or the other. Whatever may be true of Bernhardi, whether or not he is as representative as he has been taken to be, Treitschke was the most brilliant of German historians, loyally devoted to the Prussian state- system, and a man who stamped his convictions and prejudices on the mind of Germany as not even Macaulay stamped his on the mind of Eng- land. Our country has not produced a historian to compare with him as an awakener of patriot- 30 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM ism. He is not to be lightly dismissed by any one. Much of what he writes on politics is good, plain, common sense, that no one with an eye for the often stern realities of life would think of reject- ing. . Treitschke was nobody's fool, and to refute him you must be well armed at every point with solid fact and serried argument. The discussion of war forms only a small part of his lengthy and systematic treatise on Politics. He starts from the conception of the state as power — power to bind its people together, and power to protect them against possible enemies. This is perfectly cor- rect — the state is power, and in the nature of the case must be^until you begin to carry it out to one-sided consequences. Treitschke does this, and events have shown us what effect it has had on the nation he sought to exalt above all others. ^^ Above all nations is humanity," says the great motto that Goldwin Smith caused to be carved on a stone seat on the campus of Cornell University. This, the representatives of G-erman militarism will in no wise admit. Treitschke scoifs at hu- manity, as a conception too vague and intangible to have any meaning. In this respect President Wil- son shows himself to possess an infinitely superior political judgment. Humanity is like the horizon ; you can deny it only by first assuming that it is there. It surrounds you, whoever you are and wherever you may go. No nation lives to itself alone or can so live. As a French writer has said, ^ ^ The right of the individual has no existence except in society; the right of the nation has no existence except within the larger humanity. 31 > J THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Humanity is something more than all the people who happen to exist in the world at one time. It is an ideal sentiment, an nndying aspiration of the heart. It is one of those impregnable spiritual facts like that which lay in the background of the apostle Paul's mind when he wrote: ^^ Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.'' The frightful delusion of militarism is its notion that this divine law of human solidarity can be abrogated by one nation, G-ermany, being able to subject all others to its iron will to power. The very stars in their course fight against such a per- version of the will of God for men. *^ Above all nations is humanity." The world is ideally and potentially one, and the advancement of civilization has always consisted in the pro- gressive realization of this over-arching unity. MilitarisTQ sins most deeply by being, in principle, the deadliest foe of this advance. According to its diabolical philosophy, the hand of every nation must be against the hand of every other. They are rivals, each working only for its own selfish in- terests; and when those interests clash, each is entitled to press its own claims to the point of violence. That was the meaning of Germany's ever-mounting passion for armaments on land and sea. She has talked of protecting and extending her Kultur. Last Sunday I fully admitted the le- gitimacy of this ambition, no matter how far she carried it by decent and civilized means. The world could have nothing but the most cordial wel- come for the best she had to offer. But, to toler- ate her forcing it on us by waging war — forever 32 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM no ! It is intolerable. We have seen, and Ger- many must finally realize, what that must come to. How much has her Kultur been advantaged since she spoke her ultimatum to unwilling France, and unready Russia, and little Belgium? The harm she has done to her own best life by this war is not to be estimated. Something of what she has lost by it in reputation can never be recovered. It will take one generation, perhaps two, for her to begin to regain anything like the world's former respect. Let no one despise her enormous effort, or make light of the moral unity and discipline that her people have shown in following their Kaiser and his generals. The German nation, wickedly as its magnificent energy and skill have been misdirect- ed, has proved itself one of the wonders of the world — ^no more wonderful, indeed, than Great Britain and France. But the pity of it, and the shame of it, and the utter, woeful waste of it! At last militarism has overreached itself, and given to coming centuries a warning that can scarcely go unheeded. We are seeing what it can do, and having seen it, let us resolve to destroy it forever. One of the most flagrant vices of the ingrained militaristic habit of mind is the cold-blooded cynicism with which it judges other nations. It sees them only as beasts of prey ready to leap on one another. To read Treitschke and Bernhardi on the callous plottings of England, France, Italy, Russia, yes, and of the United States of America against Germany, is like living in a nightmare. If you want to know what a hard-headed reprobate 33 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR the average American is, read Bernhardi. A mind so drugged with base suspicion loses all sense of proportion and probability. Prince Lichnowsky who, w^hen he was German ambassador in London, got to know the British people, has lately told the German nation: ^'We deliberately destroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement. * * * The whole civilized world outside Germany attrib- utes to us the sole guilt for the world war. ' ' That will be the verdict of history. The war began in a state of suspicion that was not based on fact. It had something to go on, but not much. The typical militarist is a man who jumps affrighted at his own shadow. The bully is always a coward. Germany's bullying and swashbucklering is all of it the most damning evidence of her craven heart of fear. Individually, her people are brave, but as a nation she is a rank and arrant coward. She could not stand the steady strain of fair and hon- orable competition. She maneuvered to take ad- vantage of her antagonists, as she deemed them^ and to shoot first. The writers I have been quot- ing, especially Bernhardi, are forever reiterating that the thing for a nation to do is to choose a favorable time to force the fighting, for then she will inevitably win. Well, the General Staff picked their time. All omens seemed favorable. Every- thing was ready, to the last button. Are they go- ing to win? Humanity dare not allow it. Life would not be worth living. The earth of which they have made a shambles would then be a den of thieves and murderers. Moral right would have been repealed. All goodness and sweetness would 34 THE GOSPEL OF MILITARISM have gone out of existence. Never, never can such a monstrous conspiracy succeed! They must be pressed back. Their Kaiser and his precious brood of princes must be put where they can do no further harm. Their autocrats and junkers must be shorn of their impudent domination. Humanity requires it. It must and shall be done. No matter how long it takes, no matter if every one of us goes into the ranks, nothing matters now in comparison with winning this war for ourselves and the Allied peoples and the future of humanity. And then, what next? Force, as we saw at the beginning, cannot for long or perhaps forever be banished from the world. But hencefort;h, as the greatest result to grow from the demonstrated bankruptcy of militarism, it must be a righteous, unified, rational, humane force. Its only reason for being will be the adequate policing of the world, to suppress disorder and to uphold order in every part of the wide earth. To accomplish this there must be a league of the free and democratic peoples, with Britain and the United States at its head — that glorious consummation of which ex- President Taft has made himself the prophet, though, not the only one, among us. Such a league of nations is surely coming, and when it comes some part of the cost of this war will be worth having paid. Militarism has proven to be self- destructive. We are witnessing its agony of sui- cide. It has brought us almost within sight of the hol}^ vision of the angels at Bethlehem — peace on earth and good will to men. 35 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR I end my sermon with a sense of the indescrib- able tragedy of it. All those millions dead and maimed and bereft, — ^it strains the strongest reason to face the truth. And for what gain? Since God is, we dare not say it has been for noth- ing. For out of all the hate must spring a new and larger love. Out of supreme pity must spring a profounder peace. One of our own poets, a member of this congregation, Philip Becker Goetz, has written the following lines with which I close. They might be the words of any one on either side who had killed blindly, mechanically, unknowingly, some one on the other side whom he had never seen. The poem is entitled : TO A FALLEN FOE I see you lying there upon the field, The sunset all that flushes your young cheeks, The mist like groping lips your white brow seeks, As if to print the kiss your mother cannot yield. You were my foe — I should be glad you fell And took to death the peril of your strength; But somehow I grow sick at your limp length And wonder which of us is nearer hell. I stilled the music that was in your heart, I cheated some lass of her starry vow: • I'd give an empire to recall you now, And in a lone grave gladly act your part! 36 SERMON III THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM They have healed the hurt of my people lightly j saying^ Peace, peace; when there is no peace. — Jekemiah vi. 14. The opposite delusion to militarism is pacifism. Its delusion is that which the prophet describes in these words of the text : ^'They have healed the hurt of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace." In this third sermon I intend to pay my respects to the pacifists — my respects *and also my respect. I have been a paci- fist myself, and to a certain extent shall always be one ; never an extreme pacifist, feeling that no price was too great to pay for peace. I never felt that peace was the highest possible good. But until August, 1914, I supposed myself to be a fairly consistent peace advocate. Up to that fateful summer most Americans, one fancies, had a more or less fervent hope for the near advent of the new internationalism, the gradual reduction of armaments on land and sea, the progress of the principle of arbitration in disputes between nations — in short, the Wliole group of world-ideals represented by the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. 37 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Time, and the amazing changes that the swift years have wrought, have profoundly affected the earlier attitude of m^any of us. While there is need of having fixed principles of conduct, and of holding loyally to them, it is not well that they should be held so rigidly as to be incapable of adaptation when the circumstances have radically altered. Peace among the nations I favor as much as ever I did. Indeed, now that modern warfare has revealed itself as fiendish and hellish beyond the utmost range of former imagination, I believe we all shall msh for its extermination with a new fervency of desire. Who would not wish and pray for it? Yet, as the old writer of Ecclesiastes has it, There is a time for everything — 'a time for war and a time for peace. And the present, when all that we value in civilization has become the object of a most dastardly and wanton attack, appears to me — in spite of my former principles, if you will, or as I shall contend, rather because of them — a time for the resolute and unremitting prosecution of our just cause in this world-conflict, in order that peace when it comes may have some promise of permanence. Though all signs may fail, the long-drawn agony of fire and blood seems to be slowly wearing itself out. Unless the United States bestirs itself might- ily, or the evident unrest in Austria reaches the boiling point, it may last through another summer or longer. But the end is inevitably coming. The strain on the life and resources of even the most powerful nations is certain to reach a point be- yond endurance. There mil be either a sudden 38 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM break or a slow dying down of the intolerable misery. It is, then, none too soon, for those who can still keep enough detachment of mind, to look through the battle-smoke and picture to our- selves the strange, new, silent earth as it must emerge when the incessant roar of the guns is over. What kind of world is it to be? It is plain to be seen, even now, that it will offer problems of a gravity 'and complexity beyond our present calcu- lation. Some of ithem we can, in a way, anticipate. Others will depend on the time when peace comes, and the exact form which it takes. The rest of this series of sermons will encourage the forward look, and undertake to outline a pant at least of the new situation that we should try to establish for the sake of ''just and lasting peace among our- selves and with all nations. ' ' To my thinking, a;t least, while pacifism is justly in bad repute for the moment, because of the ill-^advised and imprac- ticable action of some of its exponents, the hour cannot be forever delayed when — ^having given the war -makers their long and lurid inning — the world will turn with unspeakable relief to realize anew the blessing of the peace-makers. Very much as we found to be the case with the will to power, and even with militarism, so also- pacifism is not all of a piece, to be accepted or rejected without thoughtful discrimination. It is a mixed attitude. It has some aspects that are defensible and others that are not. In some ways, when pushed to extreme conclusions, it is utterly impracticable. But in others, and as an ideal principle, it is one of the sublimest visions for the 39 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR future of the race that has ever visited the mind of man. I propose', first, to deal with it sympa- theticaJUy, to set forth its good and reasonable and attainahle side, so far as I am now aible ; and then to point out its inherent limitations, and the in- superable obstacles that it has to confront at the present stage of human development. I know that there are strong feelings among you on this, as on the other subjects of this series of sermons, and I can only ask that you will hear me patiently and considerately in view of the diffi- culty inherent in what I am attempting to do. There is one thing, at least, that may be safely affirmed at the outset, namely, that under no cir- cumstances that we are able to conceive, could the pacifists possibly have m^ade such an awful, un- speakable mess of the world-situation as the mili- tarists have made of it. One does not ignore the great gains that are already apparent. For if the war has resulted in fearful losses materially, it has brought very decided gains spiritually. But if we could bring back the millions of newly dead ; call them again in manly strength out of their recent graves, and restore them to their loved ones; and if then we could take a vote as to whether to go through it all again, or settle the differences of the peoples by conference around a talble — some way, any way, so they were settled rationally, and without all this spilling of blood — can any one doubt the issue of such la referendum? The trouble before the war was not that there were too many pacifists, but that there were too few of them, and that the apostles of violence sat 40 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM in too many of the seats of power. If it takes two to make a qnarrel, it also takes two to keep the peace. Wlien one is bound to fight, the other must also fight or be exterminated. For my part, I choose to fight rather than to see everything I hold dear put in jeopardy. The primary weakness of pacifism is that it puts too high an estimate on humian nature as it is now constituted: So long as any nation is restless, dis- satisfied with its place in the worid, and cherishes unrealized imperialistic ambitions, the day for universal disarmament has not yet dawned. It is well to practice kindness to animals, but that does not mean stopping to reason with a mad dog when he is 'attacking your child. The peaceable peoples said, ^^Come, pretty pussy,'' quite long enough to the Prussian tiger. Since pussy came, and we have felt her claws in our flesh, naturally we have quite considerably changed our tune. There is an individual and instinctive, as well as la public and professional, pacifism. We may say that the guiding motive of the one is the prin- ciple of non-resistance to evil ; or, stated positively, the attempt to love our neighbor as ourself . The guiding motive of the other is anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism ; or, positively, the attempt to give expression to the international mind. Both of these motives are excellent; the only question is as to their present (application. The typical paci- fist — except in those cases, perhaps relatively rare, where the attitude is merely a cloak for cowardice — is apt to be an idealist; often, though not in- variably, a Christian idealist. I realize that I am 41 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR probably speaking to some to whom all pacifism and all pacifists, lumped together, are simply anathema. They cannot away with them. Bnt no movement as earnest as this, that draws to itself so many spirits touched to finer issues, can be rightly judged by what Oolonel E/oosevelt has called its ^'lunatic fringe." It has its lunatic fringe, but it also has its center of idealism, and of Christian idealism, that we must not overlook. Fairness of mind, as one fully realizes, is pe- culiarly difficult now, in the midst of the struggle. We need all the help we can get, and the man who stands aside in such an issue, ^at such a supreme crisis of history, will receive short shrift from the majority. We call the pacifist a slacker, if not a traitor. He may very well be both, and it is not always easy to tell. He that is not with us is in effect lagainst us. The non-resistant, the consci- entions objector, talks provokingly like a pro- German. We wish him to curb his conscience be- fore it compels him to preach against conscription. Our house is on fire, and it is time, we think, for those who object to our method of putting it out to keep quiet and not hinder us in doing the neces- sary work. Germany simply puts the uncompro- mising pacifist to death, likewise France. In Great Britain and the United States, with a longer tra- dition of individual liberty, if he is abnoxious, he is put in prison. Either way, some injustice is prob- ably done to sincere pacifists, whose idealism is simply too unbending. I am thinking of one of the greatest of living English philosophers, whose books I have read with prof ound respect, Bertrand 42 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM Russell. For some reason the En^lisli authorities have seen fit to put him in jail. I think he is a genuine martyr. It is well for us to remember that the Abolition- ists of half a century ago were pretty uncomfort- able people to live with, and some of them even openly advocated dissolving the Union. But they were profoundly right in moral principle, and in time the whole nation came to think as they did, except that the Union was saved. Their ravings never threw Abraham Lincoln off his balance. We need our idealists, even though they sometimes go to extremes. We ought to be strong enough to possess our souls and not be thrown into a panic. Those who are genuine pacifists, or genuine be- lievers in any form of faith, never complain of the degree of martyrdom to which they have to submit, knowing that thus the truth has ever been furthered, when it is the truth. The reward of the true pacifists will perhaps come only when their bones are dust. When there is no longer a militant Prussia to attack us, it may be that we shall all come to think as they do. That may serve as enough by way of sympa- thetic appreciation. What now shall we say of the difficulties that stand in the way of carrying out the pacifist program? I am not thinking simply of those that grow out of the immediate situation, but equally of those that will long, if not always, exi^t in the very nature of the case. It is a com- monplace of present-day thinking, given its chief impulse by the doctrine of evolution and especially by Darwin's teaching, that all life is a struggle for 43 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR existence, resulting in the survival of the fittest. It is a serious error, however, to confine this teach- ing to the biological plane, and suppose it to mean the survival of the physically strongest. God is not, as Napoleon cynicaJlly dedared, always on the side of the biggest battalions. In human life, and even below the human level, the moral factor comes in. A single antelope may easily become a prey to the lion, but a herd of antelopes, by banding together and defending one another, may manage to outwit him. The drawing together of the Allied peoples, with ourselves now^ added, is the most wonderful demonstration of the power of this moral factor in evolution that history yet affords. On paper, and as a mere military calculation, Germany seemed bound to win. It looked like an absolutely certain demonstration. All those who are dazzled by physical power, whose secret if not avowed leaning is toward the materialistic in- terpretation of history, have repeatedly in their hearts conceded her the victory. Why should not guns and 'ammunition and organization, long pre- pared in advance, win the day? Simply because the world is not made on tho'se lines. Germany broke down at the Marne, again at Verdun, and she is apparently stopped now in Picardy and in Flanders. What does it mean? Why, that even armed force, to succeed, must call to its aid the invisible but potent moral factor. The magnificent resolution of the French at Verdun, with the watchword, ^^They shall not pass,'' was alone worth to them many divisions of fighting men. We have had it repeated in Field Marshal Haig's 44 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM great recent order to the men of Britain to stand firm where they were and fight with their backs to the wall. That is a spirit which evokes in real men an almost miraculous courage and determina- tion. Any true man rises to double his strength in response to an appeal like that. The moral might of the world is roused against the material might of the Central Empires — which, however, as I showed in an earlier sermon, is not without its real though inferior moral factor — and we need have no fear of the final outcome. The embattled nations are deeply convinced of the sacredness of their cause, and with a single supreme command we may await the ultimate issue with confidence. What has just been said about the essential moral factor in the human struggle in no way in- validates the general law of conflict and survival. It simply raises it to the human plane. It is no- torious that the aggressive and militant peoples, those who most display the will to power, are not the more backward, but the more advanced, as regards the general arts of civilization. This is the astounding paradox with which we are con- fronted. India does not rule Britain, but Britain rules India. Unawakened China, notwithstanding her vast undeveloped resources as a military and naval power, is a model, except as shown in her recent internal strife, of contented pacifism. How long this passiveness will last is a problem for the future. The militancy of Japan has been in exact proportion to her progress in other directions, to her swift assimilation of the rest of western civil- ization. The genius of militarism in Germany is 45 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR inextricably bound up with her leadership in the manifold forms of industrial organization. She professes war, and practices it, only as an exten- sion into another but adjacent field of her insati- able purpose of commercial and financial domina- tion. It has been truly said, by a pacifist writer, that in no other nation do we find leaders as patri- otic in their peculiar sense as those who direct the G-erman world-policy. To them Germany is everything, and all other nations are nothing. The advancement of German interests, by any and every means, is their be-all and end-all. '^If they can confer what they regard as benefits upon Ger- many, everything else is of no account." We are patriotic, some of us, but hardly to that extent. This is the temper of mind with which we have to deal. While Germany manifests it in an ex- treme form, of open and declared envy of other, peoples and determination to pull them down so that she may be built up, still she is not alone in showing this temper. Britain, France, and the United States — ourselves with our dollar diplo- macy — ^though with somewhat less crudity of method, are no less fixed in their determination to. hold fast to their present immense advantages. All alike are possessed by national egotism; and what we call patriotism in these several countries is largely devoted to upholding and enhancing this not wiholly pardonable pride of nationality. In diplomatic language, it is generally described by the phrase, '^our national honor and interest." What the national honor and interest seem to dic- tate, the patriotic part of the nation will always 46 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM insist on enforcing, even by resort to arms. In the case of the United States this has meant, for nearly a hundred years, the application of the Monroe Doctrine to South America. Let certain foreign nations come over and threaten Vene- zuela, and the American people rise as one man to protest. In the case of Britain, it has meant the oppression of Ireland, the government of India, and making her power secure in South Africa and Egypt. In the case of France it has meant the appropriating for herself, and especially keeping Germany out of, the extensive commercial oppor- tunities in Morocco. The world at large, like each nation separately, is thus divided into two con- flicting interests — those w^ho have what they want, and those who lack it. Next Sunday, in the ser- mon on the War and the Social Revolution, we are to study the waging of this irrepressible con- flict within the life of every great modern nation. Today we confine ourselves to its waging between the leading nations themselves. Here we see the tremendously acute problem that any thorough-going pacifist has to face. It is the problem that brought on the European war. The older pacifism — that which antedated the out- break of this war and proposed the Hague Tribunal for international arbitration — never properly sensed its existence. To bring it sharply to the foreground, we may almost say the war was required. The situation is this : Britain, France, the United States and perhaps, though not cer- tainly, Russia, may be set off in a class by them- selves and called the satiated powers. They are 47 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR like the man in the New Testament parable who had much goods laid up for many years. They possess all that even national egotism could wish. Their natural role is to hold fast what has been given them. Their controlling interest is to keep the world in its present groove iand prevent the upsetting of the balance of power; to make conditions static. Opposed to the nations of this class — even if for the present partly allied with them — is another group, including Germany, Japan and Italy, which may be placed together and called the hungry powers. They want, and their patriotic pride is constantly pushing them on to acquire, strategic and commercial advan- tages which are not now theirs. This accounts for Japan's two recent wars, with China and Eussia; and also for Italy's amazing attack on Turkey for the possession of Tripoli. It is for the interest of these hungry powers to upset the equilibrium, and that is just what Germany tried to do in 1914. It is clear enough now that this is what lies back of the Teutonic onslaught on civilization. Now, it is the fundamental nature of existence to be dynamic, not static. Not even the eternal hills stand as they are without change ; much less the animal and human species. Strive and obtain, relax and be eliminated — ^^that is the universal law. We see it working its results in every phase of competition. In business, to stand still is to go backward. Expansion is the driving force of strong natures ; contentment and slow decay is the soothing fate of weaker ones. Nations already successful have to keep themselves fit and firm 48 THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM to hold their place. Nations that would be greater have to equip and bestir themselves to win the desired success. The situation first became serious some thirty years ago when the outlying vacant lands in the uncivilized portions of the earth, especially in Africa and Western Asia, had been practically parcelled out among the world powers and there was no clear space left. For further expansion, for example, on the part of Germany, the latest comer at the feast, there was no escape, but to rest contented or to grasp something that belonged to somebody else. We, as citizens of a contented power, may ask, — not without a certain self-right- eousness — why could she not be contented? I tried in the opening sermon of this series to give some reasons why she cannot be. In any case, the spirit and purpose of her people — and not neces- sarily of her rulers only, as we now ought to per- ceive — is that she will not, and moreover cannot be foTced to, remain satisfied with what she has. Her approaching defeat may crush this spirit for a time, but not for always. Let us not deceive ourselves about that. This time she has failed of her aim, though only in part. She has made the rest of us suffer with her enough so that she will never again be ignored and set aside as she was by Britain and France over Morocco in 1911. I have no time at this point to go into that, which is one of the most instructive examples from re- cent history, little known to the multitude. While we were thrown into this war as a war for democ- racy, French and British imperialism have a meas- 49 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR ure of responsibility for it that history will make clear. Germany's will to greater power may be foiled for the time, until she has been enabled to recover herself, but it is too much a part of her as a consciously strong and self-reliant nation to be permanently controlled short of her extermina- tion. Suppose the whole world had told us some years ago not to take the Hawaiian Islands? Would that have checked us! We might have waited for a time, but in the end we should have sought to realize what the great bulk of our people regard as our national destiny. This, then, is the problem of world-peace for the future. All the other related questions that form the staple of pacifist and anti-pacifist dis- cussion — conscription, military training of youth, arbitration, reduction of armaments, freedom of the seas — are, by comparison, merely side issues. The world of the future will either be ruled by might, or by some peaceable adjustment of right. In the one case, the free and democratic peoples will have to Prussianize themselves, as they have been doing feverishly for the last four years, ourselves as much as any since April, 1917. Not that we are adopting the Prussian ethics, but their methods of preparedness. That means permanent conscription, universal military training, a huge navy and perpetual war budgets, with exhausting taxation. It means a steady setback of all higher civilization, from which we are already suffering acutely, though under the pressure of present ex- citement we do not realize it. This alternative opens a perspective of recurring future wars that so THE GOSPEL OF PACIFISM we do not care to look upon. Tlie other alternative is to invent some method of conference and friendly concession, whereby not only the claims of the Allied nations, some of which are among the hungry powers, may be adjusted, but whereby also 'the reasonable aspirations of German na- tional feeling may be met and somehow satisfied. Does this seem to any of you a lame and impo- tent conclusion? If so, I am not surprised. The American public just now is being worked up into a frenzy of just wrath against German atrocities and crimes against humanity. For those crimes and atrocities, I have only stern condemnation, like all right-thinking men. For the way Germany has gone about what she desired to accomplish, there can be no excuse. But that she had and has a case to press against the satiated powers, I do not think will be questioned by any man of true vision of realities in his right senses who knows the situ- ation as it is. This the newspapers alone cannot be trusted to give us. We have to read recent his- tory, and see what were the legitimate aspira- tions of Germany, which she felt that the world as it was organized before the war was united to deny her. Even with our moral condemnation upon her, Germany is still too great, and too essential to the future peace of the rest of us, not to deserve and finally to have her rightful place in the sun, what- ever that place may be. The agencies of the new pacifism, which are to work out this consumma- tion, are yet to be created. Germany herself must first repent and undergo a difficult inner trans- si THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR formation. She must learn to live in the world on decent terms with the rest of us. Her people must seize the helm of state from her militaristic rul- ers. Also the powers against her must calm their, at present needful, belligerent passions and some day sit down to talk it all over rationally and with the fullest possible mutual respect and under- standing. No one can have read discerningly the speeches and messages of President Wilson with- out seeing that this is one of his guiding aims — to defeat Germany first, then to settle the outstand- ing issues in such a way that she will be ready to live in harmony with the other world-powers. How America must lead in it all is to be the topic of the three concluding sermons of my series. 52 SERMON IV THE WAR AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION The people that ivalked in darkness have seen a great light; they that divelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. — Isaiah ix. 2. The two most surprising developments of the great war, entirely unforeseen when it began, have been the revolution in Bussia and the entrance of the United States among the coimbatants. Which of these wo rid- shaking events will have the more far-reaching consequences, w^e are not now in a position to tell. Only the historian of the future, when he comes to look back on this twentieth cen- tury and sum it all up, as we look back on the eighteenth, can decide that. One present-day writer declares that ''No change which the w^ar may bring about can equal the contribution of the Russian Revolution to the democratic progress of Europe." Another, with no less positiveness of conviction, says: "The Russian Revolution, stu- pendous though it is, pales as a portent in human affairs before the appearance of the United States as a formidable military power bent on a battle for peace in the heart of Europe." The contradic- tion in these two statements disappears when we 53 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR view the two events as intimately and profoundly related one with the other. Together they have done more than anything else that conld have hap- pened to enlarge the scope and define the character of the struggle as a war of autocracy against democracy. Whatever may have been the immediate causes of the war, it has come to reveal its connection with other and deeper-lying conditions of the world-life, in a way that is gradually becoming clearer to our understanding. If it had remained — what it seemed likely to be at the outset — an attack of two great military powers, Germany and Aus- tria, upon two other great military powers, Rus- sia and France ; or even if it had come to be — what some observers think it chiefly is — the death- grapple of Teutonic with Anglo-^Saxon imperial- ism for the prize of domination in the world's mar- kets; — all that would have been explicable in the familiar terms of the older world-order, with its jealous balance of power and its intense trade rivalry. Then we could look for nothing radically new, nothing having in itself the seeds of the fu- ture. The new note was struck with the dramatic dethroning of the Czar, Nicholas II, the autocrat of All the Russias, in March, 1917, and with the declaration of war a month later by this mighty militant democracy of the western hemisphere. The coincidence of these two events is what prom- ises to make the present one of the turning-points of human history. Let us lift up our hearts ! * ^ The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwelt in the land of the shadow 54 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION of death, upon them hath the light shined.'' The sermons still to come will be devoted to bringing ont America's participation in the war and what is implied in it. The aim of this sermon will be to interpret to you the broader significance of the Russian Revolution. The situation in Russia cannot be grasped in isolation, or as unrelated to a like struggle, if less aggravated, that is going on within each of the other nations involved, including our own. I want to start ri^ht today by helping you to see that our struggle against autocracy and that of the Rus- sian people are, at heart, one and the same thing; that Russia needs our wise comprehension and far-sighted sympathy more than any other of the peoples involved, more even than Belgium, more even than France ; and that a failure of percep- tion and imagination on our part toward the new Russia may easily lead to a miserable failure of our attempt to pull down autocracy and set up democracy in its place. The tone of much current American comment, in the press and elsewhere, shows that the danger of this tragic mishap, of our not understanding, is both real and pressing. There has been a marked cooling down of our first spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for revo- lutionary Russia, since we have seen that its inner ferment has meant the disintegration of the army and the throwing of a double burden on the west- ern front. Our feeling now is different from what we felt at first, and the spokesmen of Allied opin- ion in their natural disappointment over the im- mediate outlook — President Wilson being a 55 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR notable exception — have been especially severe on the present ill-starred rulers of that distraught land — the Bolsheviki. Their leaders, Lenine and Trotsky, are said to be pro-German, and in the pay of the German autocracy. The cJiarge is plausible, in view of all that has happened, and the evidence is not at hand with which completely to refute it. At the same time, the best in- formation' we have is entirely against this view- point. I am satisfied that it is absolutely contrary to the truth, and based on an abysmal ignorance of what these men represent. With a lead like that, American opinion is in danger of getting no- where in understanding what has actually taken place in that far-off land. There is another reason for lukewarmness. The very thought of revolu- tion is apt to be distasteful to many of us, com- fortably settled down in our own affairs and with our little corner of the world arranged to our personal liking. Although this nation had its rise in a revolution, I suppose no people on earth are farther from desiring anything of the sort than the average of educated and well-to-do Americans. As regards our internal situation, at least, we all could join with complete earnestness of spirit in the petition of the Prayer Book, ^^Give peace in our time, Lord ! ' ' What we want is to have things stay about as they are, and ourselves to stay about as we have been. It requires an effort of the imagination — in which we as a people are not conspicuously gifted — to enter into the totally different life of the Russian masses. Yet if imagination should fail 56 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION us, the instinct for fundamental democracy may not, particularly if it can be re-enforced by our keen national scent for business chances. Russia offers one of the greatest existing business oppor- tunities on earth, and if it does not appeal to us in any other sense it ought to appeal to us in that. In every way the United States has in greatest abundance what Russia most painfully lacks. Her people know this well; ours are not yet awake to it. Not our political institutions exactly — those we cannot transmit to a people so unlike ourselves, except in their most general spirit — ^but our methods of popular education and especially of machine-production in industry and agriculture, these Russia needs with an acuteness that most of us little realize. Germany is not waiting for us to take the initiative. Even now, she is hastening the process of Germanizing Russia, at which she has been engaged for generations. She has the great advantage of proximity, but we have the immensely greater advantage of possessing the natural sympathy and admiration of the Russian people ; if we do not throw it away by the in- credible stupidity of measuring everything they do by the little foot-rule of our standards of pro- priety. Either Russia will be progressively Ger- manized, in which case autocracy will take on a new lease of life in Europe, whose end no one can foresee ; or she will be progressively American- ized, in whidh case democracy and liberty will be the coming heritage of her people, and she will inaugurate a progress the end of which is equally hidden in the unimaginable future. More Ger- 57 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR mans can speak Eussian than all the rest of the outside world put together. There ought to he established in every American university chairs of the Russian language and literature, side by side with chairs of Spanish. Shall we do it! It has not been the American way to show our enter- prise in this fashion until Germany has distanced us by half a century. We must begin to send out Americans speaking foreign languages as mission- aries of Americanism to combat the ever-growing horde of the missionaries of German Kultur, It is with a feeling of trying to perform the im- possible that I undertake to describe to you, within the limits of a sermon, the vast and comprehensive social change which has brought Russia, the very stronghold of autocracy and bureaucracy, with ap- parent suddenness, into the situation where she is today. Conditions are so extraordinarily complex and difficult, and there are so many unknown fac- tors. Autocracy is scotched but not killed. Social democracy, in the European party sense, is just now in the saddle, but may not long remain there. The great bulk of the nation is waiting, inar- ticulate, for the next turn of affairs. Prophecy with conditions as they are is foolishness, and yet some lines of tendency are not wholly obscure. Not to go back too far, the incompetence, cor- ruption and utter selfishness of the hereditary autocracy was startlingly brought out by the mis- management of the war with Japan in 1904-05. The whole nation then rose in angry protest, and as a result of a long series of revolutionary mani- festations, in which all classes joined, the absolute 58 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION monarchy was frightened into granting conces- sions under the form of a paper constitution. There never was any intention of carrying these out, and they never were put into effect, so that the last state of the nation, 1906-17, was worse than the first. Wliat the people wanted were the elementary civil rights that obtain in every mod- ern free democracy, whether organized as a re- public or as a constitutional monarchy — universal suffrage, free speech and a free press, the right of peaceable assembly and association — which are the inheritance of men of English speech and are given classic form in the American Declaration of Independence. None of these had ever existed in Russia down to the time of the revolution last year. The length to which autocratic oppression had gone, both before and after the uprising of 1904- 05, absolutely beggars description. Every grop- ing toward a larger freedom was relentlessly sup- pressed. Any assertion of what we regard as the primary rights of the individual was treated as a conspiracy against the government of the Czar. No crime, no atrocity that Germany has been guilty of in Belgium, or Turkey in Armenia, is lacking in the terrible record of what the ministers and subordinate minions of the Russian state did to their suffering countrymen. The details, which can not be given here, may be found in abundance in that remarkable book, '^The Soul of the Rus- sian Revolution,'' by Moissaye J. Olgin, which every American should read. It is significant that the Russians themselves called the autocrats and 59 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR their hirelings, many of whom had German origins and connections, the ''Russian-Germans." If one could repeat here at full length, as Mr. Olgin describes it, the story of just one punitive expedi- tion against certain railroad employees who were peaceably striving to better their conditions, it would make your blood run cold. Many of the officers concerned had German names. The order given was ''to make no prisoners and to act mer- cilessly." It was carried out to the letter. And this was only one incident of hundreds and thou- sands in the years of reaction. We ourselves heard some faint echoes of the pogroms, or mas- sacres of the Jews, the worst of which was at Kishineff. The government itself organized the notorious "Black Hundreds," gangs of bandits, ruffians and cutthroats, who were given license by the police and the authorities to terrorize whole communities and cow the people into silence and submission. The Czar himself was a member of that despicable organization, the Black Hundreds. Compared with the Russian autocracy, the Ger- man, before the war broke out, appears almost in the guise of angels of light, though since 1914 they have only too faithfully followed the Russian model. Ninety per cent of the Russian people are peas- ants, living on the land and deeply attached to it. Sixty years ago they were raised from their for- mer condition of serfdom and given a limited free- dom. Except for the large proprietors, who be- long to the aristocracy, there was until shortly before the revolution no private ownership of land 60 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION among the Russian masses. The land was owned by the village community and parcelled out for cultivation. By that arrangement, few peasants received enough to work on to keep themselves and their families much above the starvation point. Famines were frequent and destructive. The one cry of one hundred and sixty millions of the Rus- sian people is for better access to the land. This represents the full and steady current of the national life, in contrast with which the industrial disturbances in the towns are the merest foam on the surface. Here we begin to get the proportions right. Nine out of ten oriRnary Russians want but one thing — enough land to bring up their families on. Private ownership of land is the most stable force in any nation, against which the assaults of Socialism and Bolshevikism beat in vain. The Russian peasantry, like the French, is one of the most conservative and reliable forces in the world. It is grossly illiterate, and retrograde in many of its methods and ideas. Its urgent need is for schooling and especially for modern farm machin- ery. But it is essentially sound and loyal, and taken together makes one of the largest and finest funds of undeveloped human material to be found anywhere upon earth. It is the firm ballast in the ship of state. No Bolshevik agitations, not even the German conquest, can make any lasting im- pression on this magnificent wealth of common Russian humanity. It stands like a rock and al- ways will stand — nothing can shake it. The bulk of the Russian army was recruited from the peasantry. When the Czar fell, it lost 61 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR its idol and was cut adrift. Now here is a point of the first importance. The war, to the rank and file of the army, was a war of autocracy, of im- perialism. The soldiers f ougiht because they were ordered to fight. Theirs not to reason wTiy, Theirs but to do or die. But when the revolution left them free to think, they could come to hut one conclusion, and that was that this was not and never had been their war. It was impossible that they should take any such view of it as the free citizens of the western democracies — France, G-reat Britain and the United States. They had never been anything but slaves to the will of the Czar, and when this bondage was sud- denly removed they were dazed. Two ideas pos- sessed them — to have peace, and to get back to the land. The collapse of the Russian army was the collapse of the old autocracy, not of the new de- mocracy. "We may be sure of that. "When there is a democratic army in Russia it will be as invin- cible as were the troops of the French Revolution. There is one thing on earth that cannot be defeat- ed, and that is a democratic army. The factor that has been crucially wanting thus far in the Russian nation, in anything like its due proportion, is the great, powerful, directing busi- ness and professional class, known in the terms employed in European party discussion as the bourgeoisie. This is the class that actually rules in America, Great Britain and France, and that was rapidly advancing to control in Germany, 62 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION only held back by the junkers and the military autocracy, which won a dubious triumph in the declaration of war. It was growing fast in Rus- sia from about 1900, but was still, unfortunately, in the mere infancy of its rightful power. The true strength and promise of the Russian democ- racy, as of every other, lies in this body of earned wealth, proved competence, professional knowl- edge and skill, and personal light and leading — what Burke called the ^^ natural aristocracy." If there had been ten million people of this kind in all Russia, the situation would be entirely different today. To this element, because of its superior governing ability, the rule of new Russia in time must inevitably fall. From it were taken most of the first cabinet after the abdication of the Czar — men like Prince Lvoff, Prof. Milyukoff, and their associates. They had come to the front in the Zemstvos or local and provincial assemblies, and in the Duma, the national parliament. They stood for cabinet government on the model of western democracies. Why did they fall, almost imme- diately after they came into power? Here we come upon another open secret of present-day revolutionary Russia, parallel to the collapse of the army. These men came from a class as yet too limited in number, too little understood, and too insecure in control. They fell, almost at once, from a lack of popular understanding and sup- port. Then, after the short but brilliant regime of Kerensky, who, though of Socialist origin and sympathies, was in reality fast emerging into the rank of bourgeois statesmanship, came the sud- 63 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR den and staggering entrance to supreme power of the Bolsheviki. The Bolsheviki! An unfamiliar, foreign, strange-sounding word like that — like Kultur — is the kind of thing with which average British and American public opinion simply loves to muddle itself, and dress up in it all its dear, de- lightful prejudices. It fits in with Mr. Dooley and his Irish humor. The Bolsheviki — it is to laugh! Then, all of a sudden, it becomes no laughing mat- ter. What is a Bolsheviki He is a man who, to use a term that has good standing in English his- tory, believes in the policy of '^thorough.'' He is a straight-out, undiluted Marxian socialist, under the skin of a typical Russian revolutionist. When he starts out, he goes through to the end. That policy is always respectable, though often misunderstood. To call him an agent of the Ger- man or any other autocracy is thinking worthy of an asjdum for the feeble-minded. And yet, because he is a radical extremist, he may unintentionally, for a time, play into the hands of the opposite ex- treme, as the Russian Bolsheviki have certainly done. I am not speaking here at random. I have read, as few Americans have yet had time to do, the two striking books by Leon Trotsky, the former Russian exile and New York Jewish newspaper reporter who, with Nicolai Lenine, was at the head of the Bolshevik government in Petrograd. This remarkable writer and pu'blicist, with the courage of a consistent set of convictions, is the prophet of the proletariat — to use another term of Euro- 64 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION peaii party strife — ^^tlie wage-earning*, hand-to- moutli-existing, laboring masses. These are the people of the cities and the industrial centers. They constitute less than ten per cent of the total Eussian population. What hold the Bolsheviki have over the peasantry on the land remains to be demonstrated. There is no reason to think it is, or ever will be, great; any more than our city Socialism gets hold of the American farmers as a class. Keep in mind this proportion — ten per cent in agitation, and ninety per cent that makes up the unshakable, conservative fabric of the nation ; and then hearing about the Bolsheviki will be less like seeing an unpleasant, menacing ghost. Lenine and Trotsky were the chosen leaders of the class-conscious, labor minority. They derived their power from the Soviets, or councils of work- men and soldier delegates in the industrial centers. They came to the front because these bodies, like the peasants at large, distrusted the war as an adventure of capitalistic imperialism. I cannot hope to enable you to enter fully into their state of mind — ^^that which leads them to think of ourselves, for example, as in this war as an enterprise for capitalistic expansion and the control of world- markets. They know us about as little as we know them, and misunderstanding on both sides is but natural. There is, unfortunately, just enough color of capitalistic imperialism in the attitude of all the western European powers to give a certain justification to this distrust. The economic con- ference in Paris, designed to isolate Germany commercially after the war, was fuel on the fire 65 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR of Bolshevik distrust of the democracy of the Al- lied cause. Now what was the Bolshevik program, before the German conquest and the enforced peace brought in a new and as yet unascertainable fac- tor? Trotsky puts it succinctly in one of the later pages of his book, ^^The Bolsheviki and World Peace,'' an appeal to German and Austrian social democracy written since the war began. ^*No con- tributions (i.e., no indemnities) ; the right of every nation to self-determination; the United States of Europe, without monarchies, without standing armies, without ruling feudal castes, without se- cret diplomacy." He prints these demands in capitals, to show their importance. Except for the first, this is our own American program, as well as that of world-democracy everywhere. The only question is as to precisely what is meant by ^^no indemnities.'' The article on indemnities should be interpreted, probably, as meaning no indemnities such as Germany wrung from France in 1871, and is planning to wring from the rest of us if she wins this war; not such as the Allies will require for the restoration of Belgium, France, Serbia, Poland and Armenia. ^ From our point of view, it is not a just, but an unjust, indemnity which the Russian democratic program repudiates. It has been the policy of a large and influential section of our press, trading on the dense ignor- ance of the average American regarding condi- tions in eastern Europe, to class the Bolsheviki with our I. W. W.'s and other extreme social revo- lutionary factions. There is just enough resem- 66 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION blance between them to give a passing currency to the theory. But let me quote on the other side Ernest Poole, an American writer who knows Russia at first hand. His recent book, ^ ^ The Dark People," is a flashlight on Russian conditions to- day, and deserves, with Olgin^s book on *^The Soul of the Russian Revolution," to be read by every thinking American. He says: ^'With all their faults, the Bolsheviki have done more than all the diplomats to lay naked the blind, brutal greed of the powers who still rule in Berlin. ' ' And he adds, most significantly, ^^ Already, the Bolsheviki give indications of slowing down. * * * In an interview, Trotsky has said that instead of taking over at once the factories and mills and mines, they pro- pose to leave them for a time to be run by their present owners, subject to government control. For how long he does not say. But it may well be, if he and his friends succeed in remaining in con- trol, that with the fast increasing load of respon- sibilities, the Bolsheviki will settle down to a long, protracted series of deep and fundamental reforms that wdll first meet the immediate needs and will then lead slowly through the years to that same co-operative commonwealth which both they and co-operatives and Socialists of every kind through- out the world have dreamed of. ' ' Is not a rule like this infinitely to be preferred to that of the old autocracy? There is no profit now in following the Russian revolution farther. Its next step depends too pal- pably on the general march of events. What, in conclusion, of the wider application of its lessons 67 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR to the social revolution everywhere? Just this: Democracy means the rule of the majority; in other words, that in the long run we shall have to use concession, rather than coercion, with the la- boring masses. They can be led; they can no longer be driven. The best of them know very well that they require wiser and more intelligent guidance than they are able of themselves to fur- nish. The fiasco in Russia gives the latest of many proofs of that. It also gives startling proof that without broad, popular support, even the natural aristocracy of business and professional leader- ship is impotent. Autocracy is dangerously effi- cient, but at a heavy cost to the common man. Democracy has tended hitherto to set aside and discount the man of natural or acquired superior- ity. The two systems are struggling for life. On the part of democracy it is the highest wisdom to keep together, to make the needed mutual con- cessions, to promote a tolerant understanding, to avoid going to extremes and to base theory on tried experience. One of the most suggestive of our American poets, William Vaughn Moody, in his poem, *' Gloucester Moors,'' has thrown into high relief the problem that here concerns us. I quote only in part : This earth is not the steadfast place We landsmen budld upon; From deep to deep she varies pace, And while she comes is gone. Beneath my feet I feel Her smooth bulk heave and dip; With velvet plunge and soft upreel She swings and steadies to her keel Like a gallant, gallant ship. 68 THE WAR AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION These summer clouds she sets for sail, The sun is her masthead light, She tows the moon like a pinnace frail Where her phosphor wake churns bright Now hid, now looming clear, On the face of the dangerous blue The star fleets tack and wheel and veer, But on, but on does the old earth steer As if her port she knew. God, dear God! does she know her port, Though she goes so far about? Or blind astray, does she make her sport To brazen and chance it out? I watched when her captains passed: She 'Were better captainless. Men in the cabin, ^before the mast. But some were reckless and some aghast. And some sat gorged at mess. By her battened hatch I leaned and caught Sounds from the noisome hold, — Cursing and sighing of souls distraught ) And cries too sad to be told. Then I strove to go down and see; i But they said, "Thou art not of us!" I turned to those on the deck with me J And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be: Our ship sails faster thus." Scattering wide or blown in ranks, Yellow and white and brown. Boats and boats from the fishing banks, Come home to Gloucester town. There is cash to purse and spend. There are wives to be embraced. Hearts to borrow and hearts to lend And hearts to take and keep to the end, — O little sails, make haste! 69 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR But thou, vast outbound ship of souls, What harbor town for thee? What shapes, when thy arriving tolls. Shall crowd the banks to see? Shall all the happy shipmates then Stand singing brotherly? Or shall a haggard ruthless few Warp her over and bring her to, While the many .broken souls of men Fester down in the slaver's pen, And nothing to say or do? That is the issue of autocracy against democ- racy — whether a haggard, ruthless few shall for- ever dominate the broken souls of men, or at the end of the voyage all the happy shipmates stand, singing brotherly! 70 SERMON V THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER IN THE WAR They,that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. — Psalm cvii. 23-24. Though most of the warfare of the past four years has taken place on the land, not all of it has been waged there ; war upon and underneath the ocean, for the first time on so large a scale in history, has claimed hardly less universal atten- tion. After the shock that followed the sinking of the Lusitania, it was Germany's submarine campaign, with its successive acts of lawless bru- tality and utter disregard of solemn pledges, that finally wore out the patience of even President Wilson and brought about our declaration of war. The President said, a few days before Congress declared war: *^The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations.'' The submarine, backed by ithe most modern science and skill, has indeed proven a terrible weapon of destruction. Hundreds of staunch steamers and sailing ships, ranging in size from fishing smacks 71 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR of tlie North Sea to giant Atlantic liners, now lie at the bottom of the ocean with all their wealth of cargoes an utter loss. With them there have been sacrificed an unknown toll of human lives — some combatants, more non-combatants, including many innocent, peaceable travelers, men, women and little children. The German mania for destruc- tion has raged on the sea as on the land. Wherever her power has extended, Germany has done her utmost — and it is not to be despised as an effort, whatever we must think of its infernal spirit and purpose — to make a desert of the one and a grave- yard of the other. But startling and unprecedented as the work of the submarine has been, that is not the only manifestation of sea power of which we have been the astonished witnesses. The first year of the war, and indeed the first weeks and months, saw almost as complete a disappearance of the German merchant marine from the seven seas — where its flag had been so constantly in evidence — as if swept away by a mighty broom. That broom of course was the unparalleled navy of Britain, which for all these months has patrolled the North Sea and the Atlantic, and kept the formidable German navy, except for one brief unlucky dash, sealed up in the Kiel Canal and the Baltic. The French and Italian navies have helped, especially in the Mediterranean; and, in the last year, our own navy has rendered notable service in protecting commerce, transporting troops and destroying submarines. In the Pacific, Japan has quietly and effectively done her part. It is a war, for the first 72 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER time, in all the elements — the land, the sea, and the air. My purpose in this sermon is to indicate to you something of the influence on the course of the struggle of the factor known as sea power. This is an intricate and technical subject, on which I can claim no special competence. More- over, the naval history of the war will remain for some time to come the professional secret of those in control of operations. We know a small part of what has happened, we are far from knowing all. Still less can we conjecture what possible new developments are to be expected. At the same time, the question of sea power is of such out- standing importance and such obvious influence in a war on the present world-scale that it is im- possible, in a discussion of the vital issues of the war, entirely to ignore it. I shall ask you to con- sider it with me in relation, first, to the causes of the war, then to its conduct, and finally to its prob- able conclusion. The influence of sea power on warfare generally, from the earliest time of fighting triremes among the Greeks and Romans, down through the era of sailing ships and frigates, to the dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of today, was first given adequate consideration by the late Admiral A. T. Mahan of the United States Navy. In the year 1890, Captain Mahan, as he then was, published his epoch-making book on ''The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.'' This was followed in the last dozen years of the author's life by a series of weighty and important works applying and ex- tending the principles originally formulated. In 73 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britan- nica the reader who lacks time to digest these many fascinating volumes will find a clear outline of the subject in a few pages under the heading ^*'Sea Power/' It is a matter that no one who wishes to gain a true comprehension of the pres- ent and coming world situation should neglect. Particularly we in the United States, who for about a century have been curiously oblivious to its critical bearing on our own national future, need awakening on ithe problems and responsi- bilities of sea power. The main lines of Admiral Mahan's exposition are easy of comprehension, when once they are set before us. The three essential links in the sea power of the greater and of many of the lesser nations are these : First, every modern industrial people produces more goods of certain kinds than it can use, and finds it natural to dispose of the surplus by sending it across the great, open com- mon of the ocean to prospective customers in for- eign markets. Second, this implies a sea-borne commerce which in time of war may need, and usually will need, armed protection. Third, the more ambitious trading nations have found it con- venient and necessary to possess themselves of favorable ports of entry and coaling stations, where their ships of both war and peace may find facilities for the pursuit of their various errands. These, according to Mahan, are the controlling elements in sea power — production, commerce and colonies. In times of quiet, all legitimate traders enjoy the complete freedom of the seas, as did the 74 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER Germans with their immense ocean commerce, which grew by leaps and bounds down to their fatal plunge into war. Inevitably it is in war times that power to control the sea becomes of critical, and usually, as Admiral Mahan has shown, of de- cisive importance. Mastery on the ocean has been struggled for, in all the centuries of which history preserves any record, as earnestly as mastery on the land. Like- wise it has passed from one people to another; from the Spanish and Portuguese to the Dutch and French, and then definitively — since Nelson's vic- tory at Trafalgar, which blocked Napoleon's in- tended invasion of England a hundred years ago — to the British race. Britain long has been, and still is, by far the greatest trading and colonizing na- tion the world has ever known. Her situation on an island, or islands, has made seafaring the natural outlet for a large fraction of the native energy and enterprise of her people. They have been great as merchant-adventurers and peaceful colonizers, rather than as armed conquerors ; on the whole, war has been merely incidental and secondary to trade. Admitting some dark blots in their long and chequered career, the British have built much and destroyed little. They have stood for free- dom and justice, and a healthy give and take in human relations. They have, like every other great people, an instinct for domination, but it has been kept in the main remarkably under control. From the time of Elizabeth, when the defeat of the Spanish Armada secured the liberties of Eng- land, a powerful navy has been essential to their 75 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR national existence. Since Trafalgar, the pre- dominance of British sea power has never been seriously challenged nntil now. It is by no mere coincidence that, about the time when Admiral Mahan was defining the laws of naval supremacy, the present intelligent, ambitious and almost abnormally restless Kaiser, Wilhelm II, ascended the throne of Grermany. Following in the footsteps of his royal ancestors, — the new empire which Bismarck and "Wilhelm I had reared over the prostrate body of France being but twenty years old — he continued training and in- creasing the German army until it was by far the most powerful in the world. This, however, was not enough. Affected, undoubtedly, by the new perception of the importance of sea power, the young Kaiser overthrew the tradition of Bismarck, who had scouted the idea of colonies, and began to scheme for them. It is reasonable to believe that 'the writings of Admiral Mahan were directly influential in this change. Declaring that Ger- many's future lay on the ocean, the Kaiser inaug- urated the building of a navy second in power only to that of Britain, and threatening rapidly to over- take that. He also rushed to completion the Kiel Canal, connecting the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, through territory seized from Denmark in 1864. At about the same time, by a piece of clever diplomacy, Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister of England, was cajoled into exchanging the little rocky island of Heligoland, in the North Sea off the entrance to the proposed canal — of great stra- tegic value to Germany — ^for some comparatively 76 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER unimportant territory in Africa. Here, then, in this consistent and well-conceived policy of the rulers of the German Empire, we may see a spe- cific antecedent to the present conflict. Britain, Japan, and ourselves, at any rate, among the nations engaged, would have been in- definitely less likely to have been drawn into the struggle if the control of sea power, with its three essential links of production, commerce, and col- onies, had not been directly involved. With the naval factor left out, the attack of G-ermany and Austria upon Russia and France in 1914 might have been a great war ; it would hardly, or at least not necessarily, have become a world-war. Plac- ing the naval factor in the foreground, we may even come to think of the war as primarily not one of land conquest, but of struggle for command of the sea. So Professor Albert Bushnell Hart describes it in his careful treatise on '^The Mon- roe Doctrine.'' ^^The main object -of the war of 1914 between Germany and the western Allies," says Professor Hart, writing toward the end of 1915, '4s to test their sea power and to dispute their possession of colonies." This comes as near to locating the taprroot of the conflict as anything that has come under my observation. For the British Empire, in posses-sion of one-quarter of the land surface of the globe, to maintain the pre- dominance of its fighting fleet is simply a question of life or death. In the last decade before the war, the mad race of naval armaments, led by Germany, had begnin to strain even the huge fabric of British finance. Successive British governments had ad- 11 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR vanced proposals for a naval holiday, but to no avail. Germany replied bluntly that her building program was conceived, and would be carried out, solely in her own national interest and without re- gard to any other power. So the weary British Titan had to struggle forward with his almost in- tolerable burden. The origins of the war date back to the conception and creation of the new German navy. Without that there might have been a war, but it would not have been this war. So much for the influence of sea power in caus- ing the war. In its conduct we have had a succes- sion of surprises. One has been the demonstrated and overpowering superiority, up to now, c£ Brit- ish over German naval strength. Events may be in store, as a part of the last desperate German offensive, of which we can have little prevision. The fleet in the Kiel Canal may be ordered out, and may show itself as overwhelming in strength as has the German armament on land. It is safe to assume that nothing has been left undone that could be done in this direction. But one large dis- count must be made. The Germans are not native to the sea, as are the British and even ourselves — though with us the habit had become almost atrophied. Night and day, through heat and cold, for four long years, some part of the British grand fleet has patrolled the foggy northern seas, and been every moment ready. The Germans, how- ever they may have exercised their crews in theory and in lesser manoeuvers, have been completely land-locked. If they come out, it will be to almost certain, disastrous defeat. The honor of their flag 78 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER is sadly tarnished by the wilful slaughter of de- fenceless merchantmen and fishermen. This is something worse than any possible defeat. They have made a few ineffectual raids on unfortified English coast towns. Their main strength has gone to their submarine campaign. I do not intend to waste any violent language in denunciation of that. It has been dealt with by President Wilson and many others as it deserves. Nothing more remains fto be said. As naval strategy, directed against the fighting ships of the enemy or to protect the home coasts from in- vasion, submarine warfare has come, in these ter- rible days of steel and high explosives, to have its legitimate place. It is not the submarine, but the barbarous use made of it, that is open to criticism. So far as we know, Germany has made practically no regular use of this weapon. Her object has been to destroy the commerce and starve the peo- ple and hinder the military effectiveness of the British Isles. In pursuit of this aim — not wholly outlawed by the rules of war, so long as Britain was equally determined to starve her people and hinder their military effectiveness by a rigid blockade — still, Germany has acted with a ruth- lessness and inhumanity and a brutal disdain for neutral rights unparalleled in history. Her frightfulness on sea has been of a piece with her atrocities on land. It helps us somewhat to be- lieve in a God of righteous vengeance — what the Greeks called Nemesis — ^^that this iniquitous black- guardism under the seas is proving progressively to have failed. The word of the hour from the 79 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR masters of the ocean is that the submarine is be- ing slowly but surely conquered. Praise Him from whom all blessings flow ! I promised to speak, thirdly, of the probable conclusion of the struggle for sea power. That is the largest part of the subject, and the time at my command is growing short. Let me suggest, as I must on all these momentous topics, what I am unable to complete. The warfare on the sea and on the land is one, not two. That is perhaps the most basic general conclusion to be drawn from the principles worked out by Admiral Mahan. We are not fighting two wars, but only one, and so long as the sea is secure for us and for our asso- ciates, so long as the United States can transport reinforcements and supplies across the Atlantic, the land struggle cannot end favorably for our enemies. They may gain yet more devastated ground in France and Flanders. They may con- ceivably, though not now probably, push on by further human sacrifices to Paris and the channel ports. But two things they must accomplish be- yond that to win a German peace — ^that agreement with death and covenant with hell of which their Kaiser still boasts in the name of his German God. They must destroy the armies on the western front and — a very large contract indeed — they must gain supremacy over the open sea. So long as the control of the sea remains with us, neither of these aims can be accomplished. Admiral Jellicoe lately advised an English audience, in studying the progress of events, to use a large map. The larger the map we lise, the 80 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER more encouraging is the outlook that we gain for the democratic peoples. On the scale of the world, Germany has already been defeated everywhere except on the Russian and the western fronts. The inaction of her main fleet is in itself an admission of defeat, all the more impressive because passive and silent. There is no reason for believing that Russia will remain always pliant under the iron heel of enforced military control. The signs of restlessness and growing revolt are patent. Dis- content in Austria is reaching the danger point. The lines on the western front are holding firm. The latest and most formidable of the German at- tacks was thrown back with terrific slaughter. Others will come, but they will be met. The sub- marine is effectively checked, if not yet entirely under control. The recent British exploit, of sink- ing cruisers loaded with concrete across the mouth of Zeebrugge Canal to prevent the exit and en- trance of submarines, was a feat worthy of the best naval traditions. Two aspects of the situa- tion remain to be discussed with reference to their bearing on the future peace and security of the world. One of these is the question of the disposition to be made of the German colonies. These lands, of great extent, but not of great immediate value, form together an area many times the size of Germany itself. If she had 'been able to secure what her military leaders have been calling a ^^ strong' 'peace, based on the triumph of German arms, a proposal would have been made for an exchange of the occupied territory in Belgium, 81 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR northern France and elsewhere, to secure the re- turn of these colonies, and douhtless further addi- tions to her over-seas possessions. It is inconceiv- able that the Allied victory, when it comes, can lead to any such outcome. German colonial enter- prise is apparently doomed, at least for the pres- ent generation. One possibility is that the chief among the victors, England, France and Italy, may divide up among themselves the colonies that formerly were under Grerman rule. Even this would be a gain. The Germans have been poor colonizers, not well adapted to the delicate task of governing subject peoples. Somehow the kind of rigid military discipline that prevails in Pots- dam does not succeed among the negroes of Africa. They do not obey orders quickly enough, and the only resource left to the Prussian mind is to shoot them down. But if the counsels of the United States, which has no selfish national interest to serve, shall prevail, as they well may, the former German colonies will probably be international- ized ; that is, placed under some form of general control, to secure their normal development on lines of progressive democratization. A policy may then be applied to them somewhat akin to ours in the Philippines. We are holding the islands, but only for the benefit of the Filipino people. That policy, if adopted, cannot fail of an ultimate strong reaction on the British policy in Egypt and India and on the French policy in Algeria and Morocco. It affords the best promise of making the world, in this aspect of it, safe for democracy. 82 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER The other question is that of the future freedom of the seas, which includes the nature of their naval control. The seas are not going to be made free by sweeping all power from their surface. In some way, this also should be internationalized, though the problem is anything but easy. One condition of the coming peace should be the entire and unconditioned surrender of the German navy to the Allied powers; coupled with an absolute prohibition of further naval construction by Ger- many for a term of years, to be carefully fixed. That dangerous threat to the world's peace needs urgently to be disposed of at least for this genera- tion. The Kiel Canal 'and Heligoland should be ceded to Denmark. These drastic suggestions are, of course, open to criticism as involving an in- vasion of Germany's sovereignty. But she is a convicted criminal, at the bar of the world's jus- tice. She wanted this frightful war; she is hav- ing it. The outcome should be such as to remove from her any similar temptation for a long time to come. Drawing her teeth in a military sense appeals to me, at least, as far more just to the rank and file of her people than the economic boy- cott, now so widely favored. What conditions can be allowed to German over-seas commerce after the war must depend on. the spirit in which the German people accept peace. Their trade should not, in jay opinion, be selfishly boycotted after the immature and unwise plan of the Paris economic conference, but so regulated as to secure for the rest of the world the products in which Germany is foremost, for the restoring of her inner economic 83 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR life by gradual degrees, and also to ensure fair and honorable competition in place of the govern- ment-controlled and centralized operations wliicb prevailed before the war. This is a thorny field for controversy, on which there musit be inevitably much debate around the peace-table and after- ward. But it will be debate by a war-chastened and sobered world, in which we may hope that essential justice will prevail. The control of sea power by the allied nations and ourselves will be complete, barring accident; which means that ithe future of the world will rest in our hands. However, this in itself cannot ab- solve us from grave difficulties growing out of the clashing of national and commercial interests. These always, in the nature of the case, tend to grow beyond the bounds of possible fulfillment. Everything depends on the spirit in which the re- sulting situation is met. Here again the sane and disinterested counsels of the United States should have great weight. We shall come out of the war with a navy of tremendous power and effective- ness. If we slash about carelessly with it, our future as a nation making for the peace of the world will be gravely imperilled. If we use it with wisdom and caution, it may be made the best bulwark of lasting peace. Britain and ourselves could easily hold control of the seas. But France, Italy, Japan, ultimately Russia, and one or more of the South American states, like Brazil and Argentina, will have to be considered. It is useless to hide from ourselves the evident fact that in this vast naval prepared- 84 THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER ness there lurk unknown possibilities of future conflict. If the spirit of an aggressive imperial- ism should come to dominate in any of these pow- ers, the peril would be imminent. The obstacles in the way of constituting a permanent and suc- cessful league of nations are very serious. But they must be met by the best and wisest states- manship the world can summon. The problems involved are to form the substance of the two fol- lowing sermons, with which this series will con- clude. Mr. Alfred Noyes, in his poem, ^'The Search- lights,^^ has voiced a warning that we, in common with the other warring peoples, will do well to heed. Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight, The lean black cruisers search the sea. Night-long their level shafts of light Revolve, and find no enemy. Only they know each leaping wave May hide the lightning, and their grave. And in the land they guard so well Is there no silent watch to keep? An age is dying, and the bell Rings midnight on a vaster deep. But over all its waves, once more. The search-lights move, from shore to shore. And captains that we thought were dead. And dreamers that we thought were dumb, And voices that we thought were fled. Arise and call us, and we come; And "search in thine own soul," they cry; "For there, too, lurks thine enemy." Search for the foe in thine own soul, The sloth, the intellectual pride; The trivial jest that veils the goal For which our fathers lived and died; The lawless dreams, the cynic Art, That rend thy nobler self apart. 85 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Not far, not far into the night, These level swords of light can pierce; Yet for her faith does England fight, Her faith in this our universe; Believing Truth and Justice draw From founts of everlasting law; Therefore a Power above the State, The unconquerable Power returns. The fire, the fire that made her great Once more upon her altar burns. Once more, redeemed and healed and whole, She moves to the Eternal Goal. * This striking poem is only one further illustra- tion of the great fact that everything material has its possible spiritual application, which the intui- tion of the poet finds. We of America no less than they of England need to take these words to heart. We have forever passed out of our provincialism. We are no longer safe in our former isolation. Our ship of state is launched and sailing on the broad seas of the world. We are io be searched by the same temptations and opportunities which have tried all earlier peoples, before which many have fallen and few have stood firm. It behooves us, in the days of grave testing that are before us, to look more 'than ever within and above for spir- itual strength. * From ''The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems," by Alfred Noyes, used by permission of the owners of the copyright, The Frederick A . Stokes Company, New York. 86 SERMON VI MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with the lifting up of their hands. — Nehemiah viii. 6. What all the people assent to, with the lifting up of their hands, and the repeated Amen, Amen, which means "^o be if — as the returned exiles of Judea assented to the laws of Moses read to them by the scribe Ezra — ^that is what we mean, in the sphere of government, by democracy. It is the rule, not by one, or by a few, but at least in theory and intention by all the people. In the course of our own national history, as the earliest and greatest of modern democracies, it has been given various typical definitions. Thus, by the Declaration of Independence, it is defined as gov- ernment wihich derives its just powders from the consent of the governed ; by Lincoln, in his Gettys- burg address, as government of the people, by the people, and for the people; by President Wilson and others, with special reference to the issues developed in the present world-conflict, as the self-determination of nationalities. The idea of democracy — ^whatever inherent difficulties may 87 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR have to be overcome in reducing it to practice — is the idea that any group of human beings, larger or smaller, possessing enough unity and cohesion to exist as a separate nationality, should be al- lowed and encouraged to conduct its affairs, shape its institutions, and elect its rulers by means of the duly ascertained and lawfully expressed will of the entire body of its citizens. This is the demo- cratic idea, which was projected into the very forefront of the present struggle by the President, in his epochal message to Congress, on April 2, 1917, when he urged the necessity of wax with Germany. He then uttered the famous sentence, that has been echoed since to the very ends of the earth, and has stirred mightily the waiting hearts of the oppressed and misgoverned of many races, **The world must be made safe for democracy.'' The declared and deliberate purpose of the United States, in embarking on the tragic but glorious adventure of war on the other side of the Atlantic, is to secure nothing short of that far- reaching consummation. We have set aside our tradition of isolation, and non-interference in the concerns of Europe, wholly for this — to make the world safe for democracy. Only after patient waiting — many of our people thought it too patient and long-enduring — for nearly three years, or until the sinister masters of Germany had fully unfolded their covert conspiracy against our- selves, as well as against all the other free and democratic peoples, did this nation throw its mighty weight into the scale on the side opposed to the menace of war-mad autocracy. It is well 88 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY to bring again to mind the words in which Presi- dent Wilson convincingly stated the issue : "We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose be- cause we know that in such a government, following such methods, we can never have a ifriend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security lor the democratic governments of the world. We are now albout to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pre- tensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about the^m, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the libera- tion of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for our- selves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have ibeen made as secure as the faith and the free- dom of nations can make them." The war, then, means to us the acceptance of a challenge, whidh at last we became convinced we could not, and ought not to, decline. By instinct and organization this great democracy of ours, like every other worthy of the name, is unaggres- sive. Its mind is habitually concentrated on its own affairs. It turns to outside matters reluct- antly and only when these seem to threaten its inner well-being. By instinct and organization, on the other hand, autocracy is aggressive. It reg- ulates its internal affairs primarily with a view to bringing its united power into the service of a wider external dominion. The very existence of 89 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR democratic goverinnents is felt by autocratic powers to be a menace to their, continuance. Un- less such governments can be weakened or over- thrown, they fear for their own safety. Likewise, democracy feels the permanent threat of any powerful and aggressive autocracy. Between the two, though peace may be kept for a time, there is in fact, just as between slavery and freedom in our own national history, an irrepressible conflict. The world cannot permanently endure half- autocratic and half-dem'ocratic. Some day, one part of it must battle with the other for the most elementary self-defense and self-perpetuation. This is the bare grain of truth that is contained in Germany ^s otherwise hypocritical contention that she is waging a war of self-defense. From the viewpoint of entrenched autocracy, the attack of the growing democracy was implicit and in- direct, but none the less actual. Autocracy could only be safe when it could feel itself to be supreme. This was the aim, now clearly disclosed, of Ger- many's half-century of fevered military prepared- ness on land and sea. Her rulers suspected and dreaded every advance of the democratic princi- ple, as an onslaught on their exclusive prerogative. That principle was fast making headway among the peoples of Europe; even, as we now know, beneath the surface in Russia. Against it, im- perial Germany stood at bay, much as our slave autocracy of the South stood at bay against every extension of the principle of free manhood, for example in the disputed territories of Kansas and Nebraska. 90 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY Au'tocracy deliberately provoked the war, be- cause it tbought it saw its chance to win and to make the world safe for itself. Some time was required to bring the issue out, with absolute clarity. We of the United States needed to be sure that what was involved was something more than a mere readjustment of the balance of power in Europe, something m'ore than a mere dispute over colonial expansion. It had to be made plain to us that what was involved was, in the last analy- sis, the right to existence, the world over, of gov- ernment of, by and for the people, against the in- trigues and plottings of a power that claimed pre- eminence by divine and hereditary right. Then, when we really learned the truth, nothing was left for us to do but to take our stand with the other free and democratic peoples and highly resolve, under God, that the German and all kindred au- tocracy, as it had hitherto existed, should be made to perish from the earth. This must be done, if the world is to be made safe for democracy. The approaching military defeat of Germany, it ought to be well understood by us, though a very essential step in the fulfilment of our purpose, is still only the first step. It will then remain to secure a peace-settlement in accordance with our national ideals ; and, having made the world safe for democracy, to do all in our power to keep it so. Here a tangled web of problems rises before us, to which it is surely not too soon to give at least pre- liminary consideration. One set of these prob- lems is involved in the question of what we our- selves mean by democracy, and another is the fur- 91 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR ther question, liow we propose to apply it to the world when peace has been finally declared. What, then, do we mean by democracy, and how far do we, or in the nature of the case can we, suc- ceed in realizing among ourselves the principle that we propose to extend to the rest of mankind! We are soon to be confronted by the most search- ing test that could possibly be applied to the in- stitutions of government in which we believe. Have they, in reality, all the virtue that we pro- fess them to have? Are they of such perfection, in actual concrete application, that we may have confidence in offering them, as the noblest possible gift, to the rest of humanity! ^^By their fruits ye shall know them,'' was the test proposed by Jesus. We are seeing some of the fruits of autoc- racy. Are those of democracy infallibly of such a kind that we can ask the rest of the world to fol- low our example rather than Germany's! The time is rapidly drawing near for us of the United States to engage in a more painstaking and serious self- scrutiny than we have ever yet given to our life and ways. It has been our habit to be somewhat over-confident. But the older world is not going to take us at our own valuation. We must ^^make good" in an emergency as severe as any to which any nation has ever been submitted. We need to take account of stock, and to look warily before we leap. I propose to engage with you in a period of self-exajmination — ^not in a spirit of flattery, but in one of the unflattering truth. When we have said that democracy means the rule of all the people, while that is formally ac- 92 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY curate as a definition, it carries us a very short distance toward knowing what our form of gov- ernment is in its actual working. We assume that we are a democracy because we pretend to be one, but the truth is that the United States is not, and never has been, a pure democracy at all, but a federal republic, which is something altogether different. The only pure democracy we have ever had in this country was in the old New England town meeting, where all the legal voters got to- gether at least once a year and carried on the business of the town. Such a system becomes obviously impossi'ble in communities i)f more than a few hundred inhabitants, much more in cities of half a million, in states of ten million or in a nation of a hundred million people. Let us open our minds to the facts, and not permit ourselves to be misled by phrases. Undoubtedly we of the United States have much of the dem- ocratic spirit — more of it than any other people, unless it be the French, — but our system is one of representative government, based on general manhood suffrage, with a growing tendency to extend the ballot to women. The crucial question here is whether our gov- ernment is truly and adequately representative, or only seemingly so. Are we, as a rule, repre- sented in our city affairs, or in our state legis- latures, or in Congress, or in the higher executive offices of the state and nation, by the men who are best fitted to direct our affairs? It has long been notorious, with honorable exceptions, that we are not. When we compare the rank and file of our 93 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR leaders in business and in the professions with the rank and file of our politicians we see the startling diiference. What if the great state of New York could be managed for a single year as the Stan- dard Oil Company or the American Red Cross is managed? We have just seen New York City, one -of the largest and most important public service corporations in the worid, turn out a mayor who, if little of a politician, was a most alble and skilful administrator of the people's trust, on modern and progressive lines, and put in his place a municipal judge, who may be personally honest and well- intentioned, but who is steadily lowering every de- partment of the municipal administration to its former level. We can call that neither democracy nor efficiency, but plain imbecility ! What can we say of the representation in Congress of even our great and powerful communities, like this manu- facturing and commercial city of half a million inhabitants ? Simply that the most representative men of such communities are practically never sent to Congress, and that for the most part our actual representatives are nonentities, of whom no one ever hears except at election time, or cares what he hears even then. American public life is a veritable paradise of more or less pretentious mediocrity. No man who can make a decent living at anything else will ordinarily soil his hands with it. This is admitted, except in war time, when we cover it with a thick coat of whitewash. Even the presidency, which is the office of the greatest potential influence in the entire world, has been more often occupied in our history by men of 94 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY mediocre, than by men of distinguished ability. It is part of the extraordinary good fortune which has hitherto followed this nation that in times of real crisis, like the present, we have had Presi- dents, who were at least able to rise to the occa- sion. President Wilson has a cabinet of men who seem to be a:ble to learn, though slowly, by exper- ience. But how many great national leaders are there in the House or Senate? Precious few, so far as the country is aware.* While we are undertaking to make the world safe for democracy, it behooves us to do some- thing, as Governor McCall of Massachusetts has expressed it, to make democracy safe for the wor'ld. With us democracy is still an experiment, and by no means altogether an encouraging one. Just now, in the strain of war, we are on our good behavior. The government is able to command the volunteer services of the best type of men among us, men who in ordinary times are entirely ab- sorbed in their private business. To make my meaning clear, I need only ask you to compare the calibre of the men w'ho directed the last campaign for the Liberty Loan in this city to a successful conclusion with that of the men to whom we usu- ally entrust our city and county business. What is the explanation? It is partly that we are in the grip of the anachronism of the party system. We vote men into state or municipal office not because they have been trained or have shown any pre- *On these (points, the reader may consult with profit Bryce's "American Commonwealth," especially the chapters on "Why Great Men are not Chosen Presidents," "Why the Best Men do not go into Politics" and "The True Faults of American Democracy." 95 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR vious fitness for the duties they are to be called upon to perform, Tbut because they belong to the party with which we agree in national issues. I grant you that parties are an essential feature of every working democracy. But we carry the par- tisan spirit into the minor spheres of government, where it is absolutely inapplicable. Nobody bene- fits by such a misapplication of it but the bosses and henchmen of the party machine. What has a man's opinion on the tariff to do with his fitness to be mayor of a city or governor of a state! Ab- solutely nothing; there is no possible connection between them. And yet most of our city and state officials are elected for their opinions on some such remote and unconnected questions. That is one ground of weakness in our working of the democratic experiment. Another, closely allied to it, is the lack of discrimination and fickle- ness on the part of our voters. Why is it that so few Americans of proved ability and self-respect will even present themselves as candidates for pub- lic office? Mainly because the average voter dis- trusts competence and expert ability, and prefers to elect some good fellow albout on his own level of intelligence and public spirit. Then if by chance a superior man is put into office, he can have no as- surance that his constituency will keep him there at the next election. Except for the professional politicians, public office with us is more often an interruption of a successful career than such a career in itself. How many of our abler men drop out of it after a time, even if the voters continue to sustain them, in order to secure for themselves and their families the more stable rewards of some 96 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY private profession or business! I do not mean to affirm that we have no good men in public life, but that we have far too few of them and very much too many mediocre men. A comparison of the average in private, gainful occupations with that in the city, state and national service in normal times is not encouraging as a recommendation of our democratic system to imitation of the w^orld at large. As a people, we lack a genuine respect for the superior man. It is at least the merit of an autocracy that it does not subject him to the leveling envy of the average American voter. The Germans believe in and value the expert, and we see the result in their extraordinary advance in every department of human endeavor. . Another of our superstitions is that the only man fit to be elected to office is one who is already a resident in the community or district which he is called upon to serve. Does it follow that the man in America best fitted for the responsibilities of the head of a city government is necessarily some one already living within the limits of that city! The question answers itself. If a business house wants a manager it searches for the man best fitted for it from anywhere it can find him in the whole country. William Ewart Gladstone was enabled to continue for a lifetime to honor and exalt by his marvelous personality the Parliament of Great Britain only because he could be chosen to a seat from any part of the kingdom. Two or three times, when he was rejected by his own constit- uency, by a wise provision of the British constitu- tion he was elected from some other constituency 97 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR in England or Scotland. One reason among others why we have had so few men of like em- inence in either house of Congress is becanse of the rule, utterly irrational, requiring previous residence of our Senators and Representatives in their electoral districts. A German custom which we may never choose to imitate, but which has some decided advantages, is the custom of weighing their votes, as well as counting them. Not only population, as with us, but property counts with them in deciding elec- tions. I know it is not a popular or democratic thing to say, nevertheless it is true more generally than is yet admitted in America, that property on the whole represents competence. The people who earn and save are apt to be the competent people. Those who get ahead are on the whole the ablest. The men of financial standing in any community are, in the main, its natural leaders. Of course it is not strictly true that money is equivalent to brains, but in our modern industrial and commer- cial society it is at least roughly so. One does not care to assert that the Prussian franchise, which is based on a property classification, is superior to ours; and, even if it were, there are other parts of the system that more than counterbalance. Germany is not a representative government at all. The Reichstag, which is elected by popular suffrage, has extremely limited powers. The real rulers are the hereditary princes of the several states, with the Kaiser-King of Prussia towering high above them all, responsible to no earthly power but himself. 98 1 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY Our votes are counted, not weighed. Because of our too g-enerous trust in human naiure, we place the power in control of mere numbers. That is equivalent to putting a premium on unin- telligence. It hands over the ultimate decision to the unleavened masses. The vote of the recent immigrant, or of the uneducated and usually un- thinking day-laborer, counts for as much as that of the most competent and thoughtful. As a faith this is magnificent, and when at length we get the people educated it will work ; but as a method for securing the best results from our present hetero- geneous population it is scarcely practical. I cer- tainly do not advocate a franchise based on prop- erty. But I do believe we should seek to develop a method by which the intelligent voter can hold his own against the mass of the unintelligent. Bow does our system work? We can perceive it most clearly in our city elections. The better third of the voters, those who have intelligence, public spirit and a desire for progress, are steadily out- voted by the other two-thirds. We make it in the interest of our public leaders to cater to the un- enlightened majority. The result is only too fa- miliar and depressing. We get good government, when we get it, by sheer luck. What is the moral of all that I have been saying about the seamy side of our democracy? Not, surely, that we are to abandon it and make our- selves over into a Grerman autocracy ! But that we are operating under what is, in many respects, an outgrown and antiquated system, well enough suit- ed to the nation in an earlier and more homo- 99 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR geneons stage of its existence, but requiring a vig- orous overhauling in very many of its parts and processes, and a radical re-adaptation to the more complex conditions toward which we are swiftly evolving. The truth is, we Americans are masters in the realm of material mechanism. Our auto- mobiles, of the pattern of 1918, leave little to be desired. The same will doubtless be true of our airplanes, when we finally get them. But our system of government, of the model of 1783, is already far behind the needs of the times, and by force of a stagnant tradition — which we mistaken- ly suppose to stand for the only true Americanism — constantly tends to become more so. We are in desperate need of beginning to do some really fundamental thinking on the subject of our own democratic institutions. We are splendidly equipped with a genuinely democratic spirit, and in a time like the present that is able to go very far toward making up for the grave defects in the way that our public business is organized. But we cannot preserve this priceless spirit, as we need to do when the passing emergency is over, with- out remoulding our institutions to fit it. The worst defect of American, as of most other, democracy thus far is that it does not pick out and encourage and loyally sustain its true leaders. They lead as yet in private affairs, not in jDublic. Our private business organization and manage- ment is the best in the world. Our public business, if not the worst, is at least the worst among any people of our grade of general intelligence. All the people consent, indeed, but they say Amen for 100 A WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY the most part to a kind of city, state and national government that falls far helow what they deserve, and onght to have. Now that we are proposing to give American democracy to the world, there can be no more urgent task before us as a great na- tion than to make it worthy of our undying faith in the democratic idea ! There is one thing that can be said of autocracy without fear of contradiction and that is that in many respects it is extremely efficient. This is where it most seriously reflects on democracy. Nor does it necessarily follow that autocracy gov- erns without the free consent of the governed. Most Americans dislike and disapprove of the German methods. But that is far from being the attitude of the Germans themselves. They dis- like and disapprove of our methods ! And the reason is not far to seek. For the German gov- ernment, while it is oppressive and tyrannical in some respects — a government of strict authority from above and not of free initiative from below — still exercises, except in time of war, a care over the common man and his family, his environment, his health, and his future in old age of which the democratic peoples are hardly yet at the begin- nings. In Germany, the science and art of gov- ernment ranks as one of the learned and honored professions. Men begin their preparation for it at the university, assured that it will afford them a profitable and satisfying career for a lifetime. While Germany has a party system, even more complex and disrupting than ours, this has little or no influence on the choice of the great majority 101 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR of executive and administrative officials. These men are chosen for their competence, as shown hy examinations^, or by their record in some sub- ordinate post of service, rather than for their par- tisan opinions, which usually have no connection with the function they are to discharge in the body politic. Any fair comparison of German with American city administration leaves us so far be- hind that there is little room for national pride on this score. Of course, I am not advocating that German methods — even where they are of superior excel- lence — shall 'be suibstituted for our own. But it is urgent for us to realize that a condition, not a theory, confronts us. We cannot make the world safe for that spirit in peoples and in governments which we desire to prevail, by solemnly chanting in chorus that blessed word Democracy. Unless de- mocracy can meet autocracy, armed and equipped at every point, and in a fair field prevail, there is no hope for its future. The critical test of American democracy will not be in helping to win the war; but afterwards, in the world in whose gradual reconstruction, on lines of nationality and the self-determination of peoples, this nation is to be inevitably one of the most potent factors. Let us, then, ag never before, bethink ourselves as to what we say Amen to — both within our own wide borders and in that wider world which it is our declared purpose to make henceforth safe for the genuine and unfettered rule of, by and for the people. 102 SERMON VII AMERICA'S LEADERSHIP INTHE WORLD OF TOMORROW Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. — Matthew xxii, 39. I bring to a close today the consideration of tlie Vital Issues of the War, which has occupied us on the last six Sunday mornings. Let me begin this final sermon of the series with an expression of my appreciation of the generous tolerance and open-mindedness with which you have listened to my discussion of these current issues. It has been a time of great tension of mind and deep anxiety of heart. When the series opened, on April 7, the formidable Grerman offensive, launched on March 21, was at its most dangerous stage. We have had the unspeakable relief of seeing it gradually checked and then firmly held. Meanwhile, we well understand that behind the German lines another mighty effort is being made ready. We must meet this further crisis, perhaps very soon, in any case before the summer is over. But the delay, for- tunately, has given time for the sending across the ocean of large bodies of American troops, who are now taking their places in the battle-line, as fast 103 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR as their training will permit, beside their British, French, Belgian, Portuguese and Italian com- rades. Every week that passes finds ns and our associates stronger over there on the western front. This means that some who are dear to some of ns are exposed to imminent danger. Bnt we of America cannot fail to rise to the situation, as the people of all the Allied nations have so nobly risen to it. When, or if, the ultimate sacrifice of our dearest and our best is required of us in turn, we can only make it as the utmost of which we are capable for the great cause of securing freedom for the world of the future. It means much, I think, that in a time of such exceptional strain and stress you have been willing to listen to a free and frank discussion of some of the problems involved. I cannot assume that all of you have agreed with all that has here been said. The views which I have ventured to express are certainly not infallibly correct in every detail, nor have they been altogether consistent probably one with another. I have spoken, as in a place like this one ought to speak, according to my best knowledge and belief from week to week. The main thing, as I see it, is that these issues should be discussed — not only on the platform and by the press, but in the pulpit. Not all the pulpits of our land have discussed them as frankly as they have been handled here. It means everything, to me, that they should be brought to the test of those high sanctities and those eternal verities of which the church is the organized expression in human society. 104 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP We have liad samples set before us of the pulpit utterances of German preachers on the war, as in the astounding volume, ^^ Hurrah and Hallelujah, '' compiled by Professor J. P. Bang of Copenhagen. One can only hope that such selections stand for the worst, and not for the best, that the church in Germany has found to say in these times of her spiritual blindness and devotion to the idols of material might. I trust that the sermons to which you have listened may at least have shone in your minds by contrast with the unspeakable pagan bar- barities that are reported from the pulpits of Ger- many. I have tried to be true to the spirit of this place, at a time when it has been especially hard for even the least pugnacious among us to heed the injunction to love our neighbor as ourself . The events of the past two months must have made clear to us, if we had not seen it before^ how critically, and we may even say how provi- dentially, important — especially for sustaining the spirit of invaded, glorious France — was the en- trance of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917. At that time there was still no definite sign of the utter military collapse of Russia, which occurred later in the year. There has been much, and some of it justified, criticism of the delay in bringing our inexhaustible force into action. But the fact is, nevertheless, that the American people have responded with magnificent energy and unanimity. Food and fuel have been conserved and sent across the sea; ships are being launched and equipped in ever-increasing numbers. Our program of airplane construction, of whose vast- 105 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR ness and intricate complexity few among ns have had any proper realization, is at last well under way. The help given by the American navy, in con- voying troops and supplies and in clearing the ocean of submarines, has been of a value hard to exaggerate. Now it appears that the vanguard of our army, not inferior in quality to any the world has yet seen, has reached the front in the very nick of time, and is being brigaded with the French and the British and thus made available in the best possible way. These are great results even for the United States to have achieved in the first year since we entered the war, and we may be confident that they are only a foretaste of indefinitely greater yet to come. When the war began and Belgium was invaded, it was all so new and unexpected to us that at first we were unable, any of us, to grasp its significance and to see how it might ultimately affect ourselves. The attitude of neutrality, counselled by the Presi- dent at the outset, as a matter of form — a counsel that any one of his predecessors would have given under similar circumstances — could not last long in fact. The first attacks by German submarines on American and other neutral ships began to open our eyes and to make the issue clear. When the Lusitania was torpedoed, some of us had no longer any doubt of the character of the nation that was running amuck among the peaceable peoples of the world. Still we had among us a great number of citizens of foreign, especially of German, origins and our national sympathies began to be deeply divided. A long-enduring distrust of Great 106 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP Britain, bred in ns by the way in whicli our schoor histories have treated the War of the Revolution and the War of 1812, was still a potent influence, not to mention the Irish hatred of the English. But above all we were held back from the definite thought of participating in the war in Europe by Washington's historic advice to avoid entangling alliances, and by the influence of the Monroe Doc- trine, confining our interests to this western con- tinent. It is extremely easy now, looking back on the events of the past four years, to say that we should have acted otherwise than we did. But, as time goes on, and we come to see all that is in- volved, I believe we shall be more and more pro- foundly thankful for the leadership we have had. Few among us can have begun as yet to realize the vast and far-reaching significance for the future organization of the world, of our departure from our former traditions, and also the transcendent greatness of the statesmanship on the part of President Wilson that has made this departure possible in the united way in which it has been taken. It will be my purpose, in this closing ser- mon, to give these facts their appropriate setting. It was natural that there should have been im- patience with the President's long months of note- writing to the Imperial German Government, which seemed to be getting us nowhere. But, dur- ing all that period. President Wilson was perform- ing two simply invaluable services. At one and the same time, he was educating the alien and re- luctant element among our own people as to the issues that .were involved, taking them step by step 107 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR along the way that his cautious but far-seeing mind was traveling just ahead of them; and with masterly skill he was building up the entire case against Germany, so solidly grounded in fact and so logically impregnable, that there can be no doubt that the verdict of history will justify our contention. After his series of notes had been writ- ten and followed up with the address to Congress, urging our declaration of war, there was nothing left to be said in Germany's defense. If Mr. Wil- son had been defeated for re-election, in the fall of 1916, before his policy was fully matured, he might have been thought by posterity to have been a failure ; just as Lincoln would have been looked upon as a relative failure if he had been defeated at the end of his first term, with the Rebellion still unsuppressed. When, finally, the case was com- plete, when Germany, violating her solemn pledges, resumed her unrestricted submarine cam- paign, the President disappointed his detractors — the honesty and patriotism of many of whom no one can question — ^by first breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany and then calling upon Congress to declare war. It is worth while quoting in this connection what Elihu Root, probably the ablest and weightiest of the President's partisan critics before he took his final stand, said of him after that stand was taken. Speaking at a war mass meeting in Chicago last September, Mr. Root said, having special refer- ence to the power vested in Congress by the Con- stitution to make war: 108 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP "The power in this instance was exercised not suddenly or rashly, but advisedly after a long delay and discussion and patience under provocation, after repeated diplomatic warnings to Germany known to the whole country, after clear notice by breach of diplo,matic relations with Germany that the question was imminent, after long opportunity for reflection and discussion following that notice, and after a formal and deliberate presentation by the President to Congress of the reasons for action in an address which com- pelled the attention not of Congress alone but of all Ameri- cans and of all the world, and which must forever stand as one of the great state papers of modern times." In that same volume of Mr. Root's political ad- dresses, is one delivered during the campaign of Judge Hughes against Mr. Wilson for the Presi- dency, in which the speaker severely criticized the President's dilatoriness. It is part of the large- mindedness of a real statesman that Mr. Root was willing afterward to make this generous acknowl- edgment that I have quoted. When we recall the indecent haste of Austria's ultimatum to 'Serbia, allowing that poor little coun- try but forty-eight hours to reply to demands that came near to robbing her of her sovereignty ; when we recall the contempt for the sober judgment of mankind involved in Germany's sudden mobiliza- tion and despatching of her troops into Belgium and Luxemburg — there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the methods of autoc- racy and those of democracy in entering the war. The one showed itself to be secret, violent, giving the people no chance to express their deliberate will; the other, considerate, patient, waiting for the nation to form its mature and reasoned judg- ment on the issue and to approve the only course that remained open to us. What we lost by that 109 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR policy in material advantage we have been given time to make up, while what we gained in moral advantage is beyond estimation. Of course Great Britain, France and Belgium had to decide on the instant; the threat to them was immediate. All honor to their heroic choice ; let them be paid their due tribute ! To us was given, by the fortunate circumstance of distance, the chance to show how a great people should decide on war when every other solution had been made impossible. America's leadership in the world of tomorrow begins by showing the kind of statesmanship, ap- pealing to conscience and reason, to justice and humanity, a democratic nation should have, and our nation has had in this unprecedented crisis. Who now is able to foresee all else that America's leadership will mean in the world of tomorrow? I can hope, in the closing words of this long dis- cussion, only to indicate a few directions in which even now it is apparent that our example will count. ' One of the outstanding questions between de- mocracy and autocracy, as I indicated to you last Sunday, is that of efficiency. "We have been seeing how terribly efficient autocracy can become when armed with the weapons that modern science and industry can furnish. The real test, as between Germany and ourselves, will come only when the two armies confront each other on fairly equal terms. None of us need fear for the result. The only dread is that we may not be at the front in sufficient force when the trial comes. Even if her great preponderance of men enables Germany to 110 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP gain some further advance, even if France and Britain cannot hold her where she now is, we are confident that the war can end in but one way. That means that autocracy will be discredited on its own ground, defeated with the weapons itself has chosen. The Germans have appealed to Caesar — to Caesar they shall go. All the reports that reach us emphasize the superior size, strength, intelligence and individual initiative of the Amer- ican troops. The conduct of our army will show a sceptical and scoffing world that long years of unprecedented prosperity have not spoiled us, that our democratic community is still sound to the core. There is not an autocracy in the world that will not be henceforth cowed by that display of righteous force made by the quickly assembled and hurriedly trained armies of the United States. Helping to win the war will be only the begin- ning of the service that America will have ren- dered. What of the splendid spirit shown by our democratic army, by our engineers and workers for reconstruction, by our agencies for human wel- fare? It is the simple truth to say that Europe has never seen anything like it. Of course in none of these ways are we serving alone. All honor to those who began long before we did, and bore the brunt of the earlier stage of the conflict ! But is it not evident that a new spirit of confidence and co-operation has come in since America really took hold? Let us not seem to forget the work of those earlier months for Belgium, by Mr. Hoover and his assistants, when America was still neutral, nbr the indispensable service rendered by the Red 111 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Cross everywhere. This coming week is to see the second drive since we entered the war for a fund of $100,000,000 for the work of the National Eed Cross in all the countries at war — for it is even feeding our prisoners in Germany. I need not in this place second that irresistible appeal to' your hearts. When were there ever such vast sums given by any people, and so lavishly, yet so wisely, spent for purely humanitarian purposes'? It is as unprecedented in all its dimensions as the great war itself. It is setting a new standard for the world of tomorrow. Never was an army so sur- rounded by friendly helpfulness, so guarded in its morals, which mean morale; never was an army so scientifically and skilfully mothered as our army in France and in the United States. We trust and pray that there may be no further wars like this one. But calamities cannot in the nature of things be avoided. We are learning now to meet them as they arise. Not only in artillery and aviation, not only in strategy and tactics, is the war bringing sudden and marvelous advances ; but also in medicine and surgery, in hospital care and nursing, in the rebuilding of broken homes and the restoring of maimed lives, is the present work- ing miracles undreamed of in even the recent past. No nation is more forward in this work of civiliza- tion, no other has greater resources for the needed task of reconstruction than our own. No doubt we are disposed to underestimate, from lack of knowledge, what the better mind and heart of Ger- many may be doing to meet similar needs. But we do know what a work of destruction and desD- 112 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP lation has been perpetrated by the German hordes, and how the prisoners of war in Germany are be- ing mistreated. How the American spirit shines ont by comparison ! As the President said yester- day in New York, we are showing the world how a people can fight a war unselfishly. It has been even less customary in the past for nations than for individuals to follow the teaching, ^^Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." His- tory may show that the United States of America has begun a new tradition in this respect. Our protection of the South American republics from European interference has not been without a self- regarding element. But it has not concealed any purpose to exploit them for ourselves. The latest and most outstanding instance has been President Wilson's policy in Mexico. It has not been with- out its minor inconsistencies, but what is its total effect ! Who is there now who will not admit that the policy of watchful waiting was far wiser than the more .aggressive policy, counselled by many who felt their material interests to be endangered, which would have made of Mexico an angry foe, menacing our flank? We have treated that coun- try as we would wish to have been treated our- selves by a greater power during our own early struggles. Mexico has a long way yet to go before she can attain to secure self-government. The temptation will be great to interfere for the sake of a more rapid development of her material re- sources. It may be that we can give help of this kind in the future, without being misunderstood. But the example of what a great neighbor nation ]13 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR might be and do to another has been set and it is to be hoped it will be more widely followed in the future. Suppose that there had been an iota of this spirit in Austria's treatment of Serbia, or Germany's of Belgium! The United States has shown the same neigh- borly friendliness in China and Japan, and throughout these great powers of the Orient our purpose is understood, in spite of minor difficul- ties. It was through our agency in the first place that Japan opened her ports to western commerce and civilization. We have stood for the open door in China against the ambitious intrigues of Ger- many. Says a writer in the French Revue des Deux MondeSj '^ Since 1858, the government of the United States, far from wishing to commit an act of force or of violence toward the peoples and gov- ernments of the far East, has held to the attitude of being their protector and their friend. ' ' Refer- ring to the united front of China and Japan against Germany, the same writer continues : ^*0f this united front of the far East, the United States is the cornerstone and cement; without it this agreement would not have held good.'' That phase of America's leadership in the world of to- morrow, as affecting these mighty peoples of the Orient, holds almost infinite largeness of promise. China knows that through thick and thin that we are her friend, and so doea Japan. May it always be so. The President has declared his firm resolve to stand by Russia. We have not yet seen at its full value the wisdom of his action in refusing to sanc- 114 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP tion the advance of Japan into Siberia. The Jap- anese are too different from the Russians to be trusted by them, besides which there are the still fresh memories of the recent war. It is inevitable that Russia should be suspicious of Japanese ag- gression. She has a long and difficult way before her in the adjustment of her internal affairs. She has not yet discovered her true leaders or her per- manent form of government. So far as possible, in this transition period, it is of the utmost im- portance that all her people should be made to feel that the United States is their loyal friend. For this reason the Root Commission, which went to Russia in the summer of 1917, cannot be con- sidered a failure. It was not seed wasted on stony ground, though the fruit may be long in maturing. No other people has sent representatives who could speak to the mind and heart of republican Russia as did those from this democratic republic. We must wait patiently for the results to manifest themselves. Meanwhile Germany, by her viola- tions of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and her aggres- sions against the Russia people and territory, is defeating her own purpose by sowing the seed of an undying hatred. Some day Russia will re- member what we said to her and stood ready to do for her in this darkest time before the dawn. Can we venture to say the same of Germany her- self? Deep and lasting as must be our righteous indignation at the enormities of the German con- duct of the war, I have tried in earlier sermons to show that she was not entirely without provoca- tion, from her point of view, in beginning it. While 115 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR the other peoples have endured untold sufferings of her inflicting:, it has not been for Germany her- self quite the quick and easy success to which her leaders looked forward. She will come out of it needing friends as perhaps no nation ever needed them. When she finally comes to her right mind, she may realize that she has no better friend in the world than the United States. Then, I believe^ the significance of President Wilson's earlier policy, when he tried in vain to recall her to her better self, will begin to make its due impression. Some day, when the war-madness has cleared from their brains, the thinkers and historians of Ger- many will discover the way in which Mr. Wilson labored for many months to recall their leaders to the dictates of their higher nature. When that comes about, we may be able to act as a recon- ciling influence to bring this deeply-sinning people back into the brotherhood of nations. The war has brought about a new and closer unity of the English-speaking peoples. That is its great, outstanding result, so far as concerns our- selves. We shall never enter any imperial federa- tion of Great Britain and her self-governing de- pendencies. But it will be surprising if a moral unity has not been created which will be the most potent force making for world-peace in the future. Canada and the United States have been drawn into a closer mutual sympathy, born of sacrifices m'ade in common. The unfortified boundary of four thousand miles in extent between ourselves and our northern neighbors for over a century past, offers the happiest example of what will come 116 AMERICA'S WORLD LEADERSHIP to be in Europe, if militarism can be overthrown and the armed camp of the last half -century be transformed into a continent of peoples who shall strive with one 'another only on lines of honorable competition in the arts of civilization. That this may prove to be the war that ends war — that is the consummation of all its bloodshed and horror most devoutly to be wished ! The best and brightest hope of such a conclusion lies in the League of Nations, to which President Wilson pledged the support of the United States in. his great speech of May 27, 1916. He then said : "The nations of the world have become each other's neig-h- bor's. It is to their interest that they should understand each other. In order that they may understand each other, it is imperative that they should agree to co-operate in a common cause, and that they should so act that the guid- ing principle of that common cause shall be even-handed and impartial justice." In that spirit the American people are prepared to follow him until a more stable and dependable international order has been evolved out of the chaos of the older diplomacy which has brought us to where we now are. It is the spirit of un- selfishness, applied to the dealings of nations, the spirit of obedience to the commandment, '^Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.^' In that, America is already leading the way. This, with all it implies, is a new fact in the history of the world. Says Mr. Heiiry Noel Brailsford, in '^A LeagTie of Nations,'' which I have found to be one of the most fair-minded as well as the most pene- trating and judicious books that the war has yet inspired : 117 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR "The new fact in the world's history is that for the first time a great power with a formidable navy, a population from which vast armies might be raised, and an economic and financial strength which might alone be decisive in any future conflict, is prepared to stake its own peace, not mere- ly to guarantee its own interests, nor to further the partisan aims of its allies, but to imake an end in the world of the possibility of prosperous aggression. Whatever may be its fate as a constructive proposal, this American offer makes an epoch in the world's moral evolution. Ambition and fear have masqueraded before now in an international dis- guise, but the disinterested advocacy of a cosmopolitan idea of duty has been left to academic moralists and Socialists. At length a Great Power, hitherto of all Powers the most isolated and self-centered, has adopted this idea as the per- manent foundation of its policy." The two policies — Germany's and our own — rtlie policy of national selfisliness and the policy of national unselfishness, have been set in motion, and we are seeing the results. Germany, an autocracy, tied to the old order of militarism, secret diplom- acy, and the exploitation of defenseless peoples, seeks to make her will prevail by armed might. America, a democracy, the pioneer of a new order banding the nations together to secure permanent peace, the democratic control of foreign relations, and the self-determination of nationalities, seeks to make the world a good neighborhood, in which justice and kindness shall be shown by all to all. We are only at the beginnings of this great en- deavor. The far, dim future will still be reaping its incalculable results ! 118 SERMON VIII THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE So fight I, as not beating the air. — I Corinthians ix. 26. A generation ago, Thomas Hughes, the author of ''Tom Brown at Eugby" and other books for boys, gave wide currency to the phrase ''muscular Christianity." The Apostle Paul, in this text, shows himself to have been an exponent and up- holder of a Christianity of that resolved and strenuous type. In the original Grreek, it is clear that what he has in mind is fighting with the fists, after the manner of gladiators in the arena. He uses a word whose root is perpetuated in our word "pugilism." Like many another man with an eye for excellence in a region remote from his own leading interests, Paul was able to see some- thing admirable in the boxing contests of the Ro- man amphitheatre. When he himself fought, he wanted to hit something, as those sturdy fighters did, and to make his blows tell. There seems, in- deed, to be a profound instinct in all of us, when we fight, to want to do that; not to contend with shadows, and spend our strokes in vain. We have been forced into a fight of quite another kind ; and we need to take to ourselves the tonic of Paul's 119 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR muscular Christianity, to see to it that our fight- ing smites the forces of evil that have arrayed themselves over against us, and does not waste itself in fruitlessly beating the air. Yes ! after nineteen centuries of what has called itself Christian civilization — and with what nearly incessant wars and rumors of wars has it not been attended! — now, in our turn, that we might not miss the severe testing to which every generation in all these centuries has had to submit, we are in a fight, a desperate fight; and it behooves us to acquit ourselves like men and be strong. The ruthless and determined adversary whom we con- front strikes to hurt, to maim, to destroy. He spares us no jot of his available force, equipped as it is with the completest science and organized and directed with the cunningest skill. His is no shadow-fighting, but actual to the last degree. To his terrible prowess a devastated and desolated Europe bears only too painful witness. The ruined towns of Belgium, the torn and bleeding fields of France, the wasted areas of Poland, Russia, Ser- bia, Roumania, Italy, the yawning graveyard of the open ocean — all tell the same incredible story. Our fighting, like that of the earliest muscular Christians, is not only against flesh and blood, but '^against principalities and powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in high places. '' We shall need all possible endurance and resolution if we are to win ; as, God willing, we must. Our gravest peril, now that victory draws nearer, is that we shall be over-confident. We need a degree of sober 120 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE optimism, but we cannot yet indulge ourselves in a too-careless hopefulness. There is heavy, wear- ing work yet to be done. What are we fighting for? To hold out to the end, we on our part must be animated and welded together by a righteous purpose. Every indi- vidual member of this vast American democracy must be able to see for himself what is the national purpose, that we may strive on ^^ without stint or limit," as our President has said, until our purpose is accomplished. Otherwise it can- not be realized. This is a war of peoples, and we must wage it as a people, in conjunction with the other free peoples who stand with us for a better world-order, if it is not to be in vain. Because of the plausible peace-proposal advanced by the Im- perial Grovernment of Austria, doubtless with the knowledge and approval of its allies, the Imperial Governments of Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey, it seems to me timely to state the ultimate aims for which we are striving. Austria wants to initiate preliminary conversa- tions looking to a peace by mutual understanding. It is proposed that this be done after the fashion of the older diplomacy, now utterly discredited; the chosen representatives of the hostile govern- ments to confer together secretly, behind closed doors, in an endeavor to approach a common agree- ment. One wonders if this humble suppliant that now comes before us is the same proud and haughty Austria that in the summer of 1914 in- sisted upon its fatal forty-eight hour ultimatum to little Serbia ! The answer of the American Gov- 121 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR eminent has been a conspicuonsly prompt and de- cisive No ; and behind that curt message, as voiced by Secretary Lansing in the name of President Wilson, the American people stand as a nnit. We ishall do well to assure ourselves of the grounds of that decision, as bearing on the whole vital and urgent question of peace in the future. To see the situation clearly as it is, we need to ^0 back to the action of the Imperial Government of Germany in resuming, on February 1st, 1917, its unrestricted submarine campaign. This was the •direct occasion of the declaration of war by the TTnited States on April 6th of that same year. Be- -ginning with the sinking of the Lusitania, in May, 1915, our government had written a long series of notes protesting against this inhumanity to neu- trals on the high seas. Finally the German Im- perial Government gave what was regarded by President Wilson and our people generally as a solemn pledge, expressed in the following terms : "In accordance with the general principles of visit and search, and destruction of merchant vessels recognized by international law, such vessels, both within and without the area declared as naval war zone, shall not be sunk, without warning and without saving human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance." We know how that pledge was kept. By its later notification of intention to resume its unre- stricted submarine warfare, the German Govern- ment deliberately broke its pledged word. It did so because at that time it believed in the subma- rine as a means to victory. But for us that was the last straw ; our fight for justice and humanity hegan then and there. 122 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE Secretary Lansing, in Jnly, 1917, interpreted this decision of Germany as follows: "The immediate cause of our war with Germany — ^the breaking of her promises as to indiscriminate submarine warfare — has a far deeper meaning, a meaning which has been growing more evident as the war progresses, and which needed but this act of perfidy to bring it home to all think- ing Americans. * * * ♦ We know now that that gov- ernment is inspired with ambitions which menace human liberty; and that to gain its end, it does not hesitate to- break faith, to violate the most sacred rights, or to perpe- trate intolerable acts of inhumanity." A month later, replying to the peace note of the Pope, the Secretary of State, acting as mouth- piece for the President, said this: "We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Ger- many as a guarantee of anything that is to endure, unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the German people themselves as the other peoples of the world would be justified in accepting. With- out such guarantees, treaties of settlement, agreements for disarmament, covenants to set up arbitration in the place of force, territorial adjustments, reconstitutions o,f small nations, if made with the German Government — no man, no nation, could now depend on. We must wait for some new evidence of the purposes of the great peoples of the central powers." There you have it ! Was ever the government of a great power so ronndly condemned at the bar of history! Evidence of the popular will in the enemy peoples, for which we are waiting, is still conspicuous by its absence. Kaiserism, militarism and autocracy continue in full control. Neither now, nor at any time in the future, can our gov- ernment hold any parley, secret or open, with the governments of Germany and Austria as they are now constituted. Between these iniquitous and self -condemned powers and ourselves it can be only war to the death. Either they must be put 123 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR down or we must. The world will never be made safe for democracy so long as those sinister rul- ers, with their overleaping ambitions, their treach- erous methods, and their utter disregard for hu- man rights, continiie to exist. If our fighting is not to be a mere beating the air, if the sacrifices that we and the allied demo- cratic peoples have already made are not to be worse than water spilt in the sand, we must fight on, until those governments are destroyed, from without or from within. We must overturn and overturn and overturn, until no Hapsburgs or Hohenzollerns are left in power to curse and crucify mankind with their insane lust of conquest. These last four years have shown us to repletion what they are. Why repeat over again the cata- logue of their crimes, beginning with the spolia- tion of Belgium and not ending with the looting and burning of French and Flemish cities and homes as they retreat unwillingly toward their own frontiers'? The German armies have made a name for themselves, the stench of which will go up forever. But in the advance of the Allied and American forces they see at last their ap- proaching doom. In the increasing roar of the American artillery they begin, like Macbeth, to hear the fatal knocking at the door, and their guilty, bloodstained hearts already tremble. This Austrian peace note is their latest sharp trick, their clever, desperate bid for consideration. They want our diplomats to m^eet theirs, and play over again the wretched farce of dividing up Eu- rope, as it was last played by the Congress of 124 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE Berlin in 1878, leaving a heritage of strife in its train, and finally this unspeakable slaughter as its direct consequence. Such another congress would only generate future wars. What Germany would still do if she had the power, we know too well from Bismarck's abject humiliation of France at Versailles in 1871; and even more certainly from the recent treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, with distraught Russia and exhausted Roumania. When Germany can, she uses the mailed fist and only that; when she cannot, she puts it behind her back and trusts to honeyed words. Let us not consent to any such futile beating the air ! The old secret diplomacy of kings and courts, of armed camps and the balance of power, is in its death-throes. We are in this fight to secure a stable and enduring peace for mankind. Where should the victory lead us! This is the most critical problem for the world of tomorrow; and there is but one conclusion to which the en- tire course of our thought from the beginning un- erringly points. Military monarchy, able to utilize the whole gigantic force of a modern industrial state, directed to violent ends by a single heredi- tary will at the top, has long enough cumbered the earth. This war must see its final extinction. It has come to its last gasp, and the entrance of the United States into the conflict means that its fate is sealed. Emerson wrote, long ago : "God said, I am tired of kings." But we need to discriminate. The limited, pop- ular, democratic monarchs of Great Britain, Italy, 125 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR Belgium, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and even Spain are no longer kings in the feudal, ab- solute sense which has become such an anachro- nism in modern Germany. Though they wear the kingly trappings, these monarchs are scarcely more than presidents of their peoples, if as much as that. None of them wields a power comparable to that of our President today. If dethroned, they would scarcely be missed. Yet the modest, helpful King George of P^ngiand, and the heroic, knightly King Albert of Belgium, are the best ex- amples of what a constitutional monarch may be- come to his people. What a contrast between such kingship and the German Kaiser ! Those nations that have kings may keep them, if they like; but the real power has long since passed to the par- liaments, to the cabinets which they make and un- make, and to the organs of the popular will. The policy of these nations, domestic and foreign, rests on the broad base of the suffrages of their people. We have just seen the last of the Romanoffs, shot like a dog by the victims of his intolerable tyranny. We shall soon see the last of the HohenzoUerns and ITapsburgs, dethroned and fitly punished by a world that they have convulsed with horror. The first essential, then, to our moral victory by force of arms, is that monarchy in Germany and Austria, claiming to rule by divine right, shall be brought low. It has played out its game of universal murder with humanity as the stakes. The crying necessity of the present hour of fate- ful decision is that that game, played as we have seen, shall be hopelessly lost. This bloody adven- 126 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE ture must be made demonstrably so colossal a failure that no king or kaiser of tlie older type shall be left to try it again. If the game could have been made to pay, these men would now be the rulers of the world. The primary purpose, to which we must devote our invincible strength, is to bring it to utter bankruptcy and ruin. The only conceivable alternative to kaiserism is to turn the world over to the divine right of its peoples. To that end, we fight on — not to destroy the Ger- manic nations, which is not possible — but to con- vert them by righteous force to democracy. When that conversion has come, and been witnessed to by works fit for repentance, then it will be time to proceed to gentler measures, that a world-alli- ance of democracy may secure the peace and pros- perity that feudal monarchy set itself to destroy. Once we are sure as to the end for which we fight, the consideration of the means by which it can be achieved must follow. Much has been said and printed about a league of nations, to which I cordially assent. But more and more it comes to me with the force of an overpowering conviction that, for the future salvation and blessing of all the European peoples — the German, Austrian and Bulgarian among the rest — there should be erect- ed, as the one positive gain and final, righteous solution of the war, an equal, equitable, federal union of the lesser and the larger continental nations — the United States of Europe! Up to the present time, this idea has not come prominently forward in current discussion. It is not a new conception, having been first f ormu- 127 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR lated, so far as my knowledge goes, by the late Sir John R. Seeley, professor of history in Oxford University, in an article in Macmillan's Maga- zine for 1871. It was repeated by Dr. Edward Everett Hale in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, and elsewhere. Occasional references to it are to be found in contemporary writings, as in the war diary of Dr. Wilhelm Muehlon, former* director of the Krupp Works. However, it needs expan- sion and concrete application to the situation with which Europe will be confronted on the conclusion of an armistice, when practical form will have to be given to the terms of a lasting peace. In a sense it is a dream; but, as I shall undertake to show in conclusion, not a wholly Utopian one. The United States of Europe would be a federa- tion of the continental nations, and would not in- clude Great Britain. The British Islands, and the world-wide, democratic-imperial federation of which they are the head, offer another and dis- tinctive problem. Its solution is inseparably joined with the issues of sea-power, which have been touched upon in an earlier sermon. As Lieutenant-General Jan C. Smuts of South Africa has pointed out, in his distinguished volume of war-speeches, the federation of the British Em- pire, that he hopes may be realized in increasing measure, must be of another type from any con- tinental union, depending, as such a federation must, upon contiguity of territory in the states comprising it. That is not our question here, and it can be left for the wise statesmanship and the profoundly democratic instinct of the British peo- 128 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE pies to settle for themselves. The line of cleavage runs through the English Channel. President Wilson has made it one of the basic principles of any peace to which he is willing to consent that it shall rest on the self-determination of nationalities. It is precisely the over-stressing of the principle of nationality on the part of Ger- many, but also on the part of her principal rivals for world-trade and colonization, that has brought us to this present pass. How the clashing of racial, territorial, commercial and colonial aspira- tions in the European states, greater and lesser, is to be obviated by any settlement made along present lines. is a difficulty of staggering propor- tions. The soundest argument for monarchy, especially in Germany, is that it is essential to the situation in which that nation finds itself, of continual peril from possible attack. Thus, Prof. Ernst Troeltsch, one of the sanest of German thinkers, writes : ''Only under monarchical leader- ship can the work of unity and development of a nation encompassed by danger.be accomplished." It is only too obvious how this bitter necessity lies at the very roots of the present struggle. Historically, in the growth and inner develop- ment of the broken fragments of the Roman Em- pire, we can see how inevitable was the rise of the modern European nationalities. But the pro- cess of evolution is not yet complete. The unifica- tion of Italy, and the imperial unity of Germany, achieved in the last two generations, were only steps to a farther goal. All Europe seems des- tined to be finally united, as Germany was united 129 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR in 1870, and as one result of this war. The Balkan States, rent by fratricidar combat before they set the torch to the world-explosion, were fast pass- ing ont of the nebulous stage, but not yet welded into a distinct planet. Eussia, held together by the bond of absolutism, seems now threatening to break up into a collection of smaller nations. As to that, it would be premature to prophesy. But what seems to me to cry aloud — above even the harsh voices of chaos that now prevail — is a de- mand for the federation of that blood-soaked and war-weary continent. Still, in spite of all, it re- mains the home of much, indeed of most, of the fairest promise for the world's ultimate salvation. What a scene, what an arena, of mingling beasts and men, it has been, and is ! The highest and the basest of human possibilities grow and struggle together in that old Europe, with its cathedrals, its treasures of art and literature, its birthplaces of the world's greatest men and women, with few, very few, exceptions; all these, and then this war! In its economic life, the foundation of all its other life, Europe has long been increasingly one. From this basic standpoint, the existing bound- aries between its peoples are either imaginary or purely artificial — tariff walls of mutual exclusion and mutual damage. In its racial and social con- ditions, notwithstanding the conflicting ambitions and animosities which have led to the present crisis, the continent is substantially one. It con- tains no single considerable element, on the whole so backward, unrelated and difficult of complete assimilation as our millions of the Negro race. 130 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE The Turks are tlie only intractable factor in the problem, bnt they can be pushed over into Asia and left there to be dealt with at a later stage of the world's evolution. In its civilization, in spite of the overweening pretensions made in behalf of German Kultur, I venture to claim that Europe is also one. The great tasks of civilization, in the very nature of the case, are something to be shared in common — no people can claim or keep a mo- nopoly of them. When the Germans have been disillusioned of their philosophy of militarism, and give themselves again to peaceful science and commerce; when once they learn to take the ad- vice of the much-abused Nietzsche and become "good Europeans," then they will be as welcome everywhere as they were before the war began. Only let them throw off, with autocracy, their autocratic manners, and become good democrats, with the rest of us. The most rooted national differences are those between France and Germany. But let it once be clearly understood that these differences are mainly not racial but political, and let federation do its perfect work of reducing them, and they would be no more troublesome than the similar differences between some of the American colonies before the adoption of the Constitution, which nearly led to war and in one or two cases quite did so. Alsace-Lorraine, even, could without great difficulty have been reconciled to its return within the bosom of the German Empire— from which it was split off originally by Louis XIV— if only a modicum of political tact could have been em- 131 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR ployed in dealing with its people following the conquest. In a federated Europe, it would make no great difference whether Alsace-Lorraine be- longed to Germany, or to France, or was made an independent state. That men of more than half German blood can become patriotic Frenchmen, is shown by the long list of Alsatian and Lor- rainian names high on France's roll of honor, from Napoleon's time until now. This war has been a civil war, the slaughter of European brother by European brother, like our similar strife of 1861-1865 ; and with the right spirit and method the continent can become in fifty years as firmly knit together around one common hearth as are our North and South today. It may seem incredi- ble now. But so did our division seem irreparable in the days of carpet-bag governments and the waving of the bloody shirt which some of us can so clearly remember. The miracle was accom- plished once by the healing hand of time, and it can be accomplished again. Only get rid of the kaisers and autocrats ; only give the rule to all the people — not to one class, as in Bolshevik Eus- sia — and federation will follow almost of itself. It alone, in my sober judgment, will solve the problem of the self-determination of nationalities. For one thing, a nationality is not a geographical unit. Eacial elements do not stay put, as static quantities. They spread, with a dynamic life, or they contract, for want of it. Poland, for example, can never be a geographical unit while the Poles continue to spread out in every direction as they have so long done. The untangling of the nation- 132 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE alities in the Balkans, so tliat each may rule over itself, is a task of impossible intricacy, to which the genius even of President Wilson is not equal. Leave Europe substantially as it is, divided be- tween larger and smaller separate nationalities, each with its attractions and repulsions, its de- sires and ambitions, and in spite of any conceiva- ble league of nations the repetition of this war within a given time is a mathematical certainty. Difficult as federation may be — and it is impossi- ble here to work it out in detail — it offers to my thinking the one reasonable and hopeful solution. Let that be the most urgent concern of those who gather about the peace-table. Already in these sermons, I have more than once insisted that it will be a sadder, wiser, in- finitely humbler Germany — a G-ermany perhaps plunged through revolution after her signal and undeniable defeat — a Germany with kaiserism and autocracy and militarism only a horrible night- mare of the past, that we shall see when the strug- gle is over. Only such a renovated Germany, in spirit and in institutions, could be asked to enter the United States of Europe. When such a Ger- many rises slowly on the ruins of the old, it will be for us who have been her consistent enemies to turn to a more fruitful friendship. Then the great place in the world that she has aspired to hold may in time become hers; not as lording it over the earth, but as a leading member of one of the greatest political unions the world has yet seen. To bring this consummation to pass remains the herculean task awaiting the competent states- 133 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE WAR manship of the world, including our own. What we have enjoyed on this American continent for more than a century and a quarter, as the bul- wark of our liberties and the basis of our internal quiet, it should be our fondest hope to pass on to Europe. Not to work toward it, as a part of our contribution to ending the war, would be a shame and a sin ; even if it takes another half-century of adjustment and negotiation. No one who has any just comprehension of the national and racial dif- ferences, prejudices and mutual suspicions engen- dered by the existing European state-system can minimize the obstacles that such an endeavor must confront and overcome. But this is one of those rare moments in history which, as Bismarck de- clared, never return. We must utilize it to the utmost. Then the millions upon millions of the world's best youth, not forgetting our own sacred dead — whose green and peaceful graves in foreign soil will be hereafter the shrines of innumerable pilgrims from the new world to the old — these will not have died in vain ! Their fairest and longest enduring monument will be the future United States of Europe ; and that great federation, when it comes, will be, with our own American Union and the British Empire, the unshakeable pillars of a thousand years of peace for humanity! 134 LIBRARY OF CONRRPce 018 465 314 A^# ■(••iii.'.SHij '^(:v:::^^■'■Vvv;:t•^^:i ;^i ■':■ ; 'I ■• .i i :.■...]. '''::]''• f%iO''^-^,Sk ■,;:.,: ..fv,, .;•!;•'•■. J ■•;' .f. ..'. Ili^^ « '^^^^v.:;-.:^;:;:;: