86

BERESFORD'S FLATTERY PALAVER.

English Saxon liberties, and we shall take you at your word that you are an innocent saint.

7. Who 'Lord' Beresford says he is.

'Mr. Phelan-You yourself are a true Celt, are you not, Lord Beresford?

Mr. Beresford-No, I am a half-bred Celt. That is to say, I am Norman. I have no Saxon blood in me at all.

Mr. Phelan-How far back do you trace your line?

Mr. Beresford-To the Conqueror; we trace to the Conqueror, because we came over with him. We can't go beyond that, though we have tried to.'

Every true American ought to revere Beresford after that. He is a lord, and he came over with William, the pious William who stripped their lands from the libertyseeking Saxons, destroyed their free institutions, and retarded the growth of popular freedom and upright human independence in England for centuries, infusing a foul strain of domineering robber poison which still runs in the Anglo-Saxon vein and prevents the realization of justice, the evolution of character, and the consummation of democracy.

This flippant aftercomer of William the Conqueror of England was a very good type for that robbing, vestedinterest nation to send over to our William the Conqueror of the Philippines. We doubt not Beresford loves and cherishes human liberty as vehemently as did that bushwhacking ancestor of his; the vested-interest ruling classes of England who invite us to arm in their defense likewise care as much for it.

CHAPTER V.

Business Enterprise of Generals.

The words of our fighting classes at home in favor of imperialism likewise lose all their force when we consider who these people are and the motives of selfishness which move them to seek for this country a military future. It is almost enough to name these classes over to understand why they wish expansion. Have we not lately had some deep experiences what a precious set of self-seekers our military officers of all grades and sorts are? Is there any thing in the daily conduct of our fire-eating professional politicians to make us think they care for the world, their country, or for aught beyond their own skins and interests? What of our eruptive press? What of great makers of trusts, so disinterested that they are taking all America as their own and damning the people to a hell of poverty and hardship? We charge these classes with seeking their own despicable private ends in painting the glories and profits of expansion.

Let us study them one by one. The trade of officers of war is war. Through schemes of war they promote themselves in the great objects of their lives, salaries, renown, affluence and influence. All their aspirations and hopes center on military magnification. And it is their trade art to make others see things as they do. They are a species of commercial drummer, whose business success hangs upon their convincing others that wars and rumors and preparations for wars are the most important affairs of human society. They must do this or remain always little people. They have the galling example of foreign coun

tries. There a general is a truly great man; he is really a god with his clanking sword, his glittering uniform, his awful majesty of mien, his towering disdainment of the common carcasses of mere citizens which creep on the low earth below him. It is a thing to be a general in Europe. Life has character if you can feel yourself reposing on the clouds of power, master of instruments to blow the groveling herd of men to dust if they run amuck the doctrines that you patron. How different in America! How abominable, how degrading! A general is only a mortal here, adored and deified by none-until recently. He swallows wind into his stomach and swells himself out in vain. He has been kept down in his proper place.

But times have changed and he thinks that if he throws a little more business enterprise into his trade he may win the privilege to expand and swagger and become a tinselled deity. Will he miss such a chance? Will he stint his arguments to convince his darling countrymen how good for them will be the owning of islands and invading of Asia? He looks forward to the time when he will not have to beg and argue to these countrymen, the time when with docile battalions behind his ramrod back he can stride haughty and ferocious across our part of earth and not demean himself by knowing that he has countrymen. Oh people of America, watch this fellow argue now! Because the army is still small, see how small and humble he is. With the deferential modesty of impassioned concern for us, he tells us of the danger of our coasts, talks soulfully of universal love, of duty, and of civilization!— this professional murderer, this smasher and preventer of civilization, verily talks of duty! But give him his army and what will you hear him talk of then? Go to Russia and listen to the generals; are they talking of love? To civilized Germany, free France, liberal England: are their generals talking as we would wish to give ours liberty to talk?

1. The New Treason.

Beware. Can you not already note a change of tone, a growing insolence, since we took to war and yielded to the importunities of our war lords for a greater body of fighters? When have we before heard such language as this?

The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry, if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth-if she is not to stand merely as the China of the Western Hemisphere.

When before now has anyone dared to use such raw twaddle to us? But the author of this febrile slush says more:

To no body of men in the United States is the country so much indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army and navy; there is no body from which the country has less to fear; and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to upbuild.

Is not this something wholly new and thunderingly preposterous? Is not the officer that can ooze this foul offense from his self-seeking mind already far on in his dreams toward a European America, where the military swashbuckler will eclipse and terrorize the toiling snail of peace? And yet even this is a lullaby beside the rabid impudence which the same nascent bully already ventures to express.

As for those in our country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are saved from being treasonable merely from the fact that they are despicable.

So then with an army of only 60,000 men our semi-military gentry dare apply these abusive words to a number of American people so great that it may turn out when counted to be the majority. What will be said and done as time goes on and the army grows according to the rampant military determination which now neither slumbers nor sleeps? Then those who differ in opinion from our military sheiks will be attended to for treason as they do it in Germany. Treason is something for which men are jailed, hanged and shot. Treason is any thing

that displeases those in power, and the number of things that are treasonable increases in proportion to the increase of military force. Treason is merely a political label which those who want to establish their private opinions by force, and rule arbitrarily, apply to those with different opinions. The man who says a thing is treason is a tyrant in embroyo; he is a person with the blood of the inquisitors in him; he has not learned the smallest lessons of human appreciation, toleration and progress; he is of that beastly fiber which burned men at the stake in earlier days for thinking as nature ordained them to think. Civilization has been one long and fearful struggle against this cruel beastliness, always betraying itself in new forms. The religious brute has been conquered, but the political brute and the military brute are here still, with the same old mighty will to destroy liberty, the same depraved frenzy to make mankind grovel to them in thought and act, the same aboriginal club with a new name to beat their brains out who resist. Heresy was the ancient name of the club, the recent name is treason. If you do not believe in God as I do, I will kill you: If you do not believe in my politics, I will kill you. The same foulness in the human mind brings out ever fresh the same hideous deformity of conduct under later conditions, as they say that small-pox is a disease which arose out of syphilis, caused by the lives of abominable nastiness and abandonment of those who lived before us, and which now lives on to infect and injure a cleaner age with its horrid syphilitic substance. So is the cry of treason a recrudescence of the mental syphilis of heresy.

You will hear little of treason where you have not got an army to back it up, and where you have not generals and military politicians with personal interests to lift on high by use or threat of force. Mark this, and read again the words glowing with military insolence that would not scruple to turn the army loose at home to butcher thosc who do not believe that we should butcher Filipino slaves.