CHAPTER XIII MORAL MAJESTY OR GUILTY MADNESS? us THE first article in the creed of militarism says that War is Desirable. And what is militarism? The celebrated German editor, Maximilian Harden, recently said, "Only statesmen can add up the possibilities and arrive at the necessities. Only they can be allowed to decide with what weapons and up to what end the war is to be conducted. It is only in Germany that these principles are disputed. Is it because militarism really reigns among ? Militarism is a form of civilisation and a state of mind. It presses for ever stronger armaments, and accustoms even the ordinary citizen to the idea that weapons alone can settle a strife of peoples, and that any other tool is unworthy and useless. Heroism and military virtue can flourish without militarism, but militarism alone guarantees the constant readiness of all the limbs of the people's body for rapid transition from peace to war. It is because militarism favours the temptation to war, and must either extend its depreda tions far and wide or be rooted out absolutely, that the war is to continue until militarism has been destroyed. That is what all the enemies of the German Empire say out loud and what all neutral powers say in whispers." 1 Now there are indeed many alleged benefits of war, nor can it be altogether denied that oftentimes good does flow from evil. But to-day it would seem that the silent protest of six million dead, whose voices are choked with dust, ought to be an all-sufficient answer to those who still prate about the value and benefits of war. Contrast for a moment the moral majesty of war, as proclaimed by Treitschke and others, with the guilty madness of war as revealed in half-a-world in ruins, in wrecked homes, in demolished cathedrals, in burned cities, in devastated fields, in torpedoed liners, in hobbling cripples, and in broken hearts that are doomed to suffer the pangs of unavailing grief. How vain and hollow the praises of war sound in our ears grown too accustomed to the sobs and groans of the dying. "Let us cling with love," wrote Ernest Renan, "to our custom of fighting from time to time be 1 Die Zukunft for October 21, 1916. Reported in the New York Times for November 8, 1916. cause war is the necessary occasion and place for manifesting moral force." 1 Ruskin, in his essay on "War," eloquently remarked that, "All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. .There is no great art possible but that which is based on battle. We talk of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse of History coupled together; that on her lips the words were peace and sensuality-peace and selfishness peace and death. . . all great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in war; . . . they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace in a word, they were born in war, and expired in peace." 2 "We have learned to perceive," sings Treitschke in one of his impassioned pæons to war, "the moral majesty of war through the very processes which to the superficial observer seem brutal and inhuman. 1 See La Reforme Intellectual et Morale. 2 John Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive. Sec. 86. |