CHAPTER XI. The Military Curse. 1. Liberty Must Fall. "I say then that there is no easier way to ruin a republic, where the people have power, than to involve them in daring enterprises; for where the people have influence they will always be ready to engage in them, and no contrary opinion will prevent them." These were the words of Machiavelli.* It has been true of the world throughout the past; is it to be true of modern republics? Is an army to be the invariable assassin of liberty? These are questions of considerable import. We have begun the elevation of a great army, having leaped by one act of congress to 60,000 men, nearly double and a half our ancient force. We have involved ourselves in daring enterprises, against the earnest warning and counsel of all the strongest and best men of the nation. History says that when republics do these things they fall. Are we prepared to deny history, are we of a better caliber to create history of a new kind, or are we ready to sink back into monarchy and despotism? Our span of popular government, but little more than a century, is hardly a day in the life of nations. The favoring conditions have been in every sense unique, our experiment altogether abnormal. When these singular advantages pass away will not our liberties pass with them? That is the expectation of the world, and all the indications of the time converge toward that event. Our freedom *Discourses on Books of Livy, ch. LIII. has rested upon nature's generous distribution of immense material resources. Land was obtainable for the asking, and all men could live independently. The land has gone and independence with it; the abnormal conditions in which freedom grew have disappeared and the promise is already vivid that freedom is about to depart. There is the closest union between freedom and the distribution of wealth. Freedom is a consequence of the just distribution of wealth and vanishes if wealth concentrates. If, on the other hand, there is true popular freedom in fact and spirit, there will be fair distribution of wealth as an effect. The law and condition of freedom is equitable distribution of wealth. This floods the present chaos with light. The unique advantages of our new country have crossed the meridian and are going down, we are becoming normal in the European sense, the laws governing wealth in old countries now govern in ours. The crucial consequence of this full settling and industrializing of the country is that wealth ceases its fair distribution and is gathered by the few rulers of trade. Coincidently with this new order freedom also droops toward the horizon. Events happen which seem fortuitous and are treated as detached and astonishing, whereas they are results of the ending of equity in distribution. The war with Spain followed by the Filipino war is a pretext, a mere concomitant circumstance; if it had not happened something similar to serve the guiding tendency would have happened. Industrial monopoly is total and universal, and must be protected; its protection calls for armies, and that is national militarism. Industrialism militarizes in order to terrorize. The swift growth and stunned acceptance of the military program show that the soil had been knowingly prepared. It spread like clouds of poison in a single year and the people sunk torpid and powerless beneath its furious vapors. Go back this one year. Spain to be ejected from Cuba for the atrocity of killing Cubans in order to own and rule Cuba for Spanish advantage. The horror of it was a stench in our nostrils too awful to endure; our nerves quivered with intolerable anguish at the sight. A year later we debonairely slaughter Filipinos in identical Spanish style, perpetrating the identical atrocity, for the identical Spanish reason, gain. The stench is no more, the anguished indignation at the murder of the weak has passed over into a fiercer indignation against the weak for resisting murder. What cataclysm fell on conscience, humanity, ruth, honor, in this curt year? They never existed. Nothing done has been accidental or inexplicable; all was buried in us when we feigned the rescue of Cuba; we have resurrected our nature: the secret of all was the necessary creation of militarism. Creation by whom and for whom? By the people, under spell of those who have confiscated the people's wealth and need a military police support. But why, if we had freedom and knew its value, did we not keep it? We had enjoyed notable and exceptional equity in the distribution of wealth-why did we not retain that? And why did not this equity of distribution save our freedom for us if freedom and fair distribution are such close kin? The answer is that in spirit we never were a free people. We never yet have comprehended what freedom is. Had we done so the events through which we are coursing could not have transpired, even in shadow or burlesque. Lay this well to heart, for it explains all our present infamies and prospective woes. The marvelous opportunities of life which were lavished on our people for a hundred years arose from no virtue of our own, but fell gratuitously from heaven upon our careless laps. We received them and, like prodigal sons, behaved as if they were deserved and would always deluge us in luxuriant showers. The lesson and the virtue which we ought to have learned we spurned; we did not ask the foundation of the freedom which we held, or how to fix it forever-we glided on recklessly sporting in the careless hour, dreaming and boasting that it would never end. As a nation we typified the rake's progress. In that state of fatuous irresponsibility we had no thought of protecting or repairing the bulwarks of our shining fortune: how should we, since our levity was so extravagant that we had never inquired what these were? Hence the sleepless waves of industrialism gradually undermined and washed them away. And we wake up now out of our silly intoxication to find them all but utterly gone. Wealth, the sources of life, monopolized and appropriated, a great army-navy about to be unsprung upon us by a seeming miracle, and we flaccid, with no soul of resistance, succumbing like old men in the last stages of senile decrepitude. What shall we do to be saved? This question at last rings through every true American heart. Let us answer it honestly and let us at last begin to be brave—for our glaring fault is cowardice. If it is only a little thing that we must do for salvation we meet it; if a great thing we quake and put it off, dreading to encounter it. We are a nation of moral cowards, shirking evils that have destroyed other states, rather nursing them in our breasts and preparing our own decease. There are two things that will save us: Courage at last to look the situation in the face, Courage to do whatsoever that look shows to be necessary. The life and decay and death of previous states have eternally and forever established the principle that there must be equitable distribution of wealth or commonwealths dry and die. Wealth is the sap of a nation; if it all rushes to one spot the remainder shrivels and perishes while in that place it congests and bursts its arteries and causes death. When nations rot their downfall is a good thing, to make way for a healthier organism. Suppose, however, that the new organism speeds through the stages of its predecessor, enjoying comparative health only a short space, falling thence meteorically into similar decay and death. The process of nations is then revealed as an enormous expenditure, the revolution of cycle upon cycle, merely to gain an occasional brief moment of reasonable sanity and happiness. All those who live in other times than the short period of health are sacrificed; those who live during that period are only less sacrificed than the others if—as is ever so the conditions and forces of decay are vigorously working in the society around them. The lives of the finest of the human race in all ages have been embittered by perception of the forces of ruin which they see relentlessly in victory about them, their efforts for race good have been stayed and spoiled by the action of these sinister powers. On such terms as this human society is not a success. The low and bad are ever getting the better of the good, overthrowing it, trampling it out. Whatever is higher and better is mocked and spit upon, its voice produces no effect, it is finally crushed in silence, and the brute mass of life speeds on the way to the cataract. The professed religion of England and America insists upon a code of conduct straight at variance with the code obtaining in affairs; he who scoffs at this never-used religion is abhorred by the popular bulk of both countries with unmeasured malice; yet no creature in his daily concerns, his business, attempts the conduct ordered by his religion, and whoever would do so is commiserated as a mild lunatic with wheels in his head. This has no other meaning than that the forces of destruction are paramount, these nations being in the course of passage through the stages of decline and dissolution that have announced the extinction of many previous great empires. This transitoriness of good in every people, the fleeting disappearance of high and saving qualities in the stream of corruption which begins to rise at a nation's birth and finally overwhelms all, is proof that man in organizing the systems that he attempts to live in with his fellows, |