Page images
PDF
EPUB

his diplomacy and for his inability to make the Central Powers respect the lives of non-combatants, yet his success constitutes a worse crime than his failure would have done. He has allowed himself to be entrapped by the wily Germans into an agreement the result of which will certainly be to embroil the relations between the United States and Great Britain. Now that the outstanding account with Germany has been practically settled, the American government will have no excuse but to press its grievances against the British maritime policy. Considering the existing temper of Congress and the irritability of British public opinion, emphatic reiteration of these grievances may provoke a dangerous quarrel. Thus Mr. Wilson's diplomacy will have the result of keeping American relations cordial with the Powers that represent a policy of aggressive militarism, while at the same time it has nourished an explosive controversy with the Powers that are fighting for human liberty.

C

RITICISMS such as the foregoing need not be feared by the President, because, apart from being prompted by a manifest anti-Wilson obsession, they are based upon an unpopular and vicious assumption. This particular condemnation could have been avoided only by using any grievances of the United States against Germany as pretexts for going to war with the Central Powers. It is the outcry of men who are dissatisfied because Mr. Wilson's diplomacy has been pacific. Their pretended fear that the man who has sought so earnestly to keep the country out of war with Germany will do something to get us into war or even into serious trouble with the Allies is ridiculous. Mr. Wilson is just as likely to embroil us in war with Great Britain as he is to embroil the rest of the country in a war with the state of Virginia. Inasmuch as the policy of the United States is that of a neutral he must assert the rights of American citizens against their violation by all belligerents, but he is free to select his own methods of assertion. And however much individual Congressmen may talk for the benefit of their constituents, Congress as a whole will have neither the inclination nor the gumption to actively interfere. The country is satisfied with its present position of being the legal accomplice of the Allied Powers. If the German Foreign Office expects that the government which did not go to war over the Lusitania will do anything more than make a verbal protest against the British embargo it has been betrayed into a serious error. Any attempt on its part to bring pressure to bear on the American government to insist more vigorously on the rights of American citizens under international law could be met by a hint to mind its own business.

W

HATEVER motives and expectations the Germans may have had in reaching an agreement with the United States, their compliance will not alter American policy in respect to Great Britain. Our government will not consent to the abatement of the rights of American citizens under the law of nations; but on the other hand, even if British maritime policy continues to be illegal, even if it becomes more drastic and costly, we shall do nothing to enforce those rights except to keep an unequivocal declaration in their favor on the written record. Such a course may seem weak and ineffective. It would be weak and ineffective against any Power except Great Britain, but we should pay Great Britain the compliment of using only civilized weapons against her. Mr. Wilson's use of verbal weapons in carrying on a controversy, doubtful as it may be in the case of other nations, is precisely adapted to the relationship existing between the United States and the United Kingdom. The two countries have many differences of interest and opinion, but the notion of making them an excuse for war is inconceivable. If Americans have a grievance against Great Britain they do not propose to go to war about it any more than they propose to go to war about British indifference to neutral obligations during the Civil War. They are content to declare their grievances and to rest assured that if their case is good the British nation will eventually recognize its validity. When the war is over all the fundamental questions relating to maritime belligerency will come up for reconsideration, not only between the British and American governments but at an international conference. Our differences can be fought out with Great Britain at that time, and under conditions which will permit the most thoroughgoing discussion of the proper functions of sea power in a community of nations, and the desirable limits of its exercise. They will not be fought out any sooner nor in any other way.

S

UNDAY, January twenty-third, is child-labor day, an anniversary on which we remind ourselves that the great tragedy of childhood destroyed continues in the United States. Child labor is not the only evil of our callousness and apathy and greed, but it is by all odds the most obviously horrible. It is one evil which no decent person would dare to defend in public. Yet it survives with only slight modification to haunt us and mock us, to make our boasts sound silly and our complacency odious. For child labor is no visitation of nature. It is not an earthquake or a plague against which men can do nothing but meet on a Sunday and utter lamentations. It is something that can be remedied if only there is the will and intelligence to do it. The intelligence exists in the form of the National Child

[blocks in formation]

THE

HE recuperative power of the Russian armies is amazing, and as the war continues German fear of the Slav peril becomes more and more comprehensible. Last summer no one expected a Russian offensive until the spring, and few expected it then; but already General Ivanoff has launched a general attack on the Austrian lines, and now the Grand Duke Nicholas is advancing along the whole length of the Caucasus front, not to mention the campaign in Persia. In all likelihood the object of the Caucasus movement is to prevent the reinforcement of the Mesopotamian army from the north, and a retreat of "several kilometers " reported from Constantinople proves that the Russians have found a weak point in the Turkish lines in the Arasa River zone. One wonders where the Russian soldiers come from, but above all one admires the Russian spirit. Few people doubt now that the battle of the Marne was won by a Russian sacrifice at Tannenberg, and to-day, in order to try to save Townshend's ridiculously inferior force at Kut on the Tigris, the Grand Duke drives on through mountain snowdrifts, and sacrifices his mujiks in the roadless fastnesses of the Caucasus. No money, no loans, can ever pay the debt which France, England and Italy owe to Russia. It has become a common thing in this country to laugh at

English countryside and of the rough words he hears there, as a shy, gentle, meditative, unthinking man, hating cruelty, liking a good fight and quite willing to do his share of the fighting. The best war poem published in English since the great war began is his "August, 1914." For no other living poet do so many American readers feel such a personal affection.

Our Relations With Great Britain

B

RITISH discontent with the war policy of the American government has received a considerate and good-tempered expression in the Round Table. The American government is criticized for having protested against the British embargo and for having insisted on the letter of our neutral rights to trade with Germany and with other neutrals. We have, according to our critic, missed an opportunity of lending American moral and material support to a group of belligerents who are fighting for the security of political ideals essentially democratic and unmistakably American. Without actually going to war with Germany we could have refused to assert the neutral rights which

were a source of embarrassment to Great Britain in her blockade of German commerce, and consented to the suppression of trade with Germany and her neutral neighbors. By so doing we would have removed from American neutrality the taint and stigma of a merely selfish and irresponsible nationalism.

THE NEW REPUBLIC agrees with part of this criticism of American policy. The government and the dominant element in public opinion have ignored international interests of vital importance to the American nation. Germany should have been given to understand from the start that by involving an innocent and inoffensive people like the Belgians

in the ruin of the war she had made neutral indifthe Russian " steam-roller," but they are not laugh-ference abhorrent to right-minded men. In order ing in Berlin.

S

OME of the Englishmen who lecture in the United States are interesting because of what they have to say, others because of what they are, others for both reasons, others for neither. Nobody who has read Mr. Masefield's little book on Shakespeare expects ideas from him. He will draw large audiences because he is John Masefield, because he has made narrative in verse live again for thousands of readers. He has painted the sea in its terribleness and beauty, and the kind of Englishmen whom the sea has been calling for hundreds of years. He has revealed himself as almost equally a lover of the

to give expression to that abhorrence without going to war, the United States might have declared an embargo on all American trade with Germany, direct or indirect, until Belgium was evacuated and the Belgians indemnified. Such a method of increasing the penalties incurred by any Power which commits an international outrage is justifiable, and in this particular case would have been highly effective. But the opportunity to adopt it was neglected, and while the failure is much to be regretted, it is partly excused by a time-honored and precious national tradition of non-interference in European politics.

What the Round Table wants the American government to do is to accept as British policy an embargo on trade with Germany which was not adopted as American policy. But approval of an embargo as a matter of voluntary choice does not involve approval in case the same losses and sacrifices are imposed without American consent. The Orders in Council, precisely because they ignored "judicial niceties" and rewrote the law of nations without consultation with the victims of the embargo, raised a wholly different series of questions, the answers to which are not involved by any antecedent condemnation of German military aggression.

It

The declaration of a voluntary embargo against Germany by the United States would have created a wholly desirable precedent in public law. would have increased the authority of international agreements and the security of small nations. An embargo illegally forced on the United States by Great Britain creates, on the contrary, a dubious and perhaps a dangerous precedent. In the former case we should have been renouncing the benefits of trade with Germany under special conditions and for an unequivocally good purpose. In the latter case American consent would involve the renunciation of a right to any trade with a belligerent or with the neutral neighbor of a belligerent which did not happen to control the sea, no matter how little American public opinion might approve the purposes for which the sea-power was fighting. A self-imposed embargo would have incurred only a limited liability and would have helped a little to bring about a genuine community of nations, but a forced embargo would have meant acquiescence in an unlimited aggrandizement of "nationalistic navalism," which unless it was subsequently subjected to international control would make a community of nations impossible.

In its policy of embargo the British government is treating the American government in the same way that early in the war it treated its own labor unions. It asked the trades unionists to surrender rights to control their conditions of work which had been conquered only after a century of struggle and suffering, and this demand was made without pretense of any effective guarantee that the rights so surrendered would be restored or that the increased power obtained by the employers over their employees would not be used for the permanent disadvantage of organized labor. Did not the British government in both cases impose on the support of its friends a dangerously and unnecessarily severe strain? Has the domestic and foreign policy of Great Britain in the past been sufficiently impeccable and disinterested to entitle her to a vote of unlimited confidence? Can neutrals be asked to consent to an absolute dictatorship of the sea with

out any preliminary agreement as to the purposes for which the power shall be exercised?

In the case of the existing war the power may be exercised for purposes of which American public opinion would not approve. A moral condemnation of Germany in respect to the origin of the war and its conduct during the first few weeks does not imply moral approval of the Allies all along the line. Because Germany brought on the war and violated Belgium we are reproached for not lending our assistance to a group of belligerents who are laboring to plant Russia in Constantinople and Italy on the Dalmatian coast, and whose spokesmen are proposing to use a victory over Germany in a vindictive manner that would make impossible the organization of any properly balanced international system. Much of the English criticism of the American policy implies that aggressively selfish nationalism is confined to the Central Powers, that negatively selfish nationalism is the special prerogative of the neutrals, while the Allies are representing purely disinterested internationalism. Englishmen may need to think in this way during the war, but if they have any sense of humor left they ought not to expect other people to do so. It is not a fight between the angels of light and the imps of darkness, with a few insignificant, scared and fascinated spectators in gray squatting on the bleachers. All the fighters and all the spectators are painted various shades of gray, and no matter how civilized the cause for which they began the fight, the belligerents are becoming so obsessed by their enemy that they are in danger of ruining the civilization in the name of which they are slaying and bleeding.

Although the American nation has missed the opportunity of striking a most effective blow on behalf of an international community, its official behavior does not deserve the condemnation which it receives from hyphenated Anglo and FrancoAmericans. The neutral rights under international law for which it has been contending have two divergent aspects. They confer a license on irresponsible neutrality; but they place a curb on a dangerous and irresponsible belligerency. In so far as one belligerent is fighting for a better cause than his opponent, neutral non-interference, irresponsibility and readiness to trade with both belligerents may, in the case of a powerful and comparatively secure nation like the United States, be fairly condemned as a negatively selfish nationalism. But some wars involve no clear moral issue and are fought by belligerents between whom there is little to choose. International law has been built up to meet the second rather than the first of these situations. It has tended to make an irresponsible neutrality profitable, because by so doing belligerency might be

made unprofitable and the area reduced of damage done to innocent and inoffensive non-combatants.

The second aspect of international law is the more fundamental. It is in part a shelter constructed by neutrals to protect them from the savage and ruthless storm of war. Before it is abandoned and neutrals admit an obligation to give new meaning to neutrality, they should be perfectly sure that wholly new meaning has been attached to belligerency. The existing fabric of public law is the result of several centuries of international aspiration. Its actual value may be slight but its symbolic

a

value is enormous. It embodies the effort of nations which are not using war as an agent of national policy, to impose on belligerents some measure of international control. Neutrals are justified in contending that the protection, flimsy as it is, shall not be taken away until the foundations are laid for a safer and more hospitable shelter. They are justified in insisting that they shall not abandon the advantages of neutrality until the plans of the new community of nations, against which all belligerency will constitute rebellion, are sketched and approved.

Issues of enormous importance for both countries are involved in this controversy between Great Britain and the United States. Their geographical location, their industrial resources and their political responsibility establish them as the two most powerful maritime nations. If they reach an understanding their joint fleets will exercise an unquestionable control of the seas, and could be fashioned into an effective instrument of the police power which any genuine community of nations must possess. If they do not reach an understanding they may be forced into the ruinous expense and suicidal folly of a competition in naval armament. The first alternative is preferable to the second. The attainment of a frank and full understanding with Great Britain should become the fundamental object of American foreign policy. In spite of the domestic political obstacles the inexorable logic of facts will steadily push us in that direction. But advantageous as the coöperation would be, the United States cannot afford to surrender its policy of neutral isolation until some acceptable plan of common action is formulated and accepted. We could not participate in an alliance which would make of us an automatic accomplice to an international feud. If Great Britain consented to a policy at the end of the war which tended to convert the Quadruple Entente into a permanent conspiracy against the Central Powers, the United States would prefer a policy of armed isolation to one of political association with any European Power. We must wait and see. In the meantime the rights of American citizens under international law are the proper symbol and attribute of an independent political

status. They cannot be surrendered until Americans have some assurance that they are to be exchanged for something better.

[ocr errors]

Poltroons and Pacifists

F all sneers none is so carelessly thrown as the charge of cowardice. To call a man a coward is almost to obliterate him from discussion. The man who uses the term always implies that he himself, of course, is a brave man. He acquires at once a kind of moral superiority, and puts his opponent on the defensive. Caution and reason thus become

positive vices, every honest doubt is made the mark of a timid soul. Those who want twenty dreadnoughts regard as cowards those who want ten; the advocates of forty dreadnoughts look with scorn upon the advocates of twenty. Men who wish to prepare against one possible enemy are cowards in the eyes of those who wish to prepare against two possible enemies. The proposers of a much larger army are tinged with yellow in the eyes of the conscriptionists. In America we are fast getting into the frame of mind where the scale of courage is measured by what the wildest jingo proposes as the correct method of licking creation.

Since all men resent being known as cowards, the jingo has an enormous advantage in any argument. He bullies men into agreeing with him by playing on their fear of appearing to be cowardly. He hammers upon moral cowardice in order to drive people into an attitude of rhetorical bravery. It is an old, old trick, but it works. Take two elderly men both over military age. Let the rumor of war appear. The man who is ready to sacrifice other people's lives at short notice appears as the hero; the moderate person who resists the stampede and braves the denunciation for doing so, is somehow labelled coward. In the German Reichstag the men who upheld the war party could pose as the gallant pacifists; Liebknecht, who stood up unmoved against the storm, was put down a coward. But, by any just estimate, where was the courage and where the timidity? Who had that iron in his soul of which free men are made? In England there is now bitter discussion between those who want a sensible peace and those who will set no limits to their vengeance. Which position is the easy one, the soft one, the one of the mollycoddles? Which position requires courage, and which requires nothing but the willingness to drift with the current?

The courage of the battlefield and the courage of the editorial sanctum are not identical. Courage is not so simple a virtue. At a dinner table, in a drawing-room, on the stump, in the Senate, the easy attitude is to follow the loudest declamation, to go with, not against, the violence of the tribe. It involves usually no risk, and it is almost always a cheap way to approval. Yet there is no guarantee that the fiber of a people is sound because no one appears who is willing to risk the sneers of the angriest. It may be that the people who are ready to sacrifice popularity, to face ridicule, to stand out for reason and adjustment, are the people who really have the bravery that freedom requires. Not to be afraid of being called a coward has been often recognized as a high order of courage.

It would be a great gain if our military agitators would use words like coward and poltroon with more discrimination. They are not synonymous with a desire for peace, with an opposition to conscription, with a determination not to invade Mexico because some bandits have committed a crime. All men less violent than the most violent have not white hearts and yellow souls. All are not cowards who wish to weigh carefully the purpose of armaments that mean a break with the whole tradition of American life. All are not poltroons who insist upon analyzing the intention of those who wish to make us the greatest military nation on earth. All are not spineless who think that the honor of a democracy is not that of a Spanish grandee.

The cause of preparedness is not helped by floating it upon a stream of jingoism. Many of us think there are powerful reasons for re-defining American policy and preparing armaments to uphold it, but the cause is endangered and made odious by those who treat it as an issue between cowards and heroes. The military propagandists will, if they don't look out, have taken so extreme a position that the American people may regard them as a greater danger than any possible foreign enemy. They are feeding the deep and experienced suspicion of ordinary men that all armament leads to militarism, that any concession provokes the appetite of those who like the virtues of war better than the virtues of peace, who like military equipment for its own sake and propose to rule the nation in its interest.

There is in America to-day the beginning of that very military arrogance which we are told this war is being fought to abolish. It shows itself in contempt for all efforts toward peace, in programs of armament that are the vistas of a nightmare, in denunciation of the virtues that make a free and tolerant people, in a hatred of other points of view, in the attempt to haze and ostracise those who have different opinions, and in the assertion of a brittle, touchy impatience at the thought that anything human can be adjusted without slamming the table and rattling the windows.

The militarists are forcing the issue in such a way as to consolidate the opposition. If the American people have to choose between their virulence and

the amiable intentions of the official pacifists they will follow the pacifists. They will risk the Monroe Doctrine and American prestige in the East, they will prefer the defeat of a foreign policy in some future war to any proposal to deliver the country into the hands of those who in the last months have got deeper and deeper into their own violence. The real desire of Americans is to make a civilization in America. They will prepare what is necessary to defend that; they may even be induced to take a share in the policing of the world. But they do not want to be told that war is a gymnasium of the virtues; they know it to be the stinking thing that it is. They want no extra gold lace and no more tom-toms than are necessary. They do not wish to spend their energy in dreaming war games. If they have to fight they will do it sadly, and with as little bombast as possible. Their condemnation of Germany in this war is based on what they believe to be a dangerous military psychology in the rulers of Germany, and they are shrewd enough to detect and resent that same psychology when it crops up in America.

The Nemesis of Reform

D

ISILLUSIONMENT is the lot of the economic reformer. Here is a mountain basin with easy slopes and potentially fertile soil, desert for want of water that flows on the other side of a rocky ridge. We apply to the government to construct a tunnel and irrigation ditches; we agitate the project in season and out of season, and at last the rock drills are installed. We picture to ourselves the thousand pleasant homes sheltered, like that of Catullus, from north wind and west, and able to bid defiance to the scorching breath of the south. But what do we find a generation later, when the fructifying waters have become established in the order of nature? An agricultural population bowed down under the threatening blasts of foreclosure proceedings. When the first pick tapped the rock ridge, the speculators entered the valley. With each blast of dynamite the value of land rose until, upon the advent of the actual settlers, the virtues of the soil and the flow of water, the unfailing sunshine and the charm of the landscape had all been capitalized, transformed into a perpetual vested interest. The goal of economic equality and popular contentment had been advanced still further into remoteness.

A great city relies for its coal supply upon a distant mining district, and a conscienceless railway combination holds rates at an exorbitant figure. By infinite effort we secure laws for rate regulation, expecting the price of coal at the consumers' doors to come down. Instead the price goes up at the pit's mouth. The railways are impoverished and the

« PreviousContinue »