New York Times Current History The European War From The Beginning To March Part 35

* War is in itself a good thing. It is a biological necessity of the first importance. (P. 18.)

* The inevitableness, the idealism, the blessing of war as an indispensable and stimulating law of development must be repeatedly emphasized. (P. 37.)

* War is the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power. Efforts to secure peace are extraordinarily detrimental as soon as they influence politics. (P. 28.)

* Fortunately these efforts can never attain their ultimate objects in a world bristling with arms, where healthy egotism still directs the policy of most countries. G.o.d will see to it, says Treitschke, that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race. (P. 36.)

* Efforts directed toward the abolition of war are not only foolish, but absolutely immoral, and must be stigmatized as unworthy of the human race. (P. 34.)

* Courts of arbitration are pernicious delusions. The whole idea represents a presumptuous encroachment on natural laws of development, which can only lead to the most disastrous consequences for humanity generally. (P. 34.)

* The maintenance of peace never can be or may be the goal of a policy.

* Efforts for peace would, if they attained their goal, lead to general degeneration, as happens everywhere in nature where the struggle for existence is eliminated. (P. 35.)

* Huge armaments are in themselves desirable. They are the most necessary precondition of our national health. (P. 11.)

* The end all and be all of a State is power, and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with politics, (quoted from Treitschke's "Politik").

* The State's highest moral duty is to increase its power. (P.

45-6.)

* The State is justified in making conquests whenever its own advantage seems to require additional territory. (P. 46.)

* Self-preservation is the State's highest ideal and justifies whatever action it may take if that action be conducive to that end. The State is the sole judge of the morality of its own action.

It is, in fact, above morality, or, in other words, whatever is necessary is moral. Recognized rights (i.e., treaty rights) are never absolute rights; they are of human origin, and, therefore, imperfect and variable. There are conditions in which they do not correspond to the actual truth of things. In this case infringement of the right appears morally justified. (P. 49.)

* In fact, the State is a law unto itself. Weak nations have not the same right to live as powerful and vigorous nations. (P. 34.)

* Any action in favor of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible. (P. 25.)

A Doctrine 2,200 Years Old.

These are startling propositions, though propounded as practically axiomatic. They are not new, for twenty-two centuries ago the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato's "Republic" argued--Socrates refuting him--that justice is nothing more than the advantage of the stronger; might is right.

[_Note.--Plato laid down that the end for which the State exists is justice._]

The most startling among them are (1) denial that there are any duties owed by the State to humanity, except that of imposing its own superior civilization upon as large a part of humanity as possible, and (2) denial of the duty of observing treaties which are only so much paper to modern German writers.

The State is a much more tremendous ent.i.ty than it is to Englishmen or Americans; it is the supreme power, with a sort of mystic sanct.i.ty--a power conceived of, as it were, self-created; a force altogether distinct from and superior to the persons who compose it. But a State is, after all, only so many individuals organized under a Government. It is no wiser, no more righteous than the human beings of whom at consists, and whom it sets up to govern it. If it is right for persons united as citizens into a State to rob and murder for their collective advantage by their collective power, why should it be wicked for citizens, as individuals, to do so? Does their moral responsibility cease when and because they act together? Most legal systems hold that there are acts which one man may lawfully do which become unlawful if done by a number of men conspiring together; but now it would seem that what would be a crime in persons as individuals, is high policy for those persons united in a State. Has the State, then, no morality, no responsibility? Is there no such thing as a common humanity? Are there no duties owed to it? Is there none of that "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," which the framers of the Declaration of Independence recognized? No sense that even the greatest States are amenable to the sentiment of the civilized world?

How Weaker States Are Affected.

Let us see how these doctrines affect smaller and weaker States which have hitherto lived in comparative security beside great powers. They will be absolutely at the mercy of the stronger, even if protected by treaties guaranteeing their neutrality and independence. They will not be safe, for treaty obligations are worthless "when they do not correspond to facts," i.e., when the strong power finds that they stand in its way its interests are paramount.

If a State hold valuable minerals, as Sweden has iron, and Belgium coal, and Rumania oil, or if it has abundance of water power, like Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland; or if it holds the mouth of a navigable river, the upper course of which belongs to another nation, a great State may conquer and annex that small State as soon as it finds that it needs minerals or water power or river mouth. It has the power, and power gives right. The interests, sentiments of patriotism, and love of independence of the small people go for nothing. Civilization has turned back upon itself; culture is to expand itself by barbaric force; Governments derive their authority, not from the consent of the governed, but from the weapons of the conqueror; law and morality between nations have vanished. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians worshipped as their G.o.d a naked sword; that is the deity to be installed in the place once held by the G.o.d of Christianity, the G.o.d of righteousness and mercy.

States--mostly despotic States--have sometimes applied parts of this system of doctrine; but none have proclaimed it. The Roman conquerors of the world were not a scrupulous people, but even they stopped short of these principles; certainly they never set them up as an ideal; neither did those magnificent Teutonic Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose fame Gen. von Bernhardi is fond of recalling. They did not enter Italy as conquerors, claiming her by right of the strongest; they came on the faith of a legal t.i.tle which, however fantastic it may seem to us today, the Italians themselves, and, indeed, the whole of Latin Christendom, admitted. Dante, the greatest and most patriotic of Italians, welcomed the Emperor Henry VII. into Italy, and wrote a famous book to prove his claims, vindicating them on the ground that he, as heir of Rome, stood for law and right and peace. The n.o.blest t.i.tle which these Emperors chose to bear was that of Imperator Pacificus.

In the Middle Ages, when men were always fighting, they appreciated the blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war is the true civilizing influence.

Great Achievements of Small States.

The doctrines above stated are, as I have tried to point out, well calculated to alarm small States which prize their liberty and their individuality, and have been thriving under the safeguard of treaties; but there are other considerations affecting those States which ought to appeal to men in all countries, to strong nations as well as to weak nations.

The small States whose absorption is now threatened have been a potent and useful--perhaps the most potent and useful--factor in the advance of civilization. It is in them and by them that most of what is most precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in art has been produced.

The first great thoughts that brought man into true relation with G.o.d came from a tiny people inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished; the religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form which has overspread the world.

The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great State, but scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each with its own life. Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of all literatures.

When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages, their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.

In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpa.s.sing those of all other countries save Italy?

So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Bjornson; scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.

England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece. In the most brilliant generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real German State at all, but a congeries of princ.i.p.alities and free cities--independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.

Culture Decayed in Imperial Rome.

No fiction is more palpably contradicted by history than that relied on by the school to which von Bernhardi belongs--that culture, literary, scientific, and artistic, flourishes best in great military States. The decay of art and literature in the Roman world began just when Rome's military power had made that world one great and ordered State. The opposite view would be much nearer the truth, though one must admit that no general theory regarding the relations of art and letters to Governments and political conditions has ever yet been proved to be sound.

[_Note--Gen. von Bernhardi's knowledge of current history may be estimated by the fact that he a.s.sumes_ (1) _that trade rivalry makes war probable between Great Britain and the United States;_ (2) _that he believes that the Indian princes and peoples are likely to revolt against Great Britain should she be involved in war, and_ (3) _that he expects her self-governing colonies to take such an opportunity of severing their connection with her._]

The world is already too uniform and is becoming more uniform every day.

A few leading languages, a few forms of civilization, a few types of character, are spreading out from the seven or eight greatest States and extinguishing weaker languages, forms, and types. Although great States are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a misfortune for the world's future development.

We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for that extinction, but we certainly ought not strengthen them. Rather we ought to maintain and defend the smaller States and to favor the rise and growth of new peoples. Not merely because they were delivered from the tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time develop out of their present crude conditions new types of culture, new centres of productive intellectual life.

Gen. von Bernhardi invokes history as the ultimate court of appeal. He appeals to Caesar; to Caesar let him go. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht", ("World history is world tribunal.") History declares that no nation, however great, is ent.i.tled to try to impose its type of civilization on others. No race, not even the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, is ent.i.tled to claim the leadership of humanity. Each people has in its time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had established its permanent ascendency.

We of the Anglo-Saxon race do not claim for ourselves, any more than we admit in others, any right to dominate by force or to impose our own type of civilization on less powerful races. Perhaps we have not that a.s.sured conviction of its superiority which the school of von Bernhardi expressed for the Teutons of North Germany. We know how much we owe, even within our own islands, to the Celtic race; and, though we must admit that peoples of Anglo-Saxon stock have, like others, made some mistakes and sometimes abused their strength, let it be remembered what have been the latest acts they have done abroad.

Praises American Altruism.

The United States have twice withdrawn their troops from Cuba, which they could easily have retained; they have resisted all temptations to annex any part of the territories of Mexico, in which the lives and property of their citizens were for three years in constant danger. So Great Britain also six years ago restored the amplest self-government to two South African republics, having already agreed to the maintenance on equal terms of the Dutch language; and the citizens of those republics, which were in arms against her thirteen years ago, have now spontaneously come forward to support her by arms under the gallant leader who then commanded the Boers; and I may add that one reason why the Princes of India have rallied so promptly and heartily to Great Britain in this war is because for many years past we have avoided annexing the territories of those Princes, allowing them to adopt heirs when the successors of their own families failed, and leaving to them as much as possible of the ordinary functions of government.

Service the Test of Greatness.

It is only vulgar minds that mistake bigness for greatness; for greatness is of the soul, not of the body. In the judgment which history will hereafter pa.s.s upon the forty centuries of recorded progress toward civilization that now lie behind us, what are the tests it will apply to determine the true greatness of a people? Not population, not territory, not wealth, not military power; rather will history ask what examples of lofty character and unselfish devotion to honor and duty has a people given? What has it done to increase the volume of knowledge? What thoughts and what ideals of permanent value and unexhausted fertility has it bequeathed to mankind? What works has it produced in poetry, music, and other arts to be an unfailing source of enjoyment to posterity? The small peoples need not fear the application of such tests.

The world advances, not, as the Bernhardi school supposes, only or even mainly by fighting; it advances mainly by thinking and by the process of reciprocal teaching and learning; by the continuous and unconscious co-operation of all its strongest and finest minds. Each race--h.e.l.lenic, Italic, Celtic, Teutonic, Iberian, Slavonic--has something to give, each something to learn; and when their blood is blended the mixed stock may combine gifts of both. Most progressive races have been those who combined willingness to learn with strength, which enabled them to receive without loss to their own quality, retaining their primal vigor, but entering into the labors of others, as the Teutons who settled within the dominions of Rome profited by the lessons of the old civilization.

Let me disclaim once more before I close, any intention to attribute to the German people the principles set forth by the school of Treitschke and Bernhardi--the school which teaches hatred of peace and arbitration, disregard of treaty obligations, scorn for weaker peoples.