Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 9

CHAPTER V

_The system of national defense for every nation must be adapted to the conditions and needs of that nation. All nations are not alike. Each has its distinct problems. The solution, in each case, must be fitted to the nation and its people. There is no system now in operation in any other country that could be fitted as a whole to the United States. A system must be devised that will be applicable to the needs and conditions of this country._

The Swiss system is ideal for Switzerland. A mountaineer is a soldier by nature. Switzerland has a soldierly citizenry and can mobilize it instantly as a citizen soldiery. The Swiss system would have fitted Belgium in spots, but not as a whole. It is adapted to a rural people, who are individually independent and self-sustaining, but not to a manufacturing community, where the people cannot exist without the factory, or the factory without the people.

It would be impracticable to adopt the Swiss system as a whole in the United States. It would fit some communities but not others. Military training would be beneficial to all boys, but our public school system is controlled by the States, counties, and local districts, and not by the nation. To adapt it to the Swiss system of universal military training in the public schools will require a propaganda to educate public sentiment that will necessitate years of patient work. A generation will pa.s.s before we will be able to mobilize a force for national defense from Reservists who will have received their military training in the public schools.

A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled the industries of the country by depriving them of the labor necessary to their operation. In the United States, one of the most urgent reasons for having an automatically acting system of national defense perfectly organized in advance and ready in case of emergency, is to insure the continuance of the industries of the country without interruption, and to prevent any industrial depression or interference with the prosperity of the country.

A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled industries by drawing away their labor.

It would cause serious industrial derangement to mobilize an army of citizen soldiers from men already enlisted in the ranks of labor in mill, shop, factory, or mine. Besides that, the majority of them have families, and live from hand to mouth with nothing between them and starvation but the pay envelope Sat.u.r.day night. The impracticability of recruiting soldiers or mobilizing a reserve force from wage earners or clerical employees with families dependent on their earnings for their living, must always be borne in mind.

In Switzerland, the active, out-of-door life of the people makes the majority of them rugged and vigorous. They have st.u.r.dy legs and strong arms. They are sound, "wind, limb, and body." They are already inured to the work of a soldier's life and its duties, any moment they may be called to the colors.

In this country the life of the apartments, flats, and tenements, and the frivolous, immoral, and deteriorating influences and evil environments of congested cities, are sapping the vitality of our people, and rapidly transforming them into a race of mental and physical weaklings and degenerates. Even now the great majority of them utterly lack the physical hardihood and vigor without which a soldier would not be worth the cost of his arms and equipment.

It would overtax most city clerks and factory workers to walk to and from the football or baseball games that const.i.tute our chief national pastime.

About the only thing to which they are really inured is to sit on benches, for hours at a time, and to yell, loud and long, to add zest to games that are being played by others. It has been most truly said that "We are not a nation of athletes, we are a nation of Rooters." Many of our devotees of commercialized sport would perhaps be able to yell loud enough to scare the enemy off in case of war, but they would not be able to march to the battlefields where this soldierly aid might be required. A special automobile service would have to be provided for their transportation.

Think of this the next time you see a howling mob of fans or rooters at a baseball or football game, and "Lest we forget," think also of England's lesson when she undertook to enlist soldiers from such a citizenry. Then consider very seriously whether you don't think we had better in this country create some communities of real men, like the Homecrofters of Scotland. There are many rural neighborhoods in Scotland from which every man of military age enlisted when the call came for soldiers to fight to sustain Britain's Empire power in this last great war.

Do we want a citizen soldiery composed of such men as those who, since 1794, have served in the ranks of the Gordon Highlanders, or composed of such men as the Gardeners of j.a.pan, who wrested Port Arthur from the Russians, or do we want to depend on a national militia of citizen soldiers enrolled from among the pink-cheeked dudelets and mush-faced weaklings from the apartments, flats, and tenements of our congested cities or factory towns, whose highest ambition is to smoke cigarettes, ape a fashion plate, or stand and gape at a baseball score on a bulletin board? They like that sort of sport, because they can enjoy it standing still. It necessitates no physical exertion. If they could ever be induced to enlist as soldiers, their feet would be too sore to walk any farther, before they had marched forty miles. A day's work with a shovel, digging a trench, would send most of them to the hospital with strained muscles and lame backs. And yet, trench-digging seems to be the most important part of a soldier's duty in these days of civilized warfare, when the machinery for murder by wholesale has been so splendidly perfected.

If we are going to have a citizen soldiery in this country, the first thing we had better set about is to produce a soldierly citizenry--a race of men with the physical vigor of the Swiss Mountaineers, or of the men who founded our own nation, who fought the battles of the Revolution, who dyed with their red blood the white snows of Valley Forge, who marched through floods and floating ice up to their armpits to the capture of Fort Vincennes, who floated down the Ohio River on rafts or walked down the Wilderness Road with Boone, who fought Indians, broke prairie, traversed the waterless deserts, and conquered the wilderness from the crest of the Alleghenies to the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific, sustained by the strong women who stood by their sides and shared their hardships.

The weakness of the United States as a nation to-day, a weakness much more deeply rooted than mere military unpreparedness, lies in the fact that as a nation we have no national ideals that rise above commercialism, no national ambitions beyond making or controlling money, which the devotees of Mammon delight to call "Practicing the Arts of Peace."

Manhood and womanhood are being utterly sacrificed to mere money-making.

National wealth is calculated in units of dollars, and not in units of citizenship. To acc.u.mulate wealth is the controlling ambition of our people, and not to perpetuate the strong racial type from which we are all descended.

Not only is the original st.u.r.dy American Anglo-Saxon stock being degenerated, but we are bringing to our sh.o.r.es millions of the strong and vigorous races from Southern and Eastern Europe, and crowding them into tenements and slums to rot, both physically and mentally. That cancer is eating away the heart and corrupting the very lifeblood of this nation.

Those conditions would soon be changed if the ma.s.s of our people, and particularly Organized Capital and Organized Labor, would place Humanity above Money.

Capital thinks only of Dividends. Labor thinks only of Wages. Neither gives the slightest heed to making this a nation of Rural Homes and thereby perpetuating the racial strength and virility of the people of the nation.

That can only be done by providing a right life environment for all wageworkers and their families, particularly the children. A home for a family is not ent.i.tled to be called a home, unless it is both an individual home and a garden home. It must be a Homecroft--a home with an abundance of sunshine and fresh air, in decent, sanitary surroundings--a home with a piece of ground about it from which in time of stress or unemployment the family can get its living by its labor, and thereby enjoy economic independence.

Industry will destroy humanity unless a national system of life is universally adopted that will prevent racial deterioration. The only way that can be done is by a nation-wide abandonment of the artificial and degenerate life of the congested cities. The people must be educated and trained so that they will desert the flats and tenements as rats would abandon a sinking ship.

Our first great national undertaking should be the creation of a national system of life that will realize the ideals of the Homecroft Slogan:

"Every Child in a Garden, Every Mother in a Homecroft, and Individual Industrial Independence For every worker in a Home of his own on the Land."

Unless the united power of the people as a whole is soon put forth to check the physical and racial deterioration now going on at such an appalling rate among the ma.s.ses of our wageworkers,--the result of the wrong conditions that surround their lives,--nothing can prevent the eventual ruin of this nation. We are already on the downward course along which Rome swept to the abyss of human degeneracy in which she was at last destroyed by the same causes that are so widely at work in this country to-day.

Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions.

They cannot shirk that responsibility. They cannot evade the fact that the menace against which we most need national defense arises from the degeneracy that we are breeding in our midst. If we cannot do both, we had far better spend our national energies and revenues in fighting the evils that are rotting our citizenship, than in building forts and fortifications or maintaining a navy and an army for defense against the remote possibility of attacks by other nations.

We hear much of the danger to New York from such an attack. New York is in far greater danger from the criminal, immoral, evil, and degenerating forces that she is nursing in her own bosom than she is from any military force that might be landed on our sh.o.r.es by a foreign invader. The enemies she has most to fear are her own Gunmen and Bomb-throwers; Black-handers and White-Slavers; Apaches, Dope Fiends, Gamblers, and Gangsters; Tenement House Landlords; Out-of-Works, and all the breeders of poverty, crime, insanity, disease, and human misery that are rampant in her midst,--the direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has herself created and for which she alone is responsible.

This is no overdrawn picture. It is only the briefest possible outline of the evil conditions which less than a century of the Service of Mammon has bred in that mighty metropolis. Everyone who reads the newspapers which reflect the daily events of New York City will appreciate how impossible it is to portray in words the depth of degradation to which a great ma.s.s of humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon--rich as well as poor.

The invasion that New York City should most fear, that of Vice and Crime and Degeneracy, has been accomplished. They have captured the outer fortifications and are intrenched within the citadel. The Goths are not _at_ the gates,--they are _within_ the gates.

Uncle Sam has transformed the wild Apaches of the Southwest into steady and industrious laborers who have done yeoman work with the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service in Arizona. New York is now breeding, in her modern canyons and cliff dwellings, a more bloodthirsty, cruel, and treacherous race of Apaches than were ever bred amid the mountain fastnesses and forbidding deserts of the Southwest.

Do not these domestic enemies const.i.tute a more immediate danger than any foreign enemy?

The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow our imaginations, is still in the remote distance--a future possibility, not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast.

_The greatest merit of the plan for national defense advocated in this book is that it will safeguard against danger from these domestic enemies, who are already in our midst, at the same time that it will safeguard, in the only adequate way yet proposed, against war or any possibility of a foreign invasion._

Many see the danger of a social or political cataclysm resulting from the saturnalia of degeneracy, disease, and crime that is being bred by tenement life and congested cities. Unfortunately they see no remedy for it but a stronger central government and a bigger standing army.

This desire for a standing army to protect against internal social or industrial disturbance leads to enthusiastic advocacy, on any pretext whatever, for a bigger army and navy whenever opportunity is presented. If the truth were known, the majority of those who so vigorously advocate a bigger and still bigger army and navy, are prompted by fear of an enemy in our midst, arising from human degeneracy in cities or from social or labor conflicts, more than by any danger of conflict with another nation.

The men who have built our great congested cities have undermined the pillars of the temple of our national strength and safety. Now they want protection from the consequences of their own work, which they so justly fear. They want this nation to adopt the Roman System, which finally worked Rome's destruction. They want soldiers hired to protect them because they fear the consequences of the things they have done, just to make money, and they cannot protect themselves from the dangers their own greed for wealth, at any cost to humanity, has created.

The inevitable result of the establishment of such a system of national defense as they advocate would be a military oligarchy. Combined with our present money oligarchy, it would be politically invincible. In some great internal crisis or social and political disturbance, all power would be centralized and our government would be transformed into a military autocracy. From that time on we would follow in the footsteps of Rome to our certain doom as a people and a nation.

It is a curious fact that this desire for protection from internal disturbance by a hired standing army comes from the very cla.s.s in the United States which was, at the last, in Rome, ground between the upper and the nether millstones--between the army above and the proletariat below--in the final working out of the Roman System. The proscriptions of the Roman Emperors, to propitiate their armies, are forgotten by the modern patricians who clamor for a large standing army.

The patrician cla.s.s in this country, who are now in their hearts praying for a strong centralized military government,--patiently and persistently planning for it, and making steady progress, too,--are the very cla.s.s whose estates were confiscated, and their owners proscribed and executed by thousands to enable the Roman Emperors to appropriate their wealth and from that source satisfy the demands of the Army. The Army had to be rewarded for their services in conferring the purple on the Emperor, which they did by virtue of their military control of the government. It was the Army who made and unmade Emperors. The Emperors bought the Army with money and bribed the populace with feasts and games. The money to do both was obtained by the proscription and plunder of the wealthy patricians, the same cla.s.s which in our time is now trying so hard to establish a gilded caste in New York and other great centers of wealth and a strong military government for this nation.

Whatever system of national defense is to be adopted in the United States, it must be a system in which the people themselves, as citizens and not as professional soldiers, furnish the human material for national defense. The people must control our army of citizen soldiery so absolutely that it can never be turned against their personal liberties or property rights. Let us heed the warning of Rome. It is none too soon. Let us beware of either confiscation or proscription as an evolution from a military government to a military despotism.

Switzerland alone, of all the civilized nations, and the smallest of them all, stands to-day a living demonstration of the National Spirit and the National System of Universal Service to their Country that should be adopted by all the nations of the world, to the fullest extent that it can be made applicable to their conditions. The Swiss System provides adequate national defense by the entire citizenship of the nation. Any subversion of the people's liberties through the power of the Army is impossible because the people themselves const.i.tute the Army.

Australia has already adopted the Swiss System, substantially, and in consequence will escape the danger of military domination which will fasten itself on this country if our system of national defense is to consist only of a steadily increasing standing army. If we are to escape that danger we must never lose sight of the chief merit of the Swiss System, which is that every citizen partic.i.p.ates in it and is affected by it, and we must as nearly as possible adapt it to the conditions existing in this country.

There are many lessons that we might learn from the Swiss to our great national advantage.

If the Spirit of Switzerland, the self-reliant independence of her people, and their physical and mental vigor, individually and collectively, her national motto "All for each and each for all," dominated a nation of 100,000,000 people, like the United States, with an area of 2,973,890 square miles, exclusive of Alaska, as it does a nation of something less than 4,000,000 people, with an area of only 15,976 square miles, that Spirit and that System of national defense would soon become the universal system of the world.

The most dangerous military system for any nation, large or small, is a standing army large enough to invite attack, but not strong enough to repel it. That was the system of Belgium, and to that fact is due the destruction of Belgium. It is the present system of the United States. The most striking feature of our unpreparedness for war is the fact that it would be hopelessly impossible to defend ourselves against invasion without an army so huge as to dwarf our present army into insignificance.

The Swiss System is the best for Switzerland and is no doubt the best for Australia, but when adapting it, so far as may be practicable, to the conditions existing in the United States, we must not fall into the error of a.s.suming that numerical strength is the only thing necessary in calculating the strength of an army. Soldiers alone are not all that a nation needs for defense, no matter how well they may be trained and equipped, or drilled and officered, or supplemented by naval strength or fortifications. The foundations on which national defense must be built are social, economic, and human. The question involves every element of the problem of preserving and perpetuating even-handed justice to all, social stability, economic strength and independence, a patriotic citizenship, and a rugged, stalwart, and virile race.

The population of Switzerland is less than that of the city of London, but if London were a nation by itself, with its congested population, human degeneration, artificial life, moral decay, and economic dependence, it would be impossible of defense from a military point of view.

Just exactly in the proportion that the United States gathers its population into great cities, does it court the same elements of weakness, but with this practical difference. London, being a part of the British Empire, is safeguarded by the whole civil and military power of that nation. Our great seaboard cities, being a part of the United States, are practically defenseless, because our people have no system or policy of national defense. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in the event of an attack by the invading military forces of any of the Great Powers, would be surrendered just as Brussels and Antwerp were surrendered, to save them from destruction, if for no other reason.

CHAPTER VI