Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association Part 5

Likewise the Newfoundland fisheries case had been a bone of contention between Great Britain and America from the day our independence was recognized. As late as 1887 it threatened to become the cause of war.

No question ever arose which more vitally affected the interests of America, yet the Senate recently accepted a settlement by arbitration.

Similarly, the Alaska fur seal dispute, the Alaskan and the Venezuelan boundary disputes, and the northeast boundary controversy all involved both the vital interests and the national honor of England and America, yet all were satisfactorily and permanently arbitrated. So excited were we over our northwest boundary that the princ.i.p.al issue of a political campaign was "The whole of Oregon or none! Fifty-four forty or fight!" Yet we peaceably acquiesced in a treaty that gave us neither.

Yes, our honor may be arbitrated. If we are ill-prepared for war, we arbitrate. If we are sure of a favorable award, we arbitrate. But we must have a loophole, an ever-ready escape from obligation. Posing as the most enlightened nation on the face of the globe, we refuse entirely to displace those medieval notions according to which personal honor found its best protection in the dueling pistol, and national honor its only vindication in slaughter and devastation. To unlimited arbitration we refuse to submit.

Fifteen years ago England, the mighty England, gave us her pledge that no cause should ever justify war. This pledge our Senate in the name of honor refused. Unlimited arbitration agreements were suggested at both Hague Conferences. Americans promptly placed restrictions upon them in the name of honor. Again has England with enthusiasm just offered us unrestricted arbitration. Again she is repulsed by our Senate in the name of honor. France, too, bears to our doors an unqualified pledge of arbitration. France, too, is repulsed by our Senate in the name of honor. Germany and j.a.pan express a desire to settle every question at the bar of justice. Impelled by honor we pa.s.s their desire unheeded. Our Clevelands, our Olneys, our Edward Everett Hales, our Carl Schurzes, our John Hays, have all urged unlimited arbitration. Our Davises and Clarks and Platts and Quays in Senate seats have undone their work in the name of honor. Our Charles Eliots and Nicholas Butlers, our Albert Shaws and Hamilton Holts, now plead for universal peace through unlimited arbitration. Senators Bacon and Lodge and Heyburn and Hitchc.o.c.k, apparently impelled by const.i.tutional prerogative, party prejudice, or personal animosity, now cast their votes for limitations in the name of honor. From the platform of peace conferences, from the halls of colleges, from the pulpit and the bench, from the offices of bankers and merchants and manufacturers, from the press, with scarcely a column's exception, there arises a swelling plea for treaties of arbitration that know no exceptions. In the name of honor that plea is defied.

Honor? No, an ocean of exception large enough to float any number of battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor?

No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death!

Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the cloak of shrewd politics, the mask of false patriotism! National honor? No, national dishonor!

Before the nations of the world the United States stands to-day in an unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen years our government has refused to touch the barrier of national honor and vital interests. England and France have now laid this duty squarely at our door. "It is a social obligation as imperative as the law of Moses, as full of hope as the Great Physician's healing touch."

Let us here highly resolve that there shall be uttered a new official interpretation of national honor and vital interests, an interpretation synonymous with dignity and fidelity, sincerity, and integrity, and confidence in the vows both of men and of nations. "If we have 'faith in the right as G.o.d gives us to see the right,' we shall catch a vision of opportunity that shall fire the soul with a spirit of service which the darkness of night shall not arrest, which the course of the day shall not weary."

THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM

By PAUL B. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

First Prize Oration in the Central Group Contest, 1913, and in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913

THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM

Robert Southey has asked through the lips of a little child the greatest peace question that the world has known. He pictures a summer evening on the old battlefield of Blenheim. On a chair before his vine-clad cottage sat old Kaspar while his grandchildren, Wilhelmine and Peterkin, played on the lawn. Suddenly Peterkin from a nearby brook unearthed a skull and, running, brought it to Kaspar's knee. The old man took the gruesome thing from the boy, and told him that this had been the head of a man killed in the great battle of Blenheim.

Then little Wilhelmine looked up into her grandfather's face and said:

"Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for."

Here we have the central question in the problem of war. Why do men fight? Through the answer to that question lies the path to world-peace.

Few men fight to-day for glory. Modern militarism has no place for Lancelots and Galahads. The glory of the regiment has absorbed the glory of the individual. Few men fight to-day to gain great wealth.

The treasures that glittered before Pizarro do not tempt our soldiers.

Material wealth is more easily won in factory or farm or mill. Few men fight to-day for religion. The conquest of religion has become a conquest of peace; the very ideal of peace is an end of religion itself. Glory, wealth, religion--these are no longer the causes of war. Then why do men fight? The answer is obvious. Men fight to-day for patriotism. Patriotism is the cause of war.

The next step in our reasoning is more difficult. If patriotism is the cause of war, how shall we treat the cause to destroy the result?

Shall we attempt to abolish patriotism as Tolstoy would have us do, or shall we try to change its nature so that war as a natural result will be impossible? To answer these questions we must study patriotism from its very beginnings. We must ask: What is patriotism? Where did it come from? What place has it in our life?

Observe first the simplest cell of life, the amoeba. We can watch it through the microscope. It is so tiny that it keeps house in a drop of water. It has neither emotion nor consciousness, in the human sense.

It lives a while, and then splits in two to form other cells that have no connection with each other. Yet this infinitesimal bit of life has an instinct, the instinct to save itself. Watch an amoeba as fire is brought near. It immediately moves away. Its every act is regulated by this one instinct, self-preservation.

Now let us leave the microscope and go outdoors. Over there is a bird in a tree top, feeding its young in a nest. Suppose that a fire should suddenly consume the tree. Would the mother bird fly away in safety?

No, it would die on its nest in the effort to save its young. There is more than self-preservation here. The scientist will tell you that the instinct has expanded to include the preservation of the offspring.

And now turn to primitive man. The recent excavations in Suss.e.x will give us a picture of him. He is a wild, gorilla-like figure that creeps beneath the trees. He can leap with lightning force on his prey. He drapes his body with bearskins, and eats meat from fingers that end in claws. And yet with all his savage ferocity, this is more than an animal. This is a man. In his breast there stir the instincts of a man. In his life we see the vital element of patriotism, love.

His little savage family is more precious to him than all the world.

He will fight and die, not only for self-preservation but for those who to him are "brother and sister and mother." This is the stamp of the human. This is the potentially divine.

But as the storms of war beat about these little savage families, the sense of common danger welded them into one. Out of grim necessity friendship came, and friendship gave birth to patriotism. Loyalty and sacrifice were not limited to the family; men fought and died for their tribe.

And now let us turn the microscope upon ourselves. We would fight for our country. We say because we love our country. We call that feeling patriotism. It is more extended than the savage love of tribe; it gives loyalty to a great government and democratic principles. We speak of that feeling as divine, but it is terribly human. Its expression is the same harsh ferocity that inspired the life of the savage.

To-morrow America goes to war. In great black type we read the call for men, and a sense of common danger thrills us. In the evening by a street lamp's glare we watch a pa.s.sionate agitator who points to a flag that we have learned to love. The tramp, tramp of pa.s.sing regiments and the sound of martial music thrill us. We lay down our tool or pen and march to the front. And then comes the first engagement. The air is blackened with rifle smoke; the roar of cannonry deafens us. Dazed, we crouch behind an earthwork while the enemy creeps through the smoke. Suddenly they charge. We fire, but they surge on through the smoke. They mount the earthwork. We leap together! Men scream hoa.r.s.ely! Musket b.u.t.ts crash! Daggers plunge into quivering flesh! Divine feeling! Glorious patriotism!

The pa.s.sing of this savage patriotism is inevitable. The whole course of nature is against it. The very history of development will tell you that. Loyalty has never been an immutable thing. It has been a ceaseless and irresistible growth from the individual to the family, to the tribe, to the nation. The time for a world-patriotism has come.

Why should men limit their loyalty by a row of stones and trees that we call a boundary? Why are men patriots, anyway, except to save their privileges and their government? The primitive patriot had no choice but to fight. He was put down in a little plot of cleared ground hemmed in by mighty forests, and made to hew out a home in a vast world of enemies. But how far we have come from him! The twentieth-century world is a little world. Our earth is like an open book. We have cut through the jungle wastes of Africa; we have photographed the poles. We sell and buy things from Greenland and Java. In such a civilization war-patriotism has no place. It is no longer the only guide to self-preservation; it has become the most terrible instrument of self-destruction. And for just this reason war-patriotism must go. It runs counter to the whole trend of nature itself. It is diametrically opposed to the mission of patriotism in the world. Just as those little savage families joined hands in tribal loyalty, just as the scattered clans and tribes united under national government, so nations must clasp hands around the globe in a new spirit of "worldism" that shall make war impossible.

But we cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?"

you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem of the world-spirit of to-morrow. But the blossom will not burst forth in a night. It must come by an unfolding and a growth. We cannot climb to universal peace upon a golden ladder and cut the rungs beneath us.

Evolution builds on the past. The final spirit of "worldism" will be a broadening and a deepening and a humanizing of the spirit of sacrifice which is the n.o.blest element in our patriotism.

"But," you ask, "if the evolution of patriotism is inevitable, what have we to do with it? Why should we meddle with the course of nature?" We reply that the evolution must come through you. We are not "puppets jerked by unseen wires." "Consciousness," says Bergson, "is essentially free." Man the savage or man the philosopher--he alone can decide. Let him purify patriotism with Christianity and he has brotherhood; adulterate it with avarice and he has war. The evolution of patriotism is not a physical thing. Listen to Huxley, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the subst.i.tution for it of the ethical process." The evolution of patriotism, then, is a moral thing, and morality is man-made. We are men, but we can be supermen. We are patriots of a nation. We can be patriots of the world.

The evolution of patriotism is no theorist's dream. It is a palpable fact. The patriot of one age may be the scoundrel of the next. A turn of the kaleidoscope and Paul the convict trades places with Nero the Emperor. Who was the ideal ancient patriot? The statesman, Pericles?

The thinker, Plato? No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy.

"I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains.

What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over prostrate lives and dead hopes and shattered empires, the blind age cries out, "O G.o.dlike Alexander!"

"G.o.dlike!" Oh, but there's new meaning in that word to-day. How much n.o.bler a picture our modern patriot presents! Not waving the brand of destruction, not a king of murder will you find the great patriot of to-day. His thunderbolt of conquest was a host of righteousness. His empire was built in the hearts of men. In the teeming slums of the world's greatest city he lifted the standard of the Christ. Haggard children stretched out hands for bread. He fed them with his last crust. Thousands were dying in the city's filth. He pointed them to a more Beautiful City where pain should be no more. And when the body of William Booth was borne through the silent throngs of London streets, a million heads were bowed in reverence to this patriot of a purer day. In every hamlet of civilization some heart called him G.o.dlike.

Is not the trend of patriotism clear? Are not the seeds of a new world-loyalty already in our soil? The trumpet call to war can never rouse this newer patriotism. The summons "peace on earth and good will to men"--that is the future bugle call. And for us the task is clear.

To take our destiny into our own hands, to throw off the prejudices of nationalism, to turn our faces resolutely to the future and strive for that summit of brotherhood and universal peace, that

"One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

CERTAIN PHASES OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT

By CALVERT MAGRUDER, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland

First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1913, and Second Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913

CERTAIN PHASES OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We are gathered here this evening in the confident expectation that a rule of reason will soon be established among the nations. It has been a hard, at times almost a discouraging, fight--for it is difficult to convince the world of its own insanity, and lovers of peace have often been tempted to cry in their despair, "How long, O Lord, how long?"