What Shall We Say?
I
WHAT shall we say as to ‘ free ships ’ and the Panama Canal? If our nation has agreed to treat all ships alike, including our own, let us stand by that agreement. Of violation of treaties we have been more than once accused. If we know what we have promised, let us stand by it, even though it seems strange that we cannot ‘throw our money to the birds’ while every other nation is free to do it.
But why ‘throw our money to the birds’? Do ‘the birds’ require it or appreciate it? What claim have coastwise steamships of the United States to use our canal at the expense of the American people? But these are ‘our ships,’ we say. Since when have they become ‘our ships’? Have the New York and London capitalists who own them ever turned them over to us? Have they ever agreed to divide their profits with those who make great profits possible? The great enemy of democracy is privilege. To grant any sort of concession, having money value, without a corresponding return, is ‘privilege.’ The granting of privilege in the past has been the source of most of the great body of political evils from which the civilized world suffers to-day.
While declaiming against privilege, even while exalting its curtailment as the greatest of national issues to-day, we start new privileges without hesitation. We throw into the hands of an unknown group of men, to become sooner or later a shipping trust, a vast unknown and increasing sum of money, extorted by indirect taxation from the people of this country. No accounting is asked from them; no returns for our generosity. We give them yearly, to begin with, as much as an American laborer can earn in twelve thousand years; in other words, we place at their service, and at our own expense, twelve thousand of our workingmen. From our tax-roll we pass over to them the payments each year of thirty thousand families. And all because these are ‘our ships.’ ‘Our ships’; we have here the primal fallacy of privilege, a fallacy dominant the world over, the leading agent in the impending bankruptcy of this spendthrift world.
In Europe and America, taxes have doubled in the last fifteen years, and half of this extra tax has gone to build up ‘our ships,’ ‘our bankers,’ ‘our commerce,’ ‘our manufactures,’ ‘our promoters,’ ‘our defense,’ in nation after nation, while ‘the man lowest down,’ who bears the brunt of this taxation, is never called on to share its benefits. The ships that bear our flag in order to go through our canal at our expense are not ‘ our ships.’ By the very fact of free tolls, we know them for the ships of our enemy; for the arch-enemy of democracy is privilege.
II
As teachers of private and to some extent of public morals, what shall we say to the gigantic parade on the Hudson of miles on miles of war vessels on their way from the tax bureau to the junk-shop?
Let us look on this mighty array of ships, splendidly equipped and manned by able and worthy men, the whole never to be needed, and never under any conceivable circumstances to be other than a burden and a danger to the nation which displays it.
We are told that a purpose of this pageant of the ships is to ‘popularize the navy.’ This may mean to get us used to it, and to paying for it — which is the chief function of the people in these great affairs. Or it may mean to work upon the public imagination so that we may fill the vacancies in the corps of sailors and marines who ‘glare at us through their absences.’
By all means let us popularize the navy. It is our navy; we have paid for it; and it is for the people to do what they please with it. ‘For, after all, this is the people’s country.’ And perhaps we could bring it nearer to our hearts and thoughts if we should paint on the white side of each ship, its cost in taxes, in the blood and sweat of workingmen, in the anguish of ‘ the man lowest down.’
There is the good ship North Dakota, for example. Her cost is almost exactly the year’s earning of the prosperous state for which she is named. The fine dreadnoughts who fear nothing while the nation is in its senses, and in war nothing but a torpedo-boat or an aerobomb, — it would please the workingman to know that his wages for twenty thousand years would purchase a ship of this kind, and that the wages of sixteen hundred of his fellows each year would keep it trim and afloat. As the procession moves by, he will see ships that have cost as much as the universities of Cornell or Yale or Princeton or Wisconsin, and almost as much as Harvard or Columbia, and on the flag-ship at the last these figures might be summed up, the whole costing as much as an American workman would earn, perhaps, in two million years, a European workman in four million, and an Asiatic in eight million; as much, let us say, as all the churches, ministers, and priests in the Christian world have cost in half a century. These figures may not be all correct. It would require an expert statistician to make them so. But it would be worth while.
If all this is needed to insure the peace it endangers, by all means let us have it. There is no cost which we cannot afford to pay, if honorable peace is at stake. But let us be convinced that peace is really at stake, and that this is the means to secure it. There are some who think that Christian fellowship, the demands of commerce, and a civil tongue in a foreign office, do more for a nation’s peace than any show of force.
‘Man,’ observes Bernard Shaw, ‘is the only animal that esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.’
III
What shall we say, as lovers of peace, in face of the Balkan War? Is it true that while Serbs are Serbs, and Greeks are Greeks, and Turks are Turks, ‘it must needs be that offenses come’? Is it not true that while Turks rule aliens for the money to be extorted, there can be no peace between them and their subjects or their neighbors?
It is not necessary for us to answer these questions. They belong to history rather than to morals. The progress of events will take our answer from our lips. The problem comes to us too late for any act of ours to be effective. The stage was set, the actors chosen long before our day and generation. Our part is to strive for peace: first, to do away with causes for war; second, to lead people to look to war as the last, and not the first, remedy for national wrongs or national disagreements. Most wars have their origin in the evil passions of men, and no war could take place if both sides were sincerely desirous of honorable peace.
No doubt, the Balkan situation could have been controlled for peace by the ‘concert of powers’ in Europe, were it not that no such concert exists. The instruments are out of tune and time. So long as foreign offices are alike controlled by the interests of great exploiting and competing corporations, they can never stand for good morals and good order. If they could, the Turkish rule of violence would have ceased long ago.
Those who fight against war cannot expect to do away with it in a year or a century, especially when it is urged on by five hundred years of crime and discord. The roots of the Balkan struggle lie back in the Middle Ages, and along mediaeval lines the fight is likely to be conducted. ‘The right to rule without the duty to protect’ is the bane of all Oriental imperialism. Meanwhile, our own task is to help to moderernize the life of the world; to raise, through democracy, the estimate of the value of men’s lives; to continue, through our day, the enduring revolt of civilization against ‘obsolete forms of servitude, tyranny, and waste.’
The immediate purpose of the Peace Movement is, through public opinion and t hrough international law, to exalt order above violence, and to take war out of the foreground of the ‘international mind’ in the event of disputes between races and nations. No movement forward can succeed all at once. Evil habit and false education have left the idea of war and glory too deeply ingrained. Men, law-abiding and patient, willing to hear both sides, have never yet been in the majority. Yet their influence steadily grows in weight. The influence of science and arts, of international fellowship, of common business interests, small business as well as great, are leading the people of the world to better and better understanding. Left alone, civilized people would never make war. They have no outside grievances they wish to submit to the arbitrament of wholesale murder. To make them prepare for war they must be scared, not led. Were it not for the exaggeration, by interested parties, of trade jealousies and diplomatic intrigues, few people would ever think of going to war. The workingmen of Europe suffer from tax-exhaustion. The fear of war is kept before them to divert them from their own sad plight. This diversion leaves their plight still sadder.
The bread-riot in all its phases is the sign of over-taxation, of governmental disregard of the lives and earnings of the common man. Anarchism is the expression that the idle and reckless give to the feelings of those who are still law-abiding.
The Peace Movement must stand against oppression and waste. It must do its part in removing grievances, national and international. It must give its council in favor of peace and order, and it must help to educate men to believe that the nation which guarantees to its young men personal justice and personal opportunity, has a greater glory than that which sends forth its youth to slaughter.