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CHAPTER 6
PEACE   INSURANCE   BY   PREPAREDNESS   AGAINST
WAR
IN the 33rd chapter of the great prophet Ezekiel, the first six verses run as, follows:
1.	Again the word of the Lord came unto me,
saying:
2.	Son of man, speak to the children of thy
people and say unto them, When I bring the
sword upon a land, if the people of the land take
a man of their coasts and set him for the watch
man;
3.	If when he seeth the sword come upon the
land, he blow the trumpet and warn the people;
4.	Then whosoever heareth the sound of the
trumpet and taketh not warning, if the sword
come and take him away, his blood shall be upon
his own head;
5.	He heard the sound of the trumpet and
took not warning, his blood shall be upon him.
But he that taketh warning shall deliver his soul.
6.	But if the watchman see the sword come
and blow not the trumpet and the people be not
warned; if the sword come and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.

I very heartily commend these verses to the prayerful consideration of all those in high political office, whether Presidents, Secretaries of State, or leaders of the Senate and the House at Washington; and to all male and female college presidents, clergymen, editors and publicists of pacifist tendency; and above all to the sometimes-well-meaning souls who have fallen victims to the habit of prolonged and excessive indulgence in attending universal peace meetings and giving, and listening to, lectures on immediate universal peace and disarmament.

Five years have gone by since Mexico, which had made no preparedness whatever against foreign war, was thrown into a violent civil war, attended with circumstances which made it our duty to take action, a duty which during the five years we, in our turn, have sedulously avoided fulfilling in efficient fashion. Eighteen months have passed since the great world war that centers in Europe burst out with, as its first result, the hideous destruction of the Belgian people—a destruction primarily due to the fact that Belgium had not prepared against war as Switzerland had prepared. The United States, in connection with The Hague treaties, had undertaken certain obligations to Belgium and to both neutral and belligerent powers. With criminal timidity we have failed to fulfill these obligations. We have also failed to stand up for the rights of our own people in any efficient fashion, even when our men, women and children were murdered on the high seas. We have earned, and have richly deserved, the contemptuous dislike of all the nations of mankind by the course we have followed for a year as regards the great world war, and for five years as regards Mexico. Worst of all, we have utterly failed, even with the lesson of the last year writ in blood and fire before our eyes, to take steps to protect ourselves from such horrors.

It is we ourselves, it is the American people, who are responsible for the public sentiment which permits unworthy action on the part of our governmental representatives. The peace propaganda of the past ten years in this country has steadily grown more noisy. It received an enormous impetus when five years ago, by the negotiation of peace-at-any-price or all-inclusive arbitration treaties, and in the last year by the ratification of the thirty odd peace-at-any-price arbitration-commission treaties, it was made part of our national governmental policy. It is the literal truth to say that this peace-at-any-price propaganda has probably, on the whole, worked more mischief to the United States than all the crookedness in business and politics combined during the same period. It has represented more positive deterioration in the American character. Millions of plain Americans, who do not have the opportunity to know the facts or to think them out for themselves, have been misled in this matter. They are not to blame; but the leaders and organizers of that movement, its upholders and apologists on the stump and in the pulpit and in the press, are very greatly to blame. Really good and highminded clergymen, capable of foresight and brave enough to risk being misrepresented, have stood steadfastly against the odious creed which puts peace ahead of righteousness. But every cheap man in the pulpit, like every cheap demagogue on the stump, has joined in the "peace-at-any-price" cry. Some of the men and women who uphold the cause of the professional pacifists are actuated by good motives. The same statement can be made of some of the Tories in the Revolutionary War, of some of the Copperheads in the Civil War. But the fact remains in this case, as in the case of the Copperheads and the Tories, that the sum of the activities of the men and women thus engaged was purely mischievous and represented evil to America and evil to the cause of international justice and right. Wilkes Booth was an honest man; when he assassinated Lincoln he was doubtless sincere in the belief that he was doing right; and great courage was needed to perform the evil feat. Yet surely Wilkes Booth did a worse deed than the most corrupt politician or businessman of his time. In exactly the same way the man who preaches peace at any price, non-resistance to all wrong, disarmament and the submission of everything to arbitration, no matter how sincere and honest he may be, is rendering a worse service to his fellow-countrymen than any exponent of crooked business or crooked politics.

The deification of peace without regard to whether it is either wise or righteous does not represent virtue. It represents a peculiarly base and ignoble form of evil. For this reason it is a positive detriment to international morality for any man to take part in any of these universal peace-at-any-price or all-inclusive arbitration movements. Nor is this all. A movement right in itself may be all wrong if made at the wrong time. Even the proposal for a world peace of righteousness, based on force being put back of righteousness, is inopportune at this time.

There are far more pressing and immediate duties. First and foremost, the United States must seriously prepare itself against war, and show itself able to maintain its rights and make its weight felt in the world. Next, it must abandon both the policy of poltroonery—the policy we have practised as regards the Lusitania and Mexico—and the policy of recklessly making promises which neither can nor ought to be kept —the policy we practiced in the proposed all-inclusive arbitration treaties five years ago, and, above all, in the unspeakably silly and wicked thirty all-inclusive arbitration-commission treaties actually negotiated under the present Administration. Our people should note well the fact that these treaties were in principle promptly repudiated by the very President who had negotiated them as soon as Mr. Bryan asked that the principle be concretely applied in the case of the Lusitania.

When we are prepared to make our words good and have shown that we make no promises which we are not both ready and willing to back up by our deeds, then, and not until then, we shall be able with dignity and effect to move for the establishment of a world agreement to secure the peace of justice. Such agreement must explicitly state that certain national rights are never to be arbitrated because the nations are to be protected in their exercise; that other matters shall be arbitrated; and that the power of all the nations shall be used to prevent wrong being done by one nation at the expense of another. To put peace above righteousness is wicked. To chatter about it, without making ready to put strength behind it, is silly.

But all this is for the future, and it is beating the air to talk about it at present. "Ephraim feedeth on wind"—and wind is not a substantial diet. A nation which is "too proud to fight" is a nation which is sure to be kicked; for every fighting man or nation knows that that particular kind of "pride" is merely another name for abject cowardice. A nation helplessly unable to assert its own rights; a nation which for five years has refused to do its duty in Mexico and yet is unwilling to see other nations do their duty there; a nation which without the utterance of one word of protest has seen The Hague Conventions which it signed torn to pieces and thrown to the winds; a nation which has not ventured beyond empty words when its ships were sunk and its citizens, men, women and children, slain on the high seas, is in no position to help the cause of either peace or justice, and would excite merely derision if it proposed at this moment the creation of a "World League for Peace."

The six great powers of Europe have sent their best and their bravest by the million to die for the right as God gave them to see the right. All their finest young men are at the front. Some of them are fighting for good, some for evil; but all are fighting for what they think to be good, and all are showing splendid and heroic qualities. We excite only derision when under these circumstances we permit foolish people, men and women, in the name of America to prattle in meaningless words about the kind of peace that brave men and high-minded women will always scorn. The all-insistent duty of the moment for America is two-fold. First, we must prepare ourselves against disaster by facing the fact that we are nearly impotent in military matters, and by remedying this impotence. Second, we must seriously and in good faith, and once for all, abandon the wicked and foolish habit of treating words as all-sufficient by themselves, and as wholly irrelevant to deeds; and as an incident thereto we must from now on refuse to make treaties which cannot be, and which will not be, lived up to in time of strain.

As regards the last matter, promise and performance, we Americans must rid ourselves of the habit of salving our vanity, when down at bottom we know we are not behaving well, by using fine words to excuse ourselves from effort which ought to be made, and to justify ourselves in avoiding risk which ought to be accepted.

There are persons who are against preparedness for war and who believe in the avoidance of national duty, who nevertheless are honest in their belief and who may not be cowardly or weak, but only foolish and misguided; and there are hundreds of thousands of good and reasonably brave men and women who simply have not thought of the matter at all and who are misguided by their leaders. But of most of these leaders it is not possible to take so charitable a view. The fundamental characteristic of the peace-at-any-price men is sheer, downright physical or moral timidity. Very many of the leaders among the men who protest against preparedness and who are hostile to manly action on our part— hostile to the insistence in good faith upon the observance of The Hague Conventions and upon respect for the lives and property of our citizens in Mexico and on the high seas—are easily cowed by any exhibition of ruthless and brutal force, and never venture to condemn wrongdoers who make themselves feared. This fact might just as well be faced. To it is due the further fact that the professional pacifist usually turns up as the ally of the most cynical type of international wrong-doer.

This has been made evident by the attitude of the great bulk of the men and women who have shrieked loudest for peace during the last eighteen months. It has been made evident by the men who have joined in the Peace Conferences, Peace Dinners and Peace Voyages during that time, and by the women of the same type who on this side of the water, or after traveling to the other side of the water, have advocated a peace without honor or justice. These men and women have demanded peace in terms that would not merely disregard righteousness, but that would crown unrighteousness with success. They have not ventured to make one protest against any concrete act of wrongdoing; they have not ventured to raise their voices in denunciation of the iniquity wrought by Germany against Belgium, the most wanton, the most hideous wrong, and the wrong on the largest scale, that had been perpetrated for over a century. Some of the women in question were abroad, actively engaged in exciting contempt and derision for themselves and their country by crying for peace without justice and without redress of wrongs, at the very time that the Lusitania was sunk.

American women and children were at the time being slain on the high seas; Belgian women and children, French women and children, in Belgium and Northern France, were at the same time suffering the last extremities of infamy and outrage ; English women and children, in unfortified towns, were being killed by the bombs of German war vessels and aircraft; and our own women in Mexico had been subjected to nameless infamies.
But these amiable peace prattlers had not one word of effective sympathy for any of the women and children who had suffered these dreadful fates. All they did was to utter silly platitudes, which were of comfort to the wrongdoers, and which, in so far as they had any effect, confounded right and wrong and put a premium upon wrongdoing by making it evident that, if successful, it would escape condemnation; because the condemnation was so uttered as, if anything, to bear more heavily on those who resisted wrong than upon those who inflicted wrong. There is no meaner moral attitude than that of a timid and selfish neutrality between right and wrong.

Such action does not represent righteousness. At best it represents folly. Often it represents cowardice. Always it represents unrighteousness. Not the smallest particle of good has come from the peace propaganda of the last ten years as carried on in America. Literally, this agitation of the professional pacifists during these ten years has not represented the smallest advance toward securing the peace of righteousness. It has, on the other hand, represented a very considerable and real deterioration in the American character. I do not think it is a permanent deterioration. I think that we shall recover and become heartily ashamed of our lapse from virile manliness. But there has been a distinct degeneracy in the moral fiber of our people owing to this peace propaganda, a distinct increase in moral flabbiness, a distinct increase in hysteria and sentimental untruth fulness.

Not once in a thousand times is it possible to achieve anything worth achieving except by labor, by effort, by serious purpose and by the willingness to run risk. The persons who seek to persuade our people that by doing nothing, by passing resolutions that cost nothing, and by writing eloquent messages and articles that mean nothing, and by complacently applauding elocution that means less than nothing, some service is thereby rendered to humanity, are not only rendering no such service, but are weakening the spring of national character. This applies to the publicists and politicians who write messages and articles and make speeches of this kind; it applies to the newspaper editors and magazine writers who applaud such utterances; and most of all it applies to those of our people who insist upon the passage of treaties that cannot and will not be enforced, while they also inveigh against preparedness, and shudder at action on behalf of our own rights.

Let no man propose a treaty unless he has reduced it to concrete terms; has proposed it in these concrete terms to his fellows, and has determined whether, when thus made concrete, it ought to be and will be observed. Take a few illustrative cases. The ultra-pacifist movement, the peace-at-any-price movement, has seemingly been as strong on the Pacific slope as on the Atlantic seaboard and in the interior. Congressmen and editors have made speeches and written articles in which they have advocated disarmament, and have demanded treaties by which the United States would agree to arbitrate everything. Worthy people, silly people, have encouraged schoolboys solemnly to debate such questions.

Now let these congressmen and editors face facts and be frank and truthful. When they applaud the passage of the thirty all-inclusive arbitration-commission treaties that the Administration has passed during the last year or so, do they mean that they wish, if the Japanese take Magdalena Bay or the Germans St. Thomas, to discuss the matter through a commission for a year without taking any action? Do they mean that when American women are raped in Mexico or American men murdered in our own territory by Mexicans firing across the line, or when the American flag is insulted and dishonored, we shall appoint a commission to discuss the matter for a year before taking action? Do they mean that if a French or English submarine sinks a ship crowded with non-combatants, as the Germans sank the Lusitania, and if American women and children are again drowned wholesale on the high seas, we shall appoint a commission to talk about it for a year and bind ourselves to take no action prior to that time ?

If they do mean these things, if our people mean these things, then let them honestly say so. From my standpoint such action would be inconceivably base and cowardly. Nevertheless, it is at least possible to accept the mental integrity of the man taking it, if he announces from the beginning that such is his intention. But it is absolutely and grossly improper to take it unless the concrete case to which the general principle is to apply is thus set nakedly forth at the outset and we agree to abide by action in such concrete case.

Again, there are Pacific slope editors and public men who have excitedly applauded that phase of the peace-at-any-price propaganda in accordance with which it is proposed that we shall bind ourselves to arbitrate all questions, including those of national honor and vital national interest. The movement has been strong even in California. Now, do these public men and editors who champion this form of peace movement in California, Oregon and Washington mean that we shall in good faith submit to outsiders for arbitration the question whether or not there shall be an unlimited immigration of Asiatics to our shores ? Do they mean that a court containing judges from Japan, Siam, China, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, as well as from the European powers, shall say whether or not we have a right to decide what immigrants shall come to our shores and here establish citizenship?

The Californian who does not believe in arbitrating the question whether there shall be such unlimited immigration of Asiatics to California is guilty of the grossest bad faith when he champions or fails to condemn such proposals, when he votes for or approves of the thirty-odd peace-commission treaties recently passed by the present Administration and the all-inclusive arbitration treaties proposed by the preceding Administration. I hold that to arbitrate the question whether we should or should not allow the unlimited immigration of Asiatics to our shores would be a dreadful wrong. It is an almost equally serious wrong to conclude a treaty specifically binding us to accept such arbitration, and then to repudiate the treaty.

All this applies to the movement for inaugurating at this time a "World League for Peace," of which the decrees are to be backed by force. Before we make such a League for the future, let us in the present live up to our engagements under The Hague Conventions and without delay protest on behalf of Belgium. If we are not willing to undergo the modest risk implied in thus keeping the promise we have already made, then for heaven's sake let us avoid the hypocrisy of proposing a new world league, under which we would guarantee to send armies over to coerce great military powers which decline to abide by the decisions of an arbitral court. Above all, let us avoid the infinite folly, the discreditable folly, of agitating for such an agreement until we have a naval and military force sufficient to entitle us to speak with the voice of authority when fronted with great military nations in international matters. Let us not live in a realm of childish make-believe. Let us not make new and large promises in a spirit of grandiloquent and elocutionary disregard of facts unless and until we are willing by deeds to make good the promises we have already made but have refrained from executing; until we are willing to demand of our government that it live up to The Hague Conventions, and, above all, that it defend our own rights.

Now, the fact that these male and female professional peace enthusiasts who have screamed so busily for peace during the past year have been afraid to make any concrete protest against wrong is doubtless due primarily to sheer fear on their part. They were afraid of the trouble and effort implied in acting about Mexico. Above all, they are afraid of Germany. Those of them who are politicians are afraid of the German-American vote; for these professional pacifists have no sense of national honor and are great encouragers of hyphenated Americanism. But in addition they are terrorized, they are cowed, by the ruthless spirit of German militarism. The Berlin Lokal Anzeiger spoke as follows after the sinking of the Lusitania:
We do not wish to gain the love of the Americans, but we desire to be respected by them. The loss of the Lusitania will earn that respect for us more than a hundred battles won on land.
Of course, when the Lokal Anzeiger spoke of inspiring "respect" in America, what it really meant was that it would inspire fear. The murder of women and children does not inspire respect; but, unfortunately, it may inspire fear. As a matter of fact, I think it did inspire fear among our pacifists. There are plenty of Americans like myself who immensely admire the efficiency of the Germans in industry and in war, the efficiency with which in this war they have subordinated the whole social and industrial activity of the state to the successful prosecution of the war, and who greatly admire the German people, and regard the German strain as one of the best and strongest strains in our composite American blood; but who feel that the German Government, the German governing class has in this war shown such ruthless and domineering disregard for the rights of others as to demand emphatic and resolute action (not merely words unbacked by action) on our part. Unfortunately, this ruthless and brutal efficiency has, as regards many men of the pacifist type, achieved precisely the purpose it was intended to achieve. As part of her program, Germany has counted on the effect of terrorism upon all men of soft nature. The sinking of the Lusitania was intended primarily as terrorism; just as the use of poison gas in the trenches (a use defensible only if one also defends the poisoning of wells and the torture of prisoners) was intended as terrorism. The object—terrorization—has not been achieved as regards the fighting men of England, France, Belgium, Russia, Italy and Servia. But it has had a distinct effect in cowing timid persons everywhere. I do not believe it would have any effect in cowing the bulk of our people if our people could be waked up to what has happened; but I have no question that it has had a very great effect in cowing that noisy section of our people which has talked loudest about peace at any price. The people who say of the present Administration that "at any rate, it has kept us out of war with Mexico or Germany;" the people who say that we ought not to act about the Lusitania; the people who say we ought not to have acted on behalf of Belgium, include in their ranks all of the persons who are cowed by Germany, who are afraid of what Germany would do if we stood up for our own rights or for the rights of other and weaker peoples. Recently, in certain circles, some popularity has been achieved by a song entitled "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier" —a song which ought always to be sung with a companion piece entitled "I Didn't Raise My Girl To Be a Mother." The two would stand on precisely the same moral level. This hymn, in condemnation of courage, has been sung in music halls, and even in schools, with applause. Think of such a song being sung by or of the mothers, sisters and wives of the men who fought under Washington in the Revolution, or of the men who fought under Grant and Lee in the Civil War! Those who applaud such a song are wholly out of place at any patriotic celebration on Decoration Day or the Fourth of July; and most assuredly men of this abject type will be easily affected by terrorism.
The sinking of the Lusitania, the destruction of Louvain, the shooting of the Belgians who rallied to the defence of their flag precisely as the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill once rallied to the defence of theirs, the merciless thoroughness of the exploitation of the civilian population of Northern France and Belgium, the utter ruthlessness shown in dealing not only with men but with women and children—all this has undoubtedly cowed and terrorized the average American pacifist, the average peace-at-any-price man in the United States. It has cowed the type of man who cheers such a song as "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier." It has terrorized the type of man who makes speeches and writes editorials or newspaper or magazine articles on behalf of disarmament, on behalf of universal arbitration, and against the Monroe Doctrine. There is a Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde in nations as in individuals; and sheer terrorism is often found working hand-in-hand with flabby and timid international pacifism for the undoing of righteousness and for the deification of the most brutal form of successful militarism.

Mrs. Wharton has sent me the following German poem on the sinking of the Lusitania, with her translation:
the; hymn of the; ujsitania (Translated from the German.}*
The swift sea sucks her death-shriek under As the great ship reels and leaps asunder. Crammed  taffrail-high  with  her  murderous
freight, Like a straw on the tide she whirls to her
fate.
A warship she, though she lacked its coat,
And lustful for lives as none afloat,
A   warship,   and   one   of   the   foe's   best
workers,
Not penned with her rusting harbor-shirkers.
Now the  Flanders  guns lack their daily
bread,
And shipper and buyer are sick with dread, For neutral as Uncle Sam may be Your surest neutral's the deep green sea.
Just one ship sunk, with lives and shell, And thousands of German gray-coats well! And for each of her gray-coats, German
hate Would have sunk ten ships with all their
freight.
* Poem reprinted by courtesy of N. Y. Herald.
Yea, ten such ships are a paltry fine For one good life in our fighting line. Let England ponder the crimson text:
torpedo, strike! and hurrah  for the next!
This is not a pleasant poem. I do not envy the person who could write with this exultation of the death of women and children. It is a manifestation of the policy of blood and iron which should be pondered carefully by those who, with voices of quivering timidity, are advocating our submission to such policies. Be it remembered, moreover, that bad though it is to do such a deed, it is even more contemptible to submit to it. The policy of milk and water is an even worse policy than the policy of blood and iron. To sink a hundred American men, women and children on the Lusitcmia, in other words, to murder them, was an evil thing; but it was not quite as evil and it was nothing like as contemptible as it was for this nation to rest satisfied with governmental notes of protest couched in elegant English, and with vaguely implied threats which were not carried out. When a man has warned another man not to slap his wife's face, and the other man does it, the gentleman who has given the warning does not meet the situation by treating elocution as a substitute for action.

Mr. Bryan resigns the foremost position in the American Cabinet and immediately addresses a large meeting of Germans, where he was very properly received with uproarious applause as a faithful servant of the present German government, as a man who, however amiable his intentions, had in actual fact stood against the honor and interest of America. Now, if Mr. Bryan were a German, the German government would not for one moment permit him to make the kind of address against Germany that the Germans applauded him for making against his own country and ours. The success of the German policy of blood-and-iron largely depends upon their possible rivals and opponents adopting a policy of milk-and-water. The blood-and-iron statesman of one nation finds in the milk-and-water statesman of another nation the man predestined through the ages to be his ally and his tool.

A number of persons, including especially the ultra-pacifists, have strongly objected to the statement that this country should have acted on behalf of Belgium, and have done this on the ground that we have declared as a nation that we did not intend to be drawn into "entangling alliances" in Europe. Yet the same persons now advocate our going into a league to enforce the results of universal arbitration, which, of course, represents the "entangling" of ourselves in a foreign alliance on the largest possible scale. It also represents an agreement on our part to wage offensive war on behalf of others, although many of the persons favoring such an agreement are opposed to the very moderate policy of making us fit to protect our own rights in defensive war. It is idle to make promises on behalf of a movement for world peace unless we intend to live up to them. If so, the first step is to live up to the promises we have already made, and not to try to sneak out of them on the ground that to fulfill them means to abandon our "policy of refusal to be entangled in foreign alliances."

This attitude of the ultra-pacifists is merely another illustration of the necessity of subordinating elocution in advocacy of universal world peace to action (not merely elocution) to meet more immediate and vital needs. It is utterly useless to advocate our entering into such a proposed league until we have prepared in military fashion to make our action effective and until we have seriously resolved to live up to our promises—and, as a consequence, to make but few promises. Therefore, at this moment all agitation for such a league merely offers an opportunity for the people who want to talk and to do nothing else. It gives them the chance to avoid the performance of immediate duty by empty elocution for something which is in the remote future and which cannot possibly be achieved until the immediate duty has been effectively performed. In my book, "America and the World War," I have outlined the only possibly feasible plan for securing world peace that has yet been propounded. But it is waste of time to advocate such a plan until we have adopted and put into effect a policy of national military preparedness, and until we take the trouble to find out what treaties—promises—mean, and to refuse to make them unless they are to be kept. To enter into the proposed "League of Peace" would mean that we promised, under certain conditions, to undertake offensive war on behalf of others. It would be ludicrous to make such a promise until we have shown that we are willing to undertake defensive war on behalf of ourselves.

In 1814, a little over a century ago, in the course of the War of 1812, a small British army landed in Chesapeake Bay. It defeated twice its number of "free-born American citizens," without training and discipline, who "had leaped to arms," as Mr. Bryan says, or become "an armed citizenry," as Mr. Wilson puts it. It then burned the public buildings at Washington. The "armed citizenry"—upon whose potentiality President Wilson relied as an excuse for signal failure to make any preparation to do our duty by adequate preparation in view of the terrible world war now going on and of the situation in Mexico— fled with such unanimity and rapidity that only a score or so lost their lives. Thereupon the remainder, together with all the American editors and public men who for years had been screaming for peace and announcing that there was no need of preparing against war, instead of expressing their hearty shame and repentance for the national failure to prepare, became hysterical in attacking—with words only—the hostile army for having burned Washington. The British army a century ago was as profoundly indifferent to this attack as the war lords of Germany to-day are to our prattle about the Lusi-tania or the resolutions of our peace societies, and the boasts of our political orators on the Fourth of July. Such indifference was, and is, entirely justifiable. It was not a nice thing to burn the public buildings of Washington; but it was an infinitely worse thing for this country, after two years of war, to be utterly unable to protect its capital. It was not a nice thing to kill our women and children on the Lusitania; but it was an even meaner and more contemptible thing for us to fail to act with instant decision thereon—and had we so acted in the case of the Gulflight, a few days previously, the Lusitania would never have been sunk.

Every right-minded man utterly despises a coward in private life. Cowardice is the unpardonable sin in a man. A corrupt man can be reformed. Many a corrupt man, both in politics and business, has been reformed within the past score of years, has realized the evils of corruption and is now a first-class citizen. In the same way a coward who appreciates that cowardice is a sin, an unpardonable sin if persevered in, may train himself so as, first to act like a brave man, and then finally to feel like and therefore to be a brave man. But the coward who excuses his cowardice, who tries to cloak it behind lofty words, who perseveres in it, and does not appreciate his own infamy, is beyond all hope. The peace-at-any-price people, the universal and all-inclusive arbitration people, and most of the men and women who have taken the lead in the pacifist movement in this country during the last five or ten years, are preaching international cowardice.

Sometimes these professional pacifists preach such cowardice openly. At other times they preach the utter flabbiness and feebleness, moral and physical, which inevitably breeds cowardice. It is a dreadful thing to think that in the event of war brave men would have to shed their blood; it is a worse thing to think that these feeble folk would purchase their own ignoble safety by the blood of others. The men and women guilty of such preaching and such practice are thoroughly bad citizens. The worst of them, of course, are those in the colleges, and those who profess to speak for the colleges; for to them much has been given and from them much should be expected. The college boys who adopt the professional pacifist views, who make peace leagues and preach the doctrines of international cowardice, are unfitting themselves for any career more manly than that of a nursemaid. A grown-up of the professional pacifist type is not an impressive figure; but the college boy who deliberately elects to be a "sissy" should be replaced in the nursery and spanked.

It is to be regretted that we do not learn history aright. Allusion has been made above to the War of 1812. Had Washington or men who carried out Washington's policy been in charge of our government during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, there would probably have been no war with Great Britain in 1812, or if there had been we would have been completely and overwhelmingly successful. But the great opponent of Washington's ideals, Thomas Jefferson, gave the tone to our governmental policies during that time. He announced that his "passion was peace"—not as strong an expression as "being too proud to fight," but sufficiently noxious. He and his followers declined to prepare a regular army and refused to upbuild the Navy. The very Congress that declared war on Great Britain declined to increase our Navy. Yet if at that time we had had an efficient navy of twenty battleships or an efficient mobile regular army of twenty thousand men, the war would not have taken place at all or else it would have ended in complete and sweeping victory the summer it was declared.

We trusted, however, to the "armed citizenry" of whom Mr. Wilson speaks and to the voluntary efforts of "the million men who spring to arms between dawn and sunset," described in Mr. Bryan's oratory. We trusted to the few frigates prepared by the men of Washington's school before the Jeffersonians came to power. These frigates did their duty well and but for them it is possible that our country would have broken in pieces under the intolerable shame of our failure on land. Nevertheless, our small cruisers could produce only a moral and not a material effect upon the war. On land for two years we were unable to do anything effective at all. When the war had begun, it was too late to make efficient preparations; and in any event we did not try. We raised a body of over a hundred thousand militiamen under the volunteer system. These militiamen were gathered in camps where they sickened of various diseases; but we were never able to get them against the foe in any numbers, except on one or two occasions, such as at Bladensburg. Mind you, they were naturally good enough men. The individuals who ran at Bladensburg were the sons of the men of York-town, the fathers of the men of Gettysburg. What they needed was preparation by long training in advance; training in the field, not merely in an armory or on a drill ground.

The same thing was true of our Civil War. In 1861 both of the contending armies at Bull Run could have been beaten with ease by a European army of regulars half the size of either. In 1863 there was not an army in Europe which could have contended on equal terms with either of the armies that fought at Gettysburg. In 1814, after two years of exertion, Brown, Scott, and a few other officers like them on the northern frontier, developed a tiny army as good as could be found anywhere, and Andrew Jackson, a real military genius, performed the same feat for the few thousand Tennesseeans and Louisianians whom he commanded at New Orleans.

But the War of 1812 was not a victorious war for us. At best it is possible to call it a draw. It was a thoroughly discreditable war from the standpoint of our people as a whole. The land officers I have named above, and a few thousand troops, not more than ten thousand all told, who served under them, did well. So did the officers and crews of our tiny navy and the shipwrights who built the ships. These men, and a very few others, deserved the highest credit. We of today owe them much. It is only because of their existence that Americans can think of the War of 1812 without unmixed. shame. But the bulk of our people, and the politicians, from the President down, who represented our people, made a wretched showing in that war; and because of this showing the Union came very near splitting up. If history were rightly taught, this fact would be brought out clearly in our schools; and the pacifists, the peace-at-any-price men, the men who shirk preparedness and who chatter about the efficacy of salvation to be secured by diluted moral mush, would not have the clear field they now have.

Men cannot and will not fight well unless they are physically prepared; and they cannot and will not fight if, through the generations, they elaborately unfit themselves by weakening their own moral fiber. China furnishes the greatest example, and a living and contemporary example. Mr. Bryan recently announced that instead of war, which he regarded as outworn, he wished to try "persuasion." Evidently he was under the impression that persuasion was something new in the annals of history. Let Mr. Bryan and his fellow pacifists read history; and, if they won't read history, let them at least look at affairs that are contemporary. A sillier falsehood has never been uttered than the falsehood that "war settles nothing." War settled the independence of this country; war settled the question of union, and war settled the question of slavery. Pacifists pretend to speak in the interests of morality. It is a poor thing for professed moralists to rest their case on a falsehood, which they must know to be a falsehood. Many of the greatest events of history have been settled by war. Many of the greatest advances in humanity have been due to successful wars for righteousness.

Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa, in addition to being rent asunder among themselves by bitter sectarian animosities—and sectarian intolerance and animosity stand for most that is evil in Christianity—had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eight centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan, and the Christian religion would be exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

China is the great living example of unpre-paredness, of pacifism, of the peace-at-any-price spirit, of the effort to preserve territory and national self-respect by "persuasion" and not by the sword. In consequence the English, the French, the Russians, the Japanese, control one-half of the territory of China, and the remaining territory, under the pressure of Japan, is at this moment losing all right to be considered an independent and self-respecting people. Well-meaning persons who treat peace pageants, peace parades, peace conferences and minor movements of similar nature as of consequence, are guilty of an error which makes their conduct foolish. Those of them who champion the exaltation of peace above righteousness and the abandonment of national power of self-defence—without which there never has been and never will be either national heroism or national manliness— will do well to study China.

It is mere gong-beating, it is the mere sounding of tom-toms and rattles, for our people to get together in conference at the present time and declare for universal peace and announce that they wish a world league by which they will agree to arbitrate everything and enforce the result by arms. Of course in no event should we agree to arbitrate everything. But the prime pokit to be considered at the moment is that until we show that we possess force, that we are willing to use it when necessary, and that we make no promises save those that ought to be and will be carried out, we shall be utterly useless to do anything for righteousness, whether through these leagues or in any other fashion.

Every peace body, whether religious or humanitarian, philosophic or political, and all advocates of peace, whether in public or private life, work nothing but mischief, and, save in so far as mere silliness prevents it, very serious mischief, unless they put righteousness first and peace next. Every league that calls itself a Peace League is championing immorality unless it clearly and explicitly recognizes the duty of putting righteousness before peace and of being prepared and ready to enforce righteousness by war if necessary; and it is idle to promise to wage offensive war on behalf of others until we have shown that we are able and willing to wage defensive war on behalf of ourselves. The man who fears death more than dishonor, more than failure to perform duty, is a poor citizen; and the nation that regards war as the worst of all evils and the avoidance of war as the highest good is a wretched and contemptible nation, and it is well that it should vanish from the face of the earth.

If our people really believed what the pacifists and the German-fearing politicians advocate, if they really feared war above anything else and really had sunk to the Chinese level—from which the best and bravest and most honorable Chinamen are now striving to lift their people—then it would be utterly hopeless to help the United States. In such case, the best thing that could befall it would be to have the Germans, or the Japanese, or some other people that still retains virility, come over here to rule and oppress a nation of feeble pacifists, unfit to be anything but hewers of wood and drawers of water for their masters.

But I do not for one moment admit that the American people has sunk or will sink to such a level. We are foolish and shortsighted and we permit the prattlers to misrepresent us. But at bottom the heart of this people is sound. We celebrate Decoration Day and Independence Day on the 3Oth of May and the 4th of July. We believe in the men of the Revolution, in the men of the Civil War and in the women who did "raise their sons to be soldiers" for the right. We know that in itself war is neither moral nor immoral, that the test of the righteousness of war is the object and purpose for which it is waged. Therefore, it is worth while for our people seriously to consider the problems ahead of them; and the first problem is the problem of preparedness.

The prime and all-important lesson to learn is that while preparedness will not guarantee a nation against war, unpreparedness eventually insures not merely war, but utter disaster. Take what has happened in the last twelve months at home and abroad. Preparedness has saved France from the unspeakable shame that befell it in 1870. Every Frenchman holds his head higher now than any Frenchman has held it in forty-five years. England suffers because she has not prepared. If her army had been prepared as Lord Roberts wished it to be prepared, if she had had universal military service on the German model, if she had copied the admirable German efficiency, military, industrial and social (and had then, unlike Germany, applied it with regard for, instead of with disregard for, the rights of others), she would have been able to rescue Belgium and France from invasion and her own position would now be absolutely assured. She was well prepared from a naval point of view and so was able to protect herself on the ocean. But, when she guaranteed Belgium's neutrality, she abandoned her sea frontier and pushed her land frontier forward to the German border beyond Liege. She failed to realize this fact—just as we have failed to realize that our own moral frontier is not our own seaboard, but is overseas, in Alaska and Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone.

But Belgium, when compared with Switzerland, offers the most complete example. In many respects Belgium a year ago stood strikingly near to where the United States stands today. She had not been quite as shortsighted as we have shown and are now showing ourselves to be; but she had been very shortsighted. She was an absolutely peaceful and exceedingly prosperous country. She had a great industrial population. For many years the wiser among her people, including especially, by the way, the wisest representatives of the labor element, the Socialists and others, had preached preparedness, so that the country might be saved from invasion by its great military neighbors. But her international policy was determined by the pacifists and peace-at-any-price men, the men and women who said that it was "immoral to fight" and that "war settled nothing," and the other men and women who said that nobody would ever attack Belgium because she was peaceful, and never committed aggression, and that all that was necessary to national well-being was business prosperity, and attention to measures of internal reform. These persons were successful in preventing any adequate preparation. Only a very inadequate one had been attempted and that only during the last year or two. This inadequate preparation was directly responsible for disaster so overwhelming as to wipe out what had been built up by generations of patient industry.

Switzerland meanwhile, the most peaceful country in Europe, had energetically taken full measures for her self-defence. Switzerland had an army of 400,000 men, highly efficient. Belgium, according to her population, on the same basis would have had an army of 700,000 men. If she had had such an army and had acted precisely as Switzerland acted, Belgian territory would now be in Belgian hands and the line of western war in Europe, representing what has been for fourteen months a stalemate, would have left Belgium on the right instead of on the wrong side; and she would have been free instead of trodden down and wasted under an appalling tyranny. No one acquainted with recent German military history, and with German military plans for the past twenty years, doubts for a moment that the German invasion would have taken place as quickly through Switzerland as through Belgium if it had been safe. But Belgium's army was only about one-sixth the size of the Swiss army. The small Belgian army fought valiantly; the conduct of the Belgian people during the last eleven months has been above all praise; and they have rendered mankind their debtor by their heroism. But the heroism came too late to be of avail. It was too late to prepare, or to make good the lack of preparedness, when once the Germans crossed the border. Switzerland had prepared in advance and Switzerland is at peace now, while the soil of Belgium has been trodden into bloody mire. The physical nature of the two countries has nothing to do with the difference. A century ago, Napoleon's armies treated Switzerland as cavalierly as Germany to-day treats Belgium; and for the same reason; because Switzerland was then utterly unprepared.

Let our people take warning.    Look at what has happened in Asia at the same time.    Japan was prepared; Japan was ready to fight. With trivial loss she has made enormous gains and now dominates China. China was not ready to fight; she had not prepared. In natural resources, in territory, in population, she many times over surpassed Japan; but she had committed the cardinal sin of neglecting to prepare; and she now is at Japan's mercy and her very existence is a matter of doubt.

The most certain way for a nation to invite disaster is to be opulent, self-assertive and unarmed. A nation can no more prepare for self-defence when war actually threatens than a spoiled college "sissy" of the pacifist type can defend himself if a young tough chooses to insult him; and unlike the sissy, the nation cannot under such conditions appeal to the police. Now and then to insure a house means that some scoundrel burns the house down in order to get the insurance. But we do not in consequence abandon insurance against fire. Now and then a nation prepares itself for a war of aggression. But this is no argument against preparedness in order to repel aggression. Preparedness against war is the only efficient form of national peace insurance.