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                            PRIZE ORATIONS
                                OF THE
                  INTERCOLLEGIATE PEACE ASSOCIATION


                      EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
                                  BY
                        STEPHEN F. WESTON, PH.D.
                EXECUTIVE SECRETARY OF THE ASSOCIATION
         PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE
                         YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO



                              FOREWORD BY
                           CHARLES F. THWING


                                BOSTON
                      THE WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION
                                 1914




                       THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
                                TO THE
                     MISSES MARY AND HELEN SEABURY
                     WHOSE INTEREST AND ASSISTANCE
                HAVE MADE POSSIBLE THE ORATIONS OF THE
                   INTERCOLLEGIATE PEACE ASSOCIATION




                               CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE
  FOREWORD                                                         vii
    By CHARLES F. THWING, President of the Association

  THE INTERCOLLEGIATE PEACE ASSOCIATION                              1
    By STEPHEN F. WESTON, Executive Secretary of the Association

  THE CONFLICT OF WAR AND PEACE                                     25
    By PAUL SMITH, DePauw University, Indiana

  THE UNITED STATES AND UNIVERSAL PEACE                             35
    By GLENN PORTER WISHARD, Northwestern University, Illinois

  THE EVOLUTION OF WORLD PEACE                                      45
    By LEVI T. PENNINGTON, Earlham College, Indiana

  THE WASTE OF WAR--THE WEALTH OF PEACE                             55
    By ARTHUR FORAKER YOUNG, Western Reserve University, Ohio

  THE HOPE OF PEACE                                                 65
    By STANLEY H. HOWE, Albion College, Michigan

  THE ROOSEVELT THEORY OF WAR                                       73
    By PERCIVAL V. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan

  NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS                                81
    By RUSSELL WEISMAN, Western Reserve University, Ohio

  THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM                                       91
    By PAUL B. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan

  CERTAIN PHASES OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT                             101
    By CALVERT MAGRUDER, St. John's College, Maryland

  THE ASSURANCE OF PEACE                                           111
    By VERNON M. WELSH, Knox College, Illinois

  EDUCATION FOR PEACE                                              121
    By FRANCIS J. LYONS, University of Texas

  NATIONAL HONOR AND PEACE                                         129
    By LOUIS BROIDO, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  THE NEW NATIONALISM AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT                       137
    By RALPH D. LUCAS, Knox College, Illinois

  MAN'S MORAL NATURE THE HOPE OF UNIVERSAL PEACE                   147
    By VICTOR MORRIS, University of Oregon

  THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY                                157
    By HAROLD HUSTED, Ottawa University, Kansas

  THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION                  167
    By BRYANT SMITH, Guilford College, North Carolina




FOREWORD


These orations are selected from hundreds of similar addresses spoken
in recent years by hundreds of students in American colleges. I
believe it is not too bold to say that they represent the highest
level of undergraduate thinking and speaking. They are worthy
interpreters of the cause of peace, but they are, as well, noble
illustrations of the type of intellectual and moral culture of
American students. Whoever reads them will, I believe, become more
optimistic, not only over the early fulfillment of the dreams of peace
among nations, but also over the intellectual and ethical condition of
academic life.

For the simple truth is that the cause of peace makes an appeal of
peculiar force to the undergraduate. It appeals to his imagination.
This imagination is at once historic and prophetic. War makes an
appeal to the historic imagination of the student. His study of Greek
and Roman history has been devoted too largely to the wars that these
peoples waged. Marathon, Salamis, Carthage, are names altogether too
familiar and significant. By contrast he sees what this history, which
is written in blood, might have become. If the millions of men slain
had been permitted to live, and if the uncounted treasure spent had
been economically used, the results in the history of civilization
would have been far richer and nobler. He notes, too, does this
student, that if the last decades of the eighteenth century and the
first decades of the nineteenth had been free from wars in Europe,
humanity would now have attained a far higher level of physical and
intellectual strength. The historic imagination of the student
pictures, as his reason interprets, such conditions. His prophetic
imagination likewise exercises its creative function. The student sees
nations to-day dwelling in armed truces and moving to and fro as a
soldiery actual or possible. He realizes that war puts up what
civilization puts down, and puts down what civilization elevates. He
reads the lamented Robertson's great lecture on the poetry of war, but
he knows also, as Robertson intimates, that "peace is blessed; peace
arises out of charity." The poetry of peace is more entrancing than
the poetry of carnage. To this primary element in the mind of the
undergraduate--the imagination--our great cause therefore makes an
appeal of peculiar earnestness.

To the reason of the college man, also, the cause of peace makes a
peculiar appeal through its simple logic. War is most illogical. It
breaks the law of the proper interpretation of causality. When two
nations of adjacent territory cannot agree over a boundary line, why
should settlement be made in terms of physical force? When two nations
fail to see eye to eye in adjusting the questions of certain fishing
rights, why should they incarnadine the seas in seeking for the truth
to be applied in settlement? In civil disputes, why, asks the student,
should rifles be employed to discover truth and right? War is an
intellectual anachronism, a breach of logic. Of course, one may reply,
humanity is not logical in its reasoning any more than it is exact in
its observing. Of course it is not; but the college is set to cast
out the rule of no-reason and to bring in the reign of reason. Peace
furnishes a motive and a method of such advancement. Peace is logic
for the individual and for the nation.

The illogical character of war is also made evident by the contrast
between the college man as a thinker and war itself. The college man
who thinks sees truth broadly; war interprets life narrowly, at the
point of the bayonet. The college man who thinks sees truth deeply;
war makes its primary appeal to the superficial love of glory, of
pomp, and of circumstance. The college man who thinks sees truth in
its highest relations; war is hell. The college man who thinks sees
truth in long ranges and in far-off horizons; war is emotional, and
the warrior flings the years into the hours. The college man who
thinks, thinks accurately, with logic, with reason; war does not
think--it strikes. "Strike," the college man may also say, "but hear!"
he cries; "yes, think." If the college can make the student think, it
has created the greatest force for making the world and the age a
world and an age of peace.

It is plain enough, too, that the economic side of war makes a
tremendous appeal to the student. The cost of the battleship _Indiana_
was practically $6,000,000; the total value of grounds and buildings
of the colleges and universities in Indiana is slightly more than
$7,000,000, and the productive funds are $4,000,000. The total cost of
the battleship _Oregon_ was more than $6,500,000; the total value of
grounds and buildings of the universities and colleges of Oregon is
less than $2,000,000, and the productive funds amount to hardly more
than $2,000,000. The cost of the battleship _Iowa_ was nearly
$6,000,000, and the productive funds of all the colleges and
universities of the state are only $5,000,000. The battleship
_Kentucky_ cost $5,000,000; in the colleges of that state the total
amount of productive funds is only $2,000,000, and the total value of
grounds and buildings, $3,000,000. The battleship _Alabama_ cost more
than $4,500,000, and the entire property, real and personal, of all
the universities and colleges in that state is less than $4,000,000.
The cost of the battleship _Wisconsin_ was more than $4,500,000; the
whole value of all grounds and buildings of the colleges and
universities of the state is only slightly more than $7,000,000. The
battleship _Maine_ cost more than $5,000,000, and the entire value in
grounds, buildings, and productive funds of the colleges and
universities of that state is little more than $5,000,000.

The value of the buildings of five hundred colleges and universities
in this country was estimated in a recent year at $262,000,000, and
the productive funds at $357,000,000. Leaving out those now in course
of construction, the total cost of the battleships and armored
cruisers of the United States named after individual states is
$325,000,000.

The cost of maintaining these battleships during the fiscal year of
1910, though many were in commission but a small part of the year,
amounted to no less than $33,000,000. The amount which all the
colleges and universities in this country received in tuition fees in
1911 was only $20,000,000; and the entire income received both from
fees and productive funds was only about $34,000,000. In other words,
when one takes into account the depreciation of the battleship or
armored cruiser, the entire cost of the thirty-eight battleships for a
single year is greater than the administration of the entire American
system of higher education.

Is it not painfully manifest that the cost of war constitutes a mighty
argument for the economic mind of the student?

Moreover, I am inclined to believe that the very difficulties
belonging to the triumph of our great cause constitute ground for its
closer relationship to the college man. The college man wishes, as
well as needs, a hard job. The easy task, the rosy opportunity, makes
no appeal. He is like Garibaldi's soldiers, who, when the choice was
once offered them by the commander to surrender to ease and safety,
chose hardship and peril. The Boxer revolution in China was followed
by hundreds of applications from college men and women to be sent
forth to China to take the place of the martyrs. The difficulties in
the progress of the great cause are of every sort and condition.
Industrial narrowness and commercial greed, military and political
ambitions, sectional zeal, national jealousy, the sensitiveness of
each nation in matters of national honor, the glamour of the good and
the beautiful under the sentiment of patriotism, the historic honor
attending death for one's country, the ease of creating war scares
among the people, the looseness of the organization of the higher
forces of the world--all these conditions and more pile up into a
Pelion on Ossa as a part of the difficulties standing in the progress
of our great movement. But such difficulties inspire rather than
deter. The student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I
can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are
more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in
his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best
interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred
Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision
of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of
logic--all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him
in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled
from the river of the water of life.

Perhaps, furthermore, the cause makes its most impressive appeal to
the collegian in its internationalism, or interpatriotism. This
internationalism addresses itself to his own international
appreciation. The collegian is a patriot. He is a patriot not only
against a foreign country but often against certain parts of his own
country--loyal to the interests which he believes a section of his own
nation properly represents. The German students have fought for their
Fatherland; they have also fought for the liberal sentiments of their
own land against reactionary movements, as in 1848. In the American
Civil War no brighter record is to be found than is embodied in the
tablets in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, or in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina. But the collegian possesses the
international sense, and possesses it more and more deeply with each
passing decade. His is the international mind, interpreting phenomena
in terms of common justice. His is the international heart, feeling
the universal joys and sorrows, woes and exultations. His is the
international will, seeking to do good to all men. His is the
international conscience, weighing right and duty in the scales of
divine humanity. Whatever interpretation he gives to the sayings of
Paul that God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of the
earth and has fixed the bounds of their habitation,--whether he stops
with the words "the face of the earth" or whether he goes on to
interpret the limitations of their residence,--it is nevertheless true
that his mind, his heart, his will, and his conscience do go out
toward all nations in their endeavor to realize their highest racial
and interracial peace. No man is a foreigner to him.

I have, I trust, said enough to intimate that these orations arise out
of a natural and normal condition of the student mind and heart. They
also, in subject as well as in origin, bear a special message of cheer
and hopefulness to all who have a good will toward the collegian and
toward the great cause for which we all are laboring.

                                           CHARLES F. THWING
                                                           _President_

  WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
       CLEVELAND, OHIO




PRIZE ORATIONS

THE INTERCOLLEGIATE PEACE ASSOCIATION


_Origin._ In the autumn of 1904 President Noah E. Byers of Goshen
College, Goshen, Indiana, a Mennonite college, invited to a conference
representatives of all the colleges in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio
that are conducted by those religious denominations that advocate
nonresistance as one of their essential religious principles. Such
bodies are the Mennonites, the Dunkards, and the Quakers. In the
spring of 1905 a more specific invitation was sent out, with the
result that a conference was held at Goshen College, June 22-23, 1905.
This date is important, since the call of President Byers for such a
conference was the first active step ever taken to interest the
college world, and particularly undergraduates, in the great movement
for world peace founded upon the idea of human brotherhood. While the
conference did not take place until a month after President Gilman had
suggested to the Lake Mohonk Conference, in May, 1905, that it should
extend its peace work to the colleges and universities, yet the call
for the conference was several months prior to the action of the
Mohonk Conference.

Eight institutions were represented at this conference--Goshen,
Earlham, Central Mennonite, Ashland, Wilmington, Juniata, and Penn
colleges and Friends' University. No definite plan of work had been
mapped out, but a simple organization was effected, and arrangements
were made for a second conference at Earlham College (Society of
Friends). Professor Elbert Russell of Earlham College was elected
president, and upon him devolved most of the work of arranging for the
second conference, which was held April 13-14, 1906. For this
conference no denominational lines were drawn, it being felt that all
colleges and universities should be interested in this important work.
Hence invitations were sent to all institutions of higher learning in
both Indiana and Ohio. Eight institutions were represented: Indiana,
three--Earlham and Goshen colleges and Indiana University; Ohio,
five--Antioch, Denison, Miami, Wilmington, and Central Mennonite. This
representation was small, considering the importance of the conference
and the excellent program that had been arranged for by Professor
Russell. But notwithstanding the small number of institutions
represented, the conference was a marked success, made so very largely
by the many excellent addresses--among others, those of Edwin D. Mead,
Benjamin F. Trueblood, Professor Ernst Richard of Columbia University,
and Honorable William Dudley Foulke.

On the last day of the conference the delegates from the different
colleges met and perfected a permanent organization, which it was
agreed should be called the Intercollegiate Peace Association. Thus,
after a year of preliminary work, the Intercollegiate Peace
Association came into definite and permanent existence on April 14,
1906. At this meeting Dean William P. Rogers of the Cincinnati Law
School was elected president, and Professor Elbert Russell, secretary
and treasurer. The president and the secretary, President Noah E.
Byers of Goshen College, and Professor Stephen F. Weston of Antioch
College constituted the executive committee. The writer has remained
on the executive committee from the beginning, as either an elected or
an ex-officio member.

Two methods of propaganda were adopted: intercollegiate oratorical
contests, and public addresses on peace questions before the student
body and faculties of colleges and universities. It was also agreed
that the work should begin with Ohio and Indiana and gradually extend
to other states. Although no definite plan was formulated until a year
later, at the meeting at Cincinnati, it was understood from the outset
that it should be the aim gradually to extend the field of work, so
that ultimately most of the institutions of higher learning in
practically all of the states should be embraced within the
organization and participate in the contests.

_Purpose._ The purpose of the association has been quite definitely
set forth in my "Historical Sketch"[1] and in my report for 1912.
From these the following statement is very largely borrowed. The
fundamental purpose of the Intercollegiate Peace Association is to
instill into the minds and hearts of the young men of our colleges
and universities the principle that the highest ideals of justice
and righteousness should govern the conduct of men in all their
international affairs quite as much as in purely individual and social
matters, and that, therefore, the true aim of all international
dealings should be to settle differences, of whatever nature, by
peaceful methods through an appeal to the noblest human instincts
and the highest ideals of life, rather than by the arbitrament of
the sword through an appeal to the lower passions; and, further,
both on humanitarian and economic grounds, to arouse in the youth of
to-day an appreciation of the importance of a peaceful settlement of
international disputes, and to inculcate a spirit antagonistic to the
inhuman waste of life and the reckless waste of wealth in needless
warfare.

    [1] Printed in _Antioch College Bulletin_, Vol. VII, No. 1,
    December, 1910.

This appeal to the idealism of youth is founded upon the psychological
fact that it is the ideals of life that determine the conduct of life.
It is ideals that rule the world; hence the importance of right ideals
based upon a comprehensive understanding of the real nature and
deepest implications of human fellowship. The alleged impracticability
is not in the ideal but in the difficulty of making the ideal such a
dominant part of our being that it shall consistently direct our
activities under every circumstance. One of the essential conditions
of human progress is the conviction that such ideals are vital to the
highest attainments and that these should be the aim of all our
strivings. Unfortunately such a standard of life is far from being
realized. Policy rules largely in the world of practical life; either
high ideals are considered impracticable, or there is no attempt to
enforce consistency between belief and practice.

Mindful of the further fact that the ideals and habits of thought and
action that prevail in mature life are those that are formed in youth,
the Intercollegiate Peace Association turns to the young manhood of
the undergraduate for its field of operations. The aim is to give such
a firm mold to the ideals of the undergraduate that they shall for all
time shape his activities to the end of righteous conduct in all
international dealings. In particular, the aim is to cultivate in the
young men of our colleges and universities such sentiments and
standards of conduct as will insure their devotion to the furtherance
of international peace through arbitration and other methods of
pacific settlement rather than by battleships--standards of conduct
based upon the fundamental truth that conflicts between men, and
therefore principles of right and justice, can be rightly settled only
through the mediation of mind, and that every effort to settle them by
force is not only illogical, a psychological impossibility, but is the
way of the brute, not the way of man, whose nature touches the divine.
All the more important must this work with the undergraduate be
considered when we reflect that it is the young men in our colleges
and universities to-day who will mold the public opinion and the
national and international policy of the next generation; for it is
such young men as these that will control the pulpit and the press,
the legislation and the diplomacy of the future. It is this fact that
gives such peculiar importance to the work of the Intercollegiate
Peace Association. To quote from the report of the secretary for 1912:

"Other peace societies are laboring to create a public sentiment
to-day in favor of international peace, through arbitration of all
international differences. This is very essential. But the
Intercollegiate Peace Association is founded upon the belief that the
cause of peace will not triumph in a day, and that it is therefore of
the utmost importance that right ideals be rooted into the minds of
those who will give expression to the public opinion of the future. In
brief, it is building more for the future than for the immediate
present. The millennium of peace will not come until the ideals of a
Christian civilization take deeper root in the minds and hearts of
those who are the leaders of thought and action. One of the crying
sins of to-day is that professions of righteous living in accordance
with Christian ethical ideals are not taken seriously. Note the
disgraceful policy that has been pursued with regard to Turkey by the
nations of Europe that profess to be disciples of the Prince of Peace.
Hence it is of the utmost importance that those who are to become the
future translators of ideals into action shall be imbued with right
principles of life and of human relations. To this end it is sought to
cultivate the right sentiment against war, and for international
peace, among the undergraduates of our colleges; for what the
undergraduate thinks about and reads about to-day will very largely
determine his future principles and his conduct, and it is he who is
destined to mold the ideals, shape the policies, and determine the
actions of the people of to-morrow."

_Methods and Results._ To carry out these purposes two things are
essential: an awakened interest in the cause of peace, and some
definite and effective method for molding sentiments and habits of
thought that will persist with such vitality that they will give shape
to future conduct and activities. To arouse an interest in the
subject, on the part of both professors and students, it was believed
at the outset that public addresses would be effective, and it was
hoped that the association would be able to inaugurate a course of
such addresses in our colleges and universities. It was, however, soon
found that to finance such a course would require more money than we
could hope to command for some time to come. In consequence, very
little has been done along this line further than to arrange for
occasional addresses and to encourage chapel talks. It is this field
of work that the Lake Mohonk Conference voted to adopt at the
suggestion of Dr. Gilman. The conference also found it difficult to
carry out the plan, and our association was invited to assume the
whole of this work--a request we would gladly have accepted, but which
we were compelled to decline for want of funds. It is a very important
field of work and could be made very effective toward realizing the
ultimate goal of the Intercollegiate Peace Association, for its effect
would undoubtedly be the enlistment of a much larger number of the
students in the oratorical contests, which must be our chief reliance
for getting international peace ideas to take a vital root in the
undergraduate mind. If we cannot secure the necessary funds for
carrying on this important work, it is hoped that some other peace
society will do it for us, for such addresses could be made a most
effective complement to our work.

Being compelled to abandon the public addresses for want of money, we
have concentrated most of our efforts upon the intercollegiate
oratorical contests as perhaps the most effective method for carrying
out the purpose of the association. The contests are bound to arouse
an interest in the subject, while the preparation of orations is sure
to ingrain thoughts, sentiments, and convictions that will be
indelible in the character of the young men who participate in the
contests. While the contests are oratorical in their nature, their
primary purpose is not the cultivation of oratory. Oratory is simply
used as a means to an end--the cultivation of right ideas of justice
and righteousness between nations. That such a result will accrue is
assured both in psychological principles and in experience. Every
student who produces a well-prepared oration in bound to make the
thoughts and sentiments expressed a part of his being. The oration
would not be effective if it were otherwise. The writer has heard
scores of these orations, and he is convinced of the sincerity and
earnestness of the orators. Moreover, letters written to him by those
who have won prizes, attesting their interest in and their devotion to
the cause, by reason of their participation in the contests, give
ample evidence that the contests are bearing fruit. Nor can one read
the orations in this volume without being convinced of their
sincerity.

Indeed, the reason why we do not have intercollegiate debates instead
of contests in oratory is because of the psychological truth, amply
justified by experience, that the student who prepares for the
negative side of a peace question would tend to have his thoughts
permanently fixed along the lines of the advocates of great armaments.
It is not that the student should not know the arguments opposing the
ideas of the advocates of peace by arbitration. We would not cultivate
bigotry even in a good cause. We would have him know the facts, as
indeed he must before he can present any arguments for peace that
would have any significance. But an acquaintance with the opposing
arguments is quite a different thing, in its effect upon the thought
of the student, from making that thought his own and publicly
defending it.

Other results may be mentioned. While the cultivation of oratory is
not a function of the Intercollegiate Peace Association, it does
foster oratory as a valuable if not an indispensable instrument for
effecting its own end. In fact, the oratorical contests are something
more than agencies for interesting undergraduates in the peace
movement. The cultivation of the art of expression and of public
speaking, now very generally provided for in college and university
curriculums, is of especial significance to the work of this
association. For it is not alone of importance that the graduate who
leaves his alma mater should be indoctrinated with a message of peace
for the world; that his message may be effective, he must also have
attained some proficiency in the art of clear and forceful diction and
in the art of delivering his message in a pleasing and convincing
manner. Therefore, it is not without reason that our contests are for
the most part under the immediate direction of the department of
English, or of whatever departments have charge of the public speaking
in the various colleges and universities.

A further factor in these contests is their cultural value, both moral
and intellectual. They necessarily cultivate the highest ethical
conceptions, historical and political knowledge, and careful and
logical thinking. To quote from the secretary's report for 1912: "The
work of the Intercollegiate Peace Association is a great force for
righteousness between nation and nation, and so between man and man,
and therefore may be considered as supplementary to the more strictly
moral and intellectual culture in our institutions of higher learning.
The ethical value is not the only value of the contests. In the
preparation of orations the undergraduate necessarily informs himself
of historical conditions, of the economic and social effects of war,
of the legal and constitutional principles involved, and of the
problems, difficulties, and principles concerned with international
relations. It is this early beginning of an intelligent understanding
of the problems involved, together with the right moral insight, that
must count for future effectiveness in shaping international policies
and practices." Finally, while these contests have chiefly in mind the
shaping of the public opinion of coming generations, they are by no
means a negligible factor in their influence upon the public opinion
of to-day. The contests--local, state, and interstate--are heard by
many hundreds of people every year, and in many cases by persons who
would otherwise seldom come in contact with peace sentiments. The
permeating influence in college circles extends beyond those who
participate in the contests. The influence of any single contest may
indeed be small, but so too is the influence of any one peace
conference or congress. The task of molding public opinion along the
lines of any human uplift is always slow, and only gradually do the
influences of this character permeate and take possession of the
social mind; but every influence leaves its impression. It is only by
persistent activities and cumulative effects that the social mind can
be aroused to a full consciousness of any great moral issue, and still
more true is this when that moral issue is of national or
international importance. The many peace societies, the
Intercollegiate Peace Association among them, are just such persistent
activities, which, by gradually producing cumulative effects, will
ultimately reap their reward. But more perhaps than other peace
societies does the Intercollegiate Peace Association concern itself
with the social mind and the social conscience of the future.

_The Contests._ The first oratorical contest was held at the
University of Cincinnati, May 17, 1907. Arrangements were made for the
participation of only Ohio and Indiana colleges. State contests were
not held, but fourteen orations were submitted from as many different
institutions, nine from Ohio and five from Indiana. The writers of
eight of these were selected by judges on thought and composition to
take part in the speaking contest. Four were from Ohio and four from
Indiana. Indiana won both the first and the second prize. The first
prize was won by Paul Smith of DePauw University with the subject,
"The Conflict of War and Peace." The second prize went to Lawrence B.
Smelser of Earlham College, whose subject was "The Solving Principles
of Federation."

The second contest was held at DePauw University, May 15, 1908.
Carrying out the plan adopted at the meeting at Cincinnati, the
contestants were selected by means of State contests, and an
invitation was extended to the colleges and universities of Michigan,
Illinois, and Wisconsin to participate in the contest. Wisconsin did
not respond, but contests were held in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and
Illinois. By special arrangement Juniata College was allowed to
represent Pennsylvania without a state contest. Glenn P. Wishard of
Northwestern University won the first prize; subject, "The United
States and Universal Peace." The second prize was won by H. P. Lenartz
of Notre Dame University; subject, "America and the World's Peace."

The third Interstate contest took place at The University of Chicago,
May 4, 1909, in connection with the Second National Peace Congress.
Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin were represented,
all having held State contests. Levi T. Pennington of Earlham College
won the first prize; subject, "The Evolution of World Peace." The
second prize went to Harold P. Flint of Illinois Wesleyan University;
subject, "America the Exemplar of Peace."

The fourth annual contest was held at the University of Michigan, May
13, 1910. There were six contestants, Pennsylvania having come
regularly into the association. Arthur F. Young of Western Reserve
University won the first prize; subject, "The Waste of War--The Wealth
of Peace." The second prize went to Glenn N. Merry of Northwestern
University; subject, "A Nation's Opportunity."

The fifth annual contest was held at Johns Hopkins University, May 5,
1911, in connection with the Third National Peace Congress. There were
seven contestants, Maryland being represented for the first time. The
first prize was won by Stanley H. Howe, Albion College, Michigan, and
the second prize by Wayne Walker Calhoun, Illinois Wesleyan
University. Mr. Howe's subject was "The Hope of Peace," and Mr.
Calhoun's, "War and the Man." This contest was one of the most
successful that had been held up to that time. It was greeted by one
of the largest audiences that had attended any of the sessions of the
Peace Congress, and the comparison of the orations, in both thought
and delivery, with the speeches given in the congress, was very
favorable to the young orators. A general enthusiasm was evoked for
the contests. Yet there was much fear that this contest might prove to
be the last, there being no assurance ahead for adequate funds to
carry on the work. It was decided, however, not to give up without
further trial, a decision well justified by subsequent developments.

Assistance being secured from the Carnegie peace fund, eleven states
held contests in 1912. In addition to the seven that participated in
the contest at Baltimore, four additional states were added--New York,
North Carolina, Iowa, and Nebraska. With so many states, it became
necessary for the first time to divide them into groups. Two groups
were formed, an Eastern and a Western. The Western Group, of five
states, held its contest at Monmouth College, Illinois, April 26, and
the Eastern Group, of six states, at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania,
May 3. No prizes were given at either of these contests, but an
arrangement was made with the Lake Mohonk Conference by which the
ranking orator in each contest should meet and contest for first and
second place at Mohonk Lake at the time of the Lake Mohonk Conference.
The contest at Mohonk was held May 16, the contestants being Percival
V. Blanshard of the University of Michigan, who represented the
Western Group, and Russell Weisman of Western Reserve University, who
represented the Eastern Group. The title of Mr. Blanshard's oration
was "The Roosevelt Theory of War," and that of Mr. Weisman's,
"National Honor and Vital Interests." The Misses Seabury gave a first
prize of $75 and a second prize of $50. The judges awarded the first
prize to Mr. Blanshard and the second prize to Mr. Weisman. So great,
however, was the interest of the guests at Mohonk Lake, and so nearly
equal in merit were the orations, that a gentleman present gave an
additional $25 to Mr. Weisman to make the prizes equal, and Mr. Joshua
Bailey of Philadelphia gave each of the contestants an additional $50.

Five additional states--Maine, Massachusetts, Texas, Missouri, and
South Dakota--participated in the contests of 1913, making sixteen
states holding contests. Of these states three groups were formed, an
Eastern, a Central, and a Western. The Central Group held its contest
at Goshen College, Indiana, April 25; the Western Group at St. Louis,
May 1, as part of the program of the Fourth American Peace Congress;
and the Eastern Group at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, May 13. The
same arrangements were made as in the preceding year--that the
contestant holding the highest rank in each group should meet in a
final contest at Mohonk Lake. No prizes were given, except that the
Business Men's League of St. Louis gave a prize of $100 for the
contest at St. Louis. The contest at Mohonk was held May 15, and three
prizes were given by the Misses Seabury--$100, $75, and $50. Paul B.
Blanshard of the University of Michigan, a twin brother of the Mr.
Blanchard who won the first prize in 1912, represented the Central
Group and won the first prize with the subject, "The Evolution of
Patriotism." Calvert Magruder, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland, represented the Eastern Group and won the second prize. His
subject was "Certain Phases of the Peace Movement." Vernon M. Welsh,
Knox College, Illinois, represented the Western Group and won the
third prize. His subject was "The Assurance of Peace."

_Growth._ The growth of the Intercollegiate Peace Association, like
that of most social movements, was slow in the first few years of its
existence, but with the gradual accretion of new states it has gained
in momentum, and is to-day increasing with such rapidity that only the
lack of financial support will prevent it from embracing in its
contests within another two years practically every state in the
Union. Starting with two states at the Earlham Conference in 1906 and
the first contest in 1907, it added three states in 1908, one in 1910,
and one in 1911, making seven states participating in the contests of
1911. Four more states were added for the contests of 1912, and five
additional ones for the contests of 1913 (nine states in two years),
making sixteen states in all. Since the contest in May, 1913, eight
states have been added for the contests of 1914, while the work of
organization is being carried on in several other states. By 1915 at
least thirty states will be holding contests if money can be secured
for properly financing them. Four groups are now definitely organized:
an Eastern, a Central, a Western, and a Southern. A Pacific Group is
in process of being organized. Thus, in seven years from the first
contest we have become a national association, extending from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Lakes to the Gulf.

_Prizes and Finances._ In order to encourage the young men to enter
the contests, the plan of offering prizes was adopted at the outset.
The national association made itself responsible for the state prizes,
leaving the local institutions to provide for such local prizes as
they could arrange for. In some places such prizes are given, being
provided for in different ways, and in some places no local prizes are
given. At first only $50 and $25 were given for the two state prizes,
but after the second year it was made a definite policy of the
association to make the first state prize $75 and the second prize
$50. With rare exceptions, in the case of the second prize, this
policy is now maintained. In New York, however, there is a first prize
of $200 and a second prize of $100, given by Mrs. Elmer Black. For the
past two or three years the national association has made itself
responsible for the first prize only, leaving the states to look after
the second prize, though the secretary also looks after many of the
second prizes. No prizes are regularly given in the group contests,
but it is hoped that a plan may be evolved for giving one prize, as
the expenses of the winning contestant are large. At the national
contest at Mohonk Lake, prizes are given to each contestant. In 1914
these prizes will probably range from $40 to $100.

The prize money has come from various sources. In 1908 Mr. Carnegie
gave $1000, and in 1909 he gave $700. The Misses Seabury, of New
Bedford, Massachusetts, gave $500 a year from the first. They gave
$750 in 1913 and will give $1000 for prizes in 1914. In Illinois La
Verne W. Noyes has annually given the first prize of $75 and Harlow N.
Higginbotham the second prize of $50. In Michigan R. E. Olds gave the
first prize until 1913, and J. H. Moores the second prize until 1914.
In Ohio Samuel Mather and J. G. Schmidlapp furnish the prizes for
1914. In New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland the
prizes are given by individuals at the instigation of peace societies.
In some states the second prize is given by some individual or through
a collection from a number of individuals. The balance of the prizes
are paid out of the subvention of $1200 that has been allowed for the
past three years out of the Carnegie endowment fund. In 1913 the
prizes amounted to $2400. In 1914 they approximate $3400, apart from
any local prizes that may be given.

The annual subvention of $1200 from the Carnegie peace fund is wholly
inadequate to meet the growing needs of this association. Since this
subvention was first granted, the number of states has been more than
doubled, and it takes about $600 a year to run the secretary's office.
Unless more money is secured from some source, the association will be
unable to grow beyond its present limits.

_Officers and Organization._ The organization of the Intercollegiate
Peace Association has been a gradual development, and has undergone
modifications to meet the changing conditions due to the considerable
enlargement of the territory embraced within its sphere of activity,
chief of which has been the practical impossibility of getting
representatives to a national meeting from such a large extent of
territory. At first there were a president, secretary, and treasurer,
and an executive committee, with the college presidents of Ohio and
Indiana as vice presidents. At the meeting at DePauw University, in
1908, it was decided to create state committees, that should have
charge of the work in their respective states. As the states grew in
numbers the plan of having vice presidents was abandoned. In 1911 the
chairmen of the state committees were made members of an advisory
council, and in 1913 the executive committee was reorganized so that
there should be one member from each group of states in addition to
the president and secretary. When the organization is fully matured
the elected members of the executive committee will be a
self-perpetuating body, only one or two going out of office in any
one year, reelection being permitted. The executive committee will
elect the president, executive secretary, and treasurer, and the
president and the executive secretary will appoint the members of the
advisory council, who will be ex-officio chairmen of the state
committees. The officers up to date have been as follows:

_Presidents:_ Dean William P. Rogers, Cincinnati Law School,
1906-1907; Professor George W. Knight, Ohio State University,
1907-1908; Professor Elbert Russell, Earlham College, 1908-1910; Dean
William P. Rogers, 1910-1911; President Charles F. Thwing, Western
Reserve University, 1911-.

_Secretaries:_ Professor Elbert Russell, 1906-1908; Mr. George Fulk,
Cerro Gordo, Illinois, 1908-1911; Professor Stephen F. Weston, Antioch
College, 1911-.

_Treasurers:_ Professor Elbert Russell, 1906-1908; Professor Stephen
F. Weston, 1908-.

_Orations._ In the seven years in which the contests have been held,
about twelve hundred orations have been written, a little more than
one half of these in the past two years. The number written in 1914
will not fall far short of five hundred. For some time we have desired
to publish a volume of the prize orations, and within the past few
years there has been considerable demand for such a volume, as many
would-be contestants are anxious to see what they will have to measure
up to in order to win. Outsiders interested in the contests have also
desired such a publication. The present collection was therefore
projected, and the World Peace Foundation willingly undertook to issue
it as one of the books in its International Library.

The ten orations that have been selected for this volume out of the
twelve hundred have all won the first prize in interstate contests.
The first five are the first prize orations in the national contests
of the first five years before the group contests were organized, and
were selected by a series of local, state, and interstate contests out
of about five hundred and fifty orations delivered. The last five,
selected by a series of contests out of about six hundred and fifty,
are the first prize orations of the group contests of the past two
years. They were delivered in the national contests at Mohonk Lake at
the time of the Lake Mohonk Conferences. The fact that many of the
second prize orations, and indeed a number of the others, were given
first place by some of the judges is indicative of the general high
character of all the orations, so that the ten selected orations are
very fairly typical of the thought and sentiment of the whole twelve
hundred. It is therefore believed that the publication of these
orations will be of great value not only as a stimulus to prospective
contestants but as a convincing proof of the quality of the work that
the undergraduate students of the country are doing in the contests.
They are evidence that these contests call out a high grade of
intellectual and moral culture, showing as they do keen and clear
thinking and high moral ideals.

There is included as an appendix to these orations the Pugsley prize
oration of 1913, by Bryant Smith, a senior in Guilford College, North
Carolina, a sample of the prize essays annually submitted for the
Pugsley prize of $100 offered through the Lake Mohonk Conference by
Chester DeWitt Pugsley of Yonkers, New York. The essay is also
fittingly printed in this volume because Mr. Smith represented the
state of North Carolina in the Eastern Group contest of the
Intercollegiate Peace Association in 1912, while still another reason
for including it is the hope that others who have taken part in the
oratorical contests, and who are thereby excluded from entering those
contests again, may be encouraged to try for the Pugsley prize.

_Subjects of Orations._ In view of the fact that so many orations have
been written on peace subjects, it is worthy of note that the topics
have seldom been duplicated, and that when the same topic has been
twice used, the handling of it has been so different that little
duplication has been noticeable. Each oration well represents the
originality and the individuality of the writer or orator. Duplication
is shown in the quotations, and it is therefore suggested that
quotations be sparingly used.

Not the least interesting feature of the orations is the combination
of idealism and practicality, which they reveal in the minds of the
contestants. Truly, these young men "have hitched their wagon to a
star," the star of universal good will.

To show the wide range of subjects chosen, and therefore the scope and
many-sidedness of the peace question, the following list of titles
already used is given here. They are also given as suggestions to
future writers of orations, for there is no objection to choosing
subjects previously used. Even if there is some duplication of
thought, it makes little difference, since the contests are seldom
held twice in the same place. Included in the list are some titles
that show variations in the way of stating the same thing, and these
variations should be suggestive to future writers of orations.

    PARTIAL LIST OF SUBJECTS

    America the Exemplar of Peace
    America and the World's Peace
    America's Mission in the Peace Movement
    America's Mission to Mankind
    America's Obligation
    The Arbiter of the World
    Arbitration _versus_ War
    The Challenge of Thor
    The Conflict of War and Peace
    A Congress of Nations
    The Cost of Militarism
    The Cost of Peace
    The Crucial Parallelism
    The Dawn of Peace
    The Dawn of Universal Peace
    Democracy and Peace
    Diplomacy and Peace
    Disillusionment
    The Dominant Ideal
    The End; and the Means
    The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism
    The Evolution of Justice
    The Evolution of Law
    The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker
    The Evolution of World Peace
    The Fallacy of the Economics of War
    The Federation of the World
    Forces of War and Peace
    The Foundations
    From Chaos to Harmony
    From History's Pages--Peace
    Fruits of War and Fruits of Peace
    Government and International Peace
    The Growing Sentiment
    The Growth of the Peace Movement
    Honor Satisfied
    The Ideal of the Century
    Idealism and the Peace Movement
    Immigration and Peace
    The Inefficiency of War
    Instead of War--What?
    International Arbitration
    International Justice and World Peace
    International Peace
    International Peace and the Prince of Peace
    Justice and Peace
    Justice by War or Peace
    The Keynote of the Twentieth Century
    The Lasting Wound
    The Law of Peace
    The Message of the Andes
    Military Selection and its Effect on National Life
    Modern Battlefields
    A Nation's Opportunity
    The New Anglo-Saxon
    The New Brotherhood
    The New Corner Stone
    The New Era
    The New Nobility
    The New Patriotism
    The Next Step
    The Panama Canal
    The Passing of War
    The Pathway to Peace
    Patriotism and Peace
    Peace and Armaments
    Peace and the Evolution of Conscience
    Peace and the Fortification of the Panama Canal
    Peace and Public Opinion
    Peace Inevitable
    Peace is our Passion
    Peace on Earth
    Peace, our Great Ideal
    The Philosophy of Universal Peace
    Physical and Psychical Aspects of War
    A Plea for International Peace
    A Plea for Peace
    Popular Fallacies about War
    Popular Government and Peace
    Popular Sentiment and Purer Citizenship: The Right Road to Peace
    The Power of International Tolerance
    The Prince of Peace
    Progress toward Justice
    The Proposed Court of Arbitral Justice
    The Rationality of Peace
    The Real Power
    The Redemption of Patriotism
    The Regaining of the World's Lost Legacy
    Right or Might
    The Significance of the Hague Conferences
    The Rightful Ruler
    A Simple Method of Forwarding Universal Peace
    The Solving Principles of Federation
    Sovereignty in Arbitration
    Statesmanship _versus_ Battleship
    Thor or Christ
    Ungrateful America
    The United States and Universal Peace
    The United States of the World
    Universal Peace and the Brotherhood of Man
    The Unnecessary Evil
    A Vision of a Conquest
    War and Christianity
    War--The Demoralizer
    War and its Elimination
    War and the Laboring Man
    War and the Man
    War for Profit
    War--Universal Brotherhood--Peace
    The Warrior's Protest against War
    The Waste of War--The Wealth of Peace
    The Way of Peace
    What, from Vengeance?
    World Federation
    The World Organization

_Acknowledgments._ The Intercollegiate Peace Association is greatly
indebted to many state and city peace societies for cooperation and
assistance. They have materially strengthened our work and made
possible the enlargement of the field of our activities. To their
secretaries we are deeply indebted. The fullest cooperation of the
peace societies, each assisting and supplementing the work of others
wherever possible, will bring the most fruitful and the most speedy
results, and the fact that we have received such cooperation indicates
a full appreciation of the value of the work being done in these
contests. We wish also to express our gratitude to the many individual
contributors of prizes, especially to the Misses Seabury, for their
interest, encouragement, and generosity, because without their
assistance our association could not have survived. To the Misses
Seabury we are also under obligation for lending their rights over the
texts of orations for this publication. For the subvention from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace we thank the American Peace
Society, through whose agency it comes to us. For the publication of
this volume we are deeply grateful to the World Peace Foundation,
without whose cooperation the book could not have been published. To
Edwin D. Mead and Denys P. Myers the editor owes his sincere thanks
for suggestions and corrections of the manuscript. We trust that the
volume will be amply justified by the good that it will do.

                                    STEPHEN F. WESTON
                                                 _Executive Secretary_


SUPPLEMENT

_The Contests of 1914._ This volume was projected to be published
before the Lake Mohonk Conference in May, but it was decided to
include the five orations given in the national contest of 1914, and
so make the volume complete for the year of issue. The last five
orations, then, are the winning ones in the group contests of 1914,
contesting for place in the national contest at Mohonk Lake, May 16,
1914. They are the picked orations of over four hundred and fifty
prepared in one hundred and twenty colleges and universities,
representing twenty-two states. The fifteen orations in the volume are
the winning orations out of more than sixteen hundred and fifty
written by the student body of the country in the past eight years.

In 1914 six additional states took part in the contests, making
twenty-two organized into five groups. The Pacific coast and Southern
groups were added during the year to the three groups organized in
1913. Three of the groups held their contests on May 1--the North
Atlantic at the College of the City of New York, the Central at
Western Reserve University, and the Western at Des Moines College. The
Southern Group held its contest at Vanderbilt University on May 10. On
the Pacific coast only Oregon was ready, and the winner of her state
contest was permitted to represent the group in the national contest.
Utah and California are planning to enter the contests of 1915.
Virginia, West Virginia, and South Carolina are organizing, and a
sixth group will then be formed--the South Atlantic Group.

                                                         S. F. W.




THE CONFLICT OF WAR AND PEACE

By PAUL SMITH, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at the University of
Cincinnati, May 17, 1907




THE CONFLICT OF WAR AND PEACE


The past ages have witnessed a long conflict between two opposing
principles--the principle of might and the principle of right. The
first instituted the duel between equals and condemned the impotent to
slavery; the second ordained the courts of civil justice and signed
the Emancipation Proclamation. The principle of might licensed
despotism and degraded the many in the service of the few; the
principle of right proclaimed democracy and consecrated the few to the
service of the many. Thus in the realm of the individual and of the
state the diviner conception has won its triumphs, and to-day force is
tolerated only as it serves the cause of justice. But in the larger
international sphere the advocates of might prolong the ancient cry
for war; the disciples of right protest in a gentler demand for peace.

The partisans of war urge four capital reasons in behalf of their
principle: personal glory, moral education, class interest, and
national egoism.

We have as a heritage of our military past, not a sense of the grim
tragedy of war, but traditions which award the highest meed of
personal glory to the warrior. The roster of the world's heroes
contains two classes of names--great soldiers and great altruists.
Poet and orator and populace unite to do honor to him who was not
afraid to fight and to die for his home, his king, his liberty, his
country, his convictions. Bravery has ever won its laurel crown, for
an instinct within us applauds physical courage and aggressiveness.
And the gilded uniform and clanking sword, the drumbeat and the bugle
call, the camp fire and the "far-flung battle line," stand as the most
dramatic expressions of a deep sentiment, primitive and thrilling.

Akin to this martial hero worship is the argument that success in war
gives training for the higher contests of peace. Out of the war of
1776 the nation took George Washington for President; out of the
Mexican War, Zachary Taylor; out of the Civil War, General Grant; out
of the Spanish War, Theodore Roosevelt. The badge of the Grand Army of
the Republic is a certificate of merit. The cross of the Legion of
Honor opens the door to social and political and business prosperity.
Battle is regarded as a supreme test of sturdy manhood, and the harsh
discipline of the camp as education for the finer arts of the council.
War creates a heroism which later devotes itself to spiritual ends.

Moreover, say the advocates, the interests of class require force for
their conservation. The hereditary nobility of Europe was founded by
military process for military purposes, and, with the passing of war,
loses its warrant for existence. On the other hand, it is claimed that
the under classes may come into the enjoyment of their inalienable
rights, common to all humanity, only by means of the sword. Witness
the peasantry of Russia! Even in America so great a prophet as Henry
Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be
set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who
freely predict, even for our democratic land, a desperate rebellion of
a proletariat of poverty against an aristocracy of wealth.

Finally, the demands of national egoism are urged in behalf of war.
For example, Japan needs new territory for her growing millions and
must assume the conqueror's role. Or France goes mad with the lust of
empire and goes forth untamed until the day of Waterloo. Or Great
Britain must have new markets; and, falsely reasoning that trade
follows the flag, and the flag follows the bayonet, she seizes a realm
upon which the sun may never set. Or the interests of white men and
yellow men, of black men or red men, clash; and then the cannon must
be the final test, might must make right, and the strongest must
survive. The greed of territorial aggrandizement, the spirit of
national adventure, the longing for commercial supremacy, the honor of
a country, the pride of racial achievement--each is urged to justify
the necessity for bloodshed and carnage. Such are the arguments of the
advocates of war.

To balance these, the advocates of peace plead four greater
considerations: against personal glory, the economic cost of
militarism; against the moral education of war, the higher heroism of
peace; against class interests, the sanctity of human life; and
against national egoism, the deeper spirit of national altruism.

A single modern battleship costs more than the combined value of the
property and endowment of all the colleges of a certain great state.
Two thirds of the money passing through the treasury of the Republic
goes to the support of the military system. Computing two hundred
dollars a year as the average loss to society occasioned by the
withdrawal of each soldier and sailor from productive toil, and adding
this sum to the war budgets of the nations for the past fifty years,
we obtain a total of billions, beyond the reach of all imagination.
The money which armies, navies, wars, and pensions have cost the world
in fifty years would have installed in China a system of education
equal to that of the United States; would have transformed the arid
deserts of India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid
railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have
dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation
of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family
on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half
century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings.
The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce
pauperism, elevate the peasantry of Europe, lighten taxation, and work
an economic revolution.

The argument for moral education mistakes national gratitude to
warriors for tribute to the training of the camp. But grant that war
develops the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral
phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war;
it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of
womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men
to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has
no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the
greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in
social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities
and powers and rulers of the world-darkness calls forth the maximum
powers of manhood. Wendell Phillips stands in the ranks of heroes as
high as Philip Sheridan. The moral loss from war transcends the moral
gain.

Yet war levies toll more tragic than any toll of dollars, more
appalling than any moral cost. A famous painting reveals the world's
conquerors, Xerxes, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, and a lesser host,
mounted proudly on battle steeds, caparisoned with gorgeous trappings;
but the field through which they march is paved with naked, mutilated
corpses, the ghastly price of glory. The trenches at Port Arthur were
filled level-full with the bodies of self-sacrificed martyrs, and upon
this gruesome <DW72> the final charges were made. Stripped of all
sentiment, war is organized and wholesale murder, a savage and awful
paradox which proclaims the shallowness of civilization. Said General
Sherman: "Only those who have never heard a shot, only those who have
never heard the shrieks of the wounded nor the groans of the dying,
can cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." God
grant the world may soon heed the Voice, sounding down from the
solemnity of Sinai, laying the divine command upon each man and each
nation: "Thou shalt not kill!"

There yet remains the ethical argument for peace. Will any one say
that the supreme duty of altruism is binding upon men as individuals,
and not binding upon the same men acting conjointly as a nation? When
the people and the statesmen of one nation are able to put themselves
in the places of the statesmen and of the people of another nation;
when there is a common will to do international justice rather than to
despise the weaker country; when not selfish interest alone, but the
greatest good of the greatest number, becomes the driving impulse of
humanity; when the thrill of fraternity crosses geographical lines and
pauses not on the shores of the seas--then war will be impossible,
the energies of the world will turn to the constructive arts, and from
the midst of contentment unshadowed by hunger, from prosperity
unmenaced by want, in the peaceful spirit of the Christ, the world
will sing:

  "The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star is
          brotherhood;
  For it will bring again to Earth her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
  Will send new light on every face, a kingly power upon the race.
  And till it come, we men are slaves, and travel downward to dust
          of graves.
  Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: blind creeds and kings
          have had their day.
  Break the dead branches from the path: our hope is in the aftermath.
  Our hope is in heroic men, star-led to build the world again.
  To this Event the ages ran: Make way for Brotherhood--make way for
          man."

All great reforms have begun with "star-led" men and have moved from
individuals to groups and from groups to the nation. In every distinct
advance of the race prophetic persons have anticipated the trend of
the ages and have adopted new codes for themselves; the higher
morality has spread by agitation to include a larger group, and
finally it has become the policy of the nation. Thus slavery went, and
political equality came.

And thus war must go and peace must come. First, we find protest
against the killing of individuals by individuals. The duel fell into
disrepute and at last was forbidden by law. The carrying of weapons
became unfashionable and at length was made a crime. With the growth
of the moral sense, mutual trust took the place of armed neutrality.
The present situation is ready for the larger application of these
principles. The argument which abolished the carrying of weapons must
frown upon excessive national armaments. As the individual duel was
superseded by personal arbitration, so the national duel must be
superseded by national arbitration. The reason that maintains the
civil court for the settlement of individuals' disputes calls for a
higher court for the settlement of national disputes. Not alone among
men, not alone within states, but among the nations, right, not might,
must rule; not force, but justice; and written as the world's supreme
mandate, as the highest human law from which there may be no appeal,
must be the unshaken law of national righteousness.

Tennyson's words were accounted a poet's fancy when he wrote:

  Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

Yet the present year[1] will witness the fulfillment of that prophecy.
Disarmament and arbitration will be considered this summer, not by
agitators, not by theorists, nor yet prophetically by poets; but in
June, at the invitation of our own President,[2] an actual
international conference will assemble, a Parliament of the World,
composed of official representatives of every nation of the globe.
Thus we see the foregleams of an approaching day. The time is
not far distant when war will glide into the grim shadows of a
scarce-remembered past, when battles will pass into the oblivion of
forgotten horrors. Then will society realize its dreams of a kingdom
of heaven upon earth, where the barbaric lure of fighting will be
lost; where no class lines may exist save those freely acknowledged by
a common justice; where national egoism maintains no armies for
conquest and no navies for aggrandizement; where economic resources
are devoted, not to mutual physical destruction, but to splendid
spiritual enlargement; where "every nation that shall lift again its
hand against a brother, on its forehead will wear forevermore the
curse of Cain"; and where, in the realization of a vast, racial
brotherhood, is fulfilled the prophetic angel's song, "Peace on earth,
good-will to men." Ruskin, the modern bard of peace, has sung:

  Put off, put off your mail, ye kings, and beat your brands to dust--
  A surer grasp your hands must know, your hearts a better trust;
  Nay, bend aback the lance's point, and break the helmet bar--
  A noise is in the morning winds, but not the noise of war!
  Among the grassy mountain paths the glittering troops increase--
  They come, they come!--how fair their feet,--they come that
          publish peace.

    [1] The Hague Conference of 1907 is referred to.

    [2] By the courtesy of President Roosevelt the official call
    for the Second Hague Conference was issued by the Emperor of
    Russia. Forty-four nations were represented.--_Editor._




THE UNITED STATES AND UNIVERSAL PEACE

By GLENN PORTER WISHARD, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at DePauw University,
Greencastle, Indiana, May 15, 1908




THE UNITED STATES AND UNIVERSAL PEACE


Political and religious reforms move slowly. We change our beliefs and
at the same time hold fast to old customs. Farsighted public opinion
has declared war to be unchristian; sound statesmanship has stamped it
as unjust; the march of events has, in a majority of cases, proved it
to be unnecessary--and yet we continue to build mammoth engines of
destruction as if war were inevitable. Truly, the millennium is not at
hand, nor is war a thing of the past; but whereas war was once the
rule, now it is the exception. This is an age of peace; controversies
once decided by force are now settled by arbitration. Europe, once the
scene of continuous bloodshed, has not been plundered by conquering
armies for more than a generation, while the United States has enjoyed
a century of peace marred by only five years of foreign war. The four
notable conflicts of the last decade have been between great and small
powers, and have been confined to the outposts of civilization; while
during the same period more than one hundred disputes have been
settled by peaceful means. The willingness to arbitrate has been
manifest; the means have been provided; the Permanent International
Court, established by the Hague Conference in 1899, actually lives,
and has already adjudicated four important controversies.[1] But
arbitration, you say, will never succeed because the decisions cannot
be enforced. You forget that already some two hundred and fifty
disputes have been settled by this method, and in not one instance has
the losing power refused to abide by the decision.

    [1] From October 14, 1902, the date of the first decision,
    up to the end of 1913, the Permanent Court has rendered
    thirteen decisions settling international
    differences.--_Editor._

Yesterday the man who advocated universal peace was called a dreamer;
to-day throughout the world organized public opinion demands the
abolition of war. Yesterday we erected statues to those who died for
their country; to-day we eulogize those who live for humanity.
Yesterday we bowed our heads to the god of war; to-day we lift our
hands to the Prince of Peace.

I do not mean to say that we have entered the Utopian age, for the
present international situation is a peculiar one, since we are at the
same time blessed with peace and cursed with militarism. This is not
an age of war, yet we are burdened by great and ever-increasing
armaments; the mad race for naval supremacy continues, while the
relative strength of the powers remains practically the same; the
intense and useless rivalry of the nations goes on until, according to
the great Russian economist, Jean de Bloch, it means "slow destruction
in time of peace by swift destruction in the event of war." In Europe
to-day millions are being robbed of the necessaries of life, millions
more are suffering the pangs of abject poverty in order to support
this so-called "armed peace." Note the condition in our own country.
Last year we expended on our army, navy, and pensions sixty-seven per
cent of our total receipts. Think of it! In a time of profound peace
more than two thirds of our entire expenditures are charged to the
account of war.

We do not advocate radical, Utopian measures; we do not propose
immediate disarmament; but we do maintain that when England, Germany,
France, and the United States each appropriates from thirty to forty
per cent of their total expenditures in preparation for war in an age
of peace, the time has come for the unprejudiced consideration of the
present international situation. Why do the great powers build so many
battleships? President Roosevelt, Representative Hobson, and others
would have us believe that England, Germany, and France are actually
preparing for war, while the United States is building these engines
of destruction for the purpose of securing peace. But what right have
we to assume that our navy is for the purpose of preserving peace,
while the navies of the European powers are for the purpose of making
war? Is not such an assumption an insult to our neighbors? As a matter
of fact, England builds new battleships because Germany does, Germany
increases her navy because France does, while the United States builds
new dreadnoughts because other nations pursue that policy. Call it by
whatever honey-coated name you will, the fact, remains that it is
military rivalry of the most barbarous type, a rivalry as useless as
it is oppressive, a rivalry prompted by jealousy and distrust where
there should be friendship and mutual confidence. There is riot one of
the powers but that would welcome relief from the bondage of
militarism; the demand for the limitation of armaments is almost
universal. Believing that to decry war and praise peace without
offering some plan by which the present situation may be changed is
superficial, we hasten to propose something practicable.

How, then, shall we put an end to this useless rivalry of the
nations? At present a general agreement of the great powers on the
limitations of military establishments seems impossible. It remains
for some powerful nation to prove to the world that the great
armaments are not necessary to continued peace, with honor and
justice. Some nation must take the first step.[2] Why not the United
States? The nations of Europe are surrounded by powerful enemies,
while the United States is three thousand miles from any conceivable
foe. They are potentially weak, while our resources are unlimited.
They have inherited imperialism; we have inherited democracy. Their
society is permeated with militarism; ours is built on peace and
liberty. Our strategic position is unequaled, our resources are
unlimited, our foreign policy is peaceful, our patriotism is
unconquerable. In view of these facts, I ask you, What nation has the
greatest responsibility for peace? Are not we Americans the people
chosen to lift the burden of militarism from off the backs of our
downtrodden brother?

    [2] The widely heralded proposal in 1913 for a naval holiday
    by all the great powers is the first move in this
    direction.--_Editor._

Now what are we doing to meet this responsibility? On the one hand, we
are performing a great work for peace. Many of our statesmen, business
men, and laborers, united in a common cause, are exerting a tremendous
influence in behalf of arbitration and disarmament. On the other hand,
we are spending more on our military establishment than any other
world power;[3] we are building more battleships than any other
nation;[4] we are no longer trusting our neighbors; we are warning
them to beware of our mailed fist; and we are thereby declaring to the
world that we have lost our faith in the power of justice and are now
trusting to the force of arms.

    [3] The orator is comparing the cost of the United States
    army, navy, and pensions upkeep with the military
    establishments of other powers.--_Editor._

    [4] Since naval rivalry in its acute form has centered
    between Great Britain and Germany, European naval building
    programs have exceeded those of the United
    States.--_Editor._

And why this paradoxical situation? Why do we at the same time prepare
for war and work for peace? It is simply because many of our statesmen
honestly believe that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for
war. It is true that a certain amount of strength tends to command
respect, and for that reason a navy sufficient for self-defense is
warranted. Such a navy we now have. Why should it be enlarged? Naval
enthusiasts would have us prepare, not for the probable but for the
possible. Seize every questionable act of our neighbors, they say,
magnify it a thousand times, publish it in letters of flame throughout
the land, and make every American citizen believe that the great
powers are prepared to destroy us at any moment. Having educated the
people up to a sense of threatened annihilation, they burden them with
taxes, build artificial volcanoes dedicated to peace, parade them up
and down the high seas, and defy the world to attack us. Then, they
say, we shall have peace. Is this reasonable? As sure as thought leads
to action, so preparation for war leads to war. This argument that the
United States, since she is a peace-loving nation, should have the
largest navy in the world in order to preserve peace is illogical and
without foundation. By what divine right does the United States assume
the role of preserving the world's peace at the cannon's mouth? Since
when has it been true that might makes right, and that peace can be
secured only by acting the part of a bully? It is unjust, it is
unpatriotic, it is unstatesmanlike, for men to argue that the United
States should browbeat the world into submission; that she should
build so many battleships that the nations of the Eastern hemisphere
will be afraid to oppose the ironclad dragon of the Western
Hemisphere. Peace purchased at the price of brute force is unworthy of
the name. Surely the United States cannot afford to be guilty of such
an injustice. If we wish to be free; if we wish to remain a true
republic; if we purpose to continue our mighty work for humanity, we
must limit our preparations for war. The best way to preserve peace is
to think peace, to believe in peace, and to work for peace.

The extent to which the great powers will go in order to secure
enthusiasm for their military establishments is almost beyond
comprehension. Each nation has its great military rendezvous, its
grand naval parades, its magnificent display of gorgeous military
uniforms, its wave of colors, blare of trumpets, and bursts of martial
music. The United States is now sending her navy around the world--for
the purpose of training the seamen?--certainly, but also that the
youth of our land may be intoxicated by the apparent glory of it all,
and thus enlist for service; that the American citizens may be aroused
to greater enthusiasm by this magnificent display of the implements of
legalized murder, and thus be willing to build more floating arsenals
rather than irrigate arid lands, develop internal waterways, build
hospitals, schools, and colleges.

The trouble with such exhibitions is, that it displays only the bright
side of militarism. If in place of the Russian battleships they should
display the starving masses of dejected and despised beings who pay
for those battleships; if in place of the gay German uniforms they
should exhibit the rags of the disheartened peasants who pay for those
uniforms; if in place of the grand parade they should produce masses
of wounded men and rivers of blood; if in place of the stirring
martial music they should produce the writhing agonies and awful
groans of dying men; if in place of sham war they should produce
actual war,--their exhibitions would make militarism unbearable.

Again, we are told that we have suddenly become a world power, and
that we must prepare to exercise a new diplomacy under new conditions.
We must increase our navy, they say, to enforce this new diplomacy. We
must prepare to fight in behalf of the Monroe Doctrine. But why, I
ask, cannot this new diplomacy be enforced as American diplomacy has
always been enforced? We promulgated the Monroe Doctrine without a
navy; we have maintained it for over eighty years without the show of
force. If our new diplomacy is right, it is as strong as the world's
respect for righteousness; if it is wrong, a hundred battleships
cannot enforce it.

We have become a world power, and therefore we have a world-wide
responsibility, and that responsibility is to establish justice, not
force; to build colleges, not battleships; to enthrone love, not hate;
to insure peace, not war. Our mission is to strike the chains from the
ankles of war-burdened humanity. Our duty is to proclaim in the name
of the Most High our faith in the power of justice as opposed to the
force of arms. May it be said of us that we found the world burdened
with militarism, but left it blessed with peace; that we found liberty
among the strong alone, but left it the birthright of the weak; that
we found humanity a mass of struggling individuals, but left it a
united brotherhood. May it be said of us that we found peace purchased
by suffering, but left it as free as air; that we found peace bruised
and stained with militarism, but left it ruling the world through love
and liberty. May it be said of us that we fulfilled our mission as a
world power; that we were brave enough and strong enough to lead the
world into the path of universal peace.




THE EVOLUTION OF WORLD PEACE

By LEVI T. PENNINGTON, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at The University
of Chicago, May 4, 1909




THE EVOLUTION OF WORLD PEACE


In the progress of the world the dream of yesterday becomes the
confident hope of to-day and the realized fact of to-morrow. As old
systems fail to meet new conditions and new ideals, they are
discarded; and into the limbo of worse than useless things is passing
the system of human sacrifice to the Moloch of international warfare.
For centuries world peace has been the dream of the poet, the
philanthropist, the statesman, and the Christian. That dream is
becoming a confident hope. This generation should see it an
accomplished fact.

There was a time when individual prowess determined the issue of every
difference. Might made right, so it was thought, and the winner in any
controversy was he who had the heaviest club, the strongest arm, or
the thickest skull. Man's interrelationships multiplied as humanity
advanced; with each new relation came new causes for quarrel, and for
a time advancing civilization brought but increase in murders and
assassinations.

We know the process by which personal combat ceased; how the duel
replaced murder and ambush and assassination; how courts of law
replaced the duel. The dreamer saw the day when personal combat should
be no more; the man of mind refuted all the arguments in favor of the
duel of men; the constructive statesman of that early day instituted
courts of law and equity. Men who had a difference insisted that it
was their quarrel and they alone could settle it; but reason saw that
two combatants inflamed by passion are least fitted of all men to see
where justice lies. Many held that where honor is involved, no one can
adjust the difficulty but those most directly concerned; but reason
saw that a man's honor cannot be vindicated by killing his enemy or
being killed by him. Men said, "If personal combat is abolished,
courage and strength will perish from the earth." But reason saw that
personal combat in a selfish cause does not bring out the highest type
of courage; and that there are opportunities enough for the exercise
of the highest and best moral and physical courage to keep valor alive
forever. It was finally urged that there would be no power to enforce
the decree if personal differences were left to the adjudication of
others; but reason said, "That power will come with the need for it."
And so courts of law and equity arose, based on the need of humanity;
laws were passed defining rights and limiting aggression; and when one
man wronged another, that wrong was settled in court by the power of
the whole people and not in personal combat with the bludgeon or the
knife.

For similar reasons wars between states and tribes have ceased; and
face to face with the inevitable logic of past progress stands the
world to-day. Though humanity has been slow to see it, the truth has
begun to dawn in the hearts of men--that international wars are no
more to be justified than civil strife, tribal warfare, or personal
combat. Gradually the omnipotent power of right is overcoming the
inertia of humanity, and the world is moving. One by one the awful
truths concerning war are forcing themselves upon the consciousness
and the conscience of men. The mighty power of fact is beating down
the opposition to world peace.

Men have begun to realize the terrible cost, the unbelievable
wastefulness of actual war, and the preparation for possible war. When
we read that the armed peace of Europe the past thirty-seven years has
cost $111,000,000,000, nearly as much as the aggregate value of all
the resources of the United States, the richest nation on earth, the
figures are so appalling that mortal mind cannot conceive them, and
they lose their force. When we remember that two thirds of the
national revenues of the United States are spent on wars past or
prospective, the matter comes closer home. When we realize that the
cost of a single battleship exceeds the value of all the grounds and
buildings of all the colleges and universities in Illinois, the
figures have more meaning to us. And when we reflect that the cost of
a single shot from one of the great guns of that battleship would
build a home for an American family, a comfortable home costing $1700,
the common man realizes that the richest nation on earth cannot afford
to go to war nor prepare for war.

But mere money is one of the cheapest things in all the world. The
price of war never can be paid in gold. Not in national treasuries can
you see the payment of that price, where smug, well-groomed
politicians sign bonds and bills of credit. If you would see the
payment of that price of war, you must go to the place of war. With
all your senses open, step upon the battlefield. Smell the smoke of
burning powder, the reek of charging horses, the breath of fresh, red,
human blood. Feel the warmth of that blood as you seek to stanch the
wound in the breast of one of the world's bravest, dying for he knows
not what. Hear the screams of the shells, the booming roar of the
cannonade, the clash of the onslaught, the shrieks of the wounded, the
groans of the dying, the last gasp of him whose life has reached its
end. Such is the infernal music of war. See the victim of the conflict
reel in the saddle and fall headlong. Cast your eyes on the mangled
forms of godlike men, fallen in the midst of fullest life. Come in the
night after the battle and look upon the ghastly faces upturned in the
moonlight. Gaze on the windrows of the dead, Mars's awful harvest,
that impoverishes all and enriches none, and you know something of the
cost of war.

And yet we have seen but little. Could we but enter the wasted homes
and see the broken hearts that war has made; could we go to the
almshouses and soldiers' orphans' homes and see widows and children by
the thousand suffering the doled-out charity of state or nation
because war has robbed them of their rightful protectors; could we but
realize the agony of the broken home, a thousandfold worse than the
agony of the battlefield,--then might we know more of the real cost of
war.

And still our idea would be inadequate, though we realized the full
measure of every groan and heartache. Earth's most priceless treasures
are still more intangible things, the treasures of justice and
kindliness and love. In that higher realm the cost of war is most
terrible and most deadly. The spirit of war in the soldier sets aside
the moral law, makes human life seem valueless, human suffering a
thing to be disregarded, human slaughter an honorable profession. The
war spirit blinds the eye of the statesman, till wrong seems right,
folly seems expediency, and the death of thousands seems preferable
to the life and happiness of all under terms of peace not dictated by
his own will. Justice is dethroned, and revenge takes up the iron
scepter and lets fly the thunderbolt. The war spirit perverts the mind
of the publicist, till the achievements of honorable peace sink into
insignificance, and the press clamors for the war that means money to
the publisher but death to innocent thousands who can have no possible
interest in the conflict. The war spirit takes possession of the
pulpit, and the minister called to preach the loving message of the
Prince of Peace stirs up the spirit of contention and animosity, of
hate and murder. Could we but draw aside the curtain and, back of the
tinsel and gold braid, see the crime, the hate, the moral degradation
that war always brings, never again would a friend of humanity ask for
war.

But the eyes of the world are opening to the fact that the cost of war
is far too high in money and in men, in suffering and sacrifice, and
in those higher values of justice and kindliness and love. And as the
thought once grew that personal differences might be settled without
personal combat, so men are looking toward the settlement of
international difficulties without recourse to the sword. They have
seen that every argument against the duel of men applies with still
greater force against the duel of nations. And the world has moved
farther toward world peace in the past twenty-five years than in all
the centuries of history that have preceded. World peace has become
not the dream of the poet but the confident hope of the world, whose
realization is the task whose accomplishment is set for the men of
this generation.

One by one the obstacles to world peace are being broken down.
Commerce has destroyed much of international prejudice. Community of
interest has obviated many former causes of quarrel. The sophistical
arguments of the friends of war are being answered by the logic of
hard facts. Warfare has been ameliorated by international agreement.
Vast reaches of territory have been neutralized. Unfortified cities
are no longer to be bombarded in any country. Actual disarmament has
taken place between the United States and Canada, between Chile and
Argentina.[1] Norway and Sweden have separated peaceably. Bulgaria has
achieved her independence without bloodshed. The Dogger Bank incident,
which a century earlier would have plunged England and Russia into
war, has been adjusted amicably. Two Hague Conferences have advanced
tremendously the progress of international amity. Over eighty
arbitration treaties are now in force. We already have a permanent
high court of nations, to which are being referred questions that
would once have resulted in war. And we are nearer than the dreamer of
last century dared hope to "the Parliament of man, the Federation of
the world."

    [1] The famous "disarmament" between the Argentine Republic
    and Chile was brought about by a series of four documents of
    May 28, 1902, one of July 10, 1902, and one of January 9,
    1903. A preliminary protocol declares the disposition of both
    countries "to remove all causes for trouble in their
    international relations." A general treaty of arbitration
    unlimited in scope was signed for a period of ten years. A
    convention bound each country to "desist from acquiring the
    vessels of war now building for them, and from henceforth
    making new acquisitions." Article II says that "the two
    governments bind themselves not to increase their naval
    armaments during a period of five years, without previous
    notice." As a result of arbitration resulting from this
    series of agreements the frontier was disarmed and remains
    free from military posts. New naval programs of both
    countries were formulated after the expiration of the period
    of abnegation, and dreadnoughts are now in course of
    construction.--_Editor._

But not yet has the millennium dawned. In the face of all this
progress, armies and navies are stronger and more burdensome than
ever. The United States spends more on wars past and prospective than
for all educational purposes, and England, France, Germany, Russia,
groan under the burdens of the armed peace of Europe. Armed to the
teeth, the nations of the world lie watching one another. The mind of
the world is convinced that war is futile and terribly wasteful. The
heart of the world is convinced that war is cruel and inexcusable. The
conscience of the world has admitted that war is wrong and morally
unjustifiable. And still the preparation for war goes on, and unless
conditions are changed, war is inevitable. What is to be done? The
world's will must be moved, and men must be led to do what they have
already admitted is right and just and expedient.

As we have led in other days, so must America lead to-day. As the
light of republican government and complete justice to the individual
first saw full dawn in the United States, so the eyes of the world are
turned toward us to see the dawn of world peace, and full justice to
all the nations. It is ours to lead. The example of the United States
will do more than a century of argument and conference. America should
begin the disarmament that will eventually mean the triumph of world
peace.

We have naught to fear. We are far distant from the storm centers of
the world. We have no foes within that demand a large standing army,
and there are no enemies without that are anxious to try conclusions
with us on land or sea. Then away with war talk and war scares and
"jingoism." In time of peace let us prepare for peace, that all the
world may enjoy peace. American disarmament will be a tremendous
stride toward the accomplishment of the world's desire--the cessation
of international warfare; a great world's court, to settle all
international differences; an international police force, to give
effect to the decrees of this court; and the end of the burdens of
armies and navies under which the whole world is groaning. Let heart
and voice and pen, pulpit and press and platform, soldier and
statesmen and private citizen, ask for peace, and not for war.

This is a part of the world's larger hope. Pessimists there are who
say that human nature is belligerent, and that war will never be
abolished. But international warfare has already seen the handwriting
on the wall. Mars has been weighed in the balances and found wanting.
The fruitless slaughter of the millions is not to be forever nor for
long. Let us hasten the day when the rolling war drum will be hushed
forever, the bugle note no longer call to carnage; when "nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more." Love shall take the place of Hate, and Justice sit on the
throne instead of Greed. Some day in the not distant future the
nations that have all these centuries bowed before the god of war
shall own eternal allegiance to the Prince of Peace. And "of the
increase of His government and of Peace there shall be no end."




THE WASTE OF WAR--THE WEALTH OF PEACE

By ARTHUR FORAKER YOUNG, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at the University
of Michigan, May 13, 1910




THE WASTE OF WAR--THE WEALTH OF PEACE


In the worship of Mars, Herodotus tells us, the ancient Scythian
erected an old scimitar at the summit of a huge brush heap. To this,
as a symbol of the great god of war, he offered not only the produce
of the land but also human life in sacrifice. We shudder as we picture
the priest standing over his victim, his hands wet with the blood of
his fellow man. We cry out in horror as we think of the lives these
peoples sacrificed. We call it an inhuman glorification of a pagan
deity. We call it a ruthless waste of wealth and human life. These
practices we pronounce to be the result of a popular delusion--a false
sense of obligation to the spirit of war. Yet from the time the
Scythian drew the blood of his victim in homage to the great war god,
even down to our own day, the nations have paid homage to Mars.

Though we boast of our progress in civilization, history reveals the
fact that we, too, have been the victims of the Scythian's delusion.
Is it not a fact that one of the most terrible customs of savage men
counts among its followers to-day all the nations of the earth? The
subtlest skill of the scientist, the keenest intelligence of the
statesman, vast stores of the world's resources, are devoted to
maintaining great armies and navies, to inventing new means of attack
or defense, to enlarging and making more deadly the enginery of war.
What is our boast of civilization, while we tolerate this devotion of
so many men and so much of wealth to war? Is this not a sacrifice
essentially pagan in spirit? Are we not still paying unrighteous
homage to Mars?

Why, then, we ask, do nations make provision for war the first
necessity of national life? Behold Russia. A few years ago, in time of
famine, spending millions of money for war equipment when millions of
her own peasantry were slowly starving for the lack of one dollar's
worth of food per month. What motive impelled Russia to this heathen
conduct? It was solely that Germany, France, England, Japan, and the
United States had great armies and navies against which starving
Russia must be prepared to defend herself. What dire stress compels
England to-day to perpetuate her program of naval supremacy when she
is struggling in the throes of budget difficulties which seem all but
unsolvable? What is it that compels Germany and France to tax
themselves until they fairly stagger under the burden of military
expenditures? Naught other than a suicidal lust for military power.
Naught other than the infatuation of the dizzy, competitive war dance
of mutual destruction--each nation blindly driven by all, and all by
each.

We as Americans profess to find in the conduct of Russia, in the
militarism of England and Germany and France, examples of militarism
run rampant. How our hearts have warmed within us when we have thought
of our own republic as the happy envied nation, free from the burden
of militarism! Our farmer has gone singing about his work, apparently
not having to carry on his back a soldier, as does the European
peasant. Our mechanic has freely plied his trade without thought of
supporting a sailor. Yet how can we say that the United States in
buying battleships and erecting coast defenses, in arming her soldiers
with Krag-Joergensens, has not been deprived of schools, colleges, and
opportunities essential to happiness and prosperity? In a decade we
have spent nearly a billion dollars on our navy alone. Yes, we have
aped the military fashions of Europe and have set a new standard of
military waste.

Verily our national advancement waits on militarism. Inland waterways
should be improved; forests must be safeguarded; other natural
resources of untold value should be conserved; millions of acres of
desert lands should be improved; millions in swamps should be
redeemed. The problem of the nation's food supply is becoming urgent;
for its solution we must look more and more to scientific methods in
agriculture. Yet contrast the support our government gives these vital
interests with war's mighty drain on our treasury. Congress
appropriated $648,000,000 for all expenditures in 1910. Of this amount
$407,000,000 were appropriated for war expenditures and the glories of
militarism. For this same year agriculture received for all its needs
the comparatively paltry sum of $12,000,000. In spite of the fact that
our nation is devoting two thirds of its enormous national
expenditures to war, our militarists point to our vast national wealth
and sneer at the niggardly mortals who object to spending it for guns.

It is evident that no nation is yet beyond the infatuation for display
of the splendors of war, yet in every one there are signs of a new
power that is coming upon us. All are thinking less of the glories of
war--of the beat of the drum, of the rhythmic tread of regiments, of
glittering sabers and of monster battleships--and are thinking more
and more of the glories of peace, of thriving industries, of
magnificent libraries, of comfortable homes, and of more efficient
schools. Obviously, though we still possess a war spirit, we are
seeing with a clearer vision that the waste of war is depriving us of
the fullest measure of the wealth of peace. Our frame of mind is much
the same as that of the ragged street urchin who, having lost his
day's earnings, thinks of a hundred things which he might have spent
it for. The same spirit is permeating every nation. The American
manufacturer, the Russian peasant, the English mechanic, the German
scientist, the French scholar, are all asking themselves, "Why need
the world continue to carry this Atlantean burden of war?"

Already this sentiment has accomplished practically all that can be
done in humanizing war. It has outlawed the dumdum bullet, it has
enforced radical sanitary measures, it has neutralized the Red Cross
and brought its ministrations to the relief of the sufferings of war.
But humanized war is not the goal of this sentiment. As long as there
is an increase of armaments there will be war; as long as the battle
rages there will be waste and suffering. The same sentiment which has
humanized war now demands war's abolition. It has already accomplished
something toward this end in making the settlement of international
disputes through arbitration more probable than war. What it has not
accomplished is the discrediting of militarism. It has failed to stop
the growth of armaments. Can we expect our regiments to find
contentment in the irksome routine of training camp with never a
thought of charging the enemy? Can we expect to man the seas with
fleets of war just for gay parade and cruises around the world? Can we
expect that our skilled gunners will be satisfied to practice,
practice always, and never long for human targets? It is against
arming nations for battle and tempting them to fight that the peace
sentiment is rousing itself and is being organized. It is in this
labor that peace societies the world over are performing valiant
service. Their great mission is the creation of an intelligent public
opinion, a force more potent than government itself.

What, for instance, was the purpose of the founder of this
Intercollegiate Peace Association? Not, I take it, to give men a
chance to win petty oratorical triumphs; not, I suppose, to bring
together speakers to entertain such audiences as this--or to weary
them. But their object must have been to set the men of our colleges
to thinking on the great question of peace. In such ways are peace
societies using the platform and the press to establish a firm basis
for unity and peace throughout the world.

Yesterday the advocate of world peace was called a dreamer; to-day
rapidly organizing public opinion demands the abolition of war and
recognizes the wealth and culture of peace. Yesterday we erected
statues to those who died for their country; to-day we cheer the
Gladstones, the McKinleys, the Roosevelts, who live for humanity.
Yesterday we bowed the knee to Mars; to-day we join in peans to the
Prince of Peace. Yes, the new spirit of the day is fraternal; it is
undaunted; it is for mankind. Even now the world's geniuses are
mustering the soldier citizens of every nation for a peaceful
conflict. The great battles of to-morrow are to be fought in quiet
laboratories, in legislative halls, in courts of justice, and on the
broad battlefields of productive labor.

The final outcome is, indeed, irresistible. Racial movements have
mixed all peoples; the oceans have become the world's common highways;
the air is filled with voices speaking from city to city and from
continent to continent; an international postal system makes the
world's ideas one; there is quick participation of mankind in the
fruits of invention and research. We behold financial and economic
enterprises world-wide in their outreach; we feel the force of social
projects and social ideals that concern not one but every nation; and
we are participating in missionary movements that affect not one but
every race, and are changing the very face of nature itself. Our world
is a world unified beyond all possible conception a century ago, and
the world unity is a certain stepping stone to world peace.

The world never offered grander opportunity to the nations for
leadership--not for leadership in military splendor, but for
leadership in the sublime paths of peace. For the United States this
call means not only opportunity but even obligation. Already this
country has performed well her duty in fostering international
arbitration. She has been a party to half of the cases where disputes
between nations have been referred to the Hague Tribunal. Arbitration
is performing its mission with more and more efficiency, yet each year
the war budgets of the nations are increasing. The peace sentiment now
demands a decrease of armaments, a conversion of the waste of war into
the wealth of peace. To demonstrate that this is practicable is the
immediate opportunity before us, our present obligation. What is our
waste of war expressed in terms of the wealth of peace? Notice! Two
thirds of the cost of one dreadnought, like the mammoth _Florida_
launched but yesterday, would erect and furnish a veritable palace for
every foreign ambassador and minister of the United States, thus
solving a perplexing problem of our diplomatic service. One
twenty-second of the cost of one dreadnought would support for one
year the entire force of the American Board of Foreign Missions in
their work of proclaiming our gospel of peace. One half the cost of
one dreadnought would erect and equip twenty-five manual-training
schools, teaching the rudiments of a trade to forty thousand young
people each year. The cost of two dreadnoughts would provide every
state in the Union with a half-million dollars with which to save the
juvenile delinquents from criminal courts and schools of vice behind
prison bars. The cost of one dreadnought, wisely spent each year in
the fight against tuberculosis, would make the white plague in a
single generation a disease as rare as smallpox is to-day.

Where now we are erecting battleships and forts, it is for us to build
libraries and schools. Where now we drain our treasuries in equipping
men to fight their fellow men, it is for us to arm against the common
enemy, disease. Where now we pour out our wealth before the pagan
Mars, it is for us to devote our treasure to supporting the works of
the Prince of Peace.

Such a victory for peace would make America not simply a world power:
it would make her the world leader. Will we stop tagging at the heels
of Great Britain and Germany and travel this broadening road in which
we can be first? How humiliating to struggle along, a trailer in the
military procession! How noble to set the daring example of living up
to the belief in peace! Will we say: "See our hands; we bear no
bludgeons. Search us; we carry no concealed weapons. Militarism we
have thrown to the scrap heap of practices discredited and vicious. We
have stopped war's wanton waste of men and treasure; we rejoice in the
growing wealth of peace ideals realized"? Thus shall we speed the
steadily growing public opinion of the world, to the bar of which must
finally come every nation which does aught to break or hinder the
world's peace.




THE HOPE OF PEACE

By STANLEY H. HOWE, Albion College, Albion, Michigan

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Johns Hopkins
University, May 5, 1911




THE HOPE OF PEACE


The history of civilization is a record of changing ideals, and ideals
are best reared in the hearts of the world's young men. Inevitably,
nations look toward the cradle for their future and intrust the care
of their destiny to the hands of youth. "Tell me what are the
prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men,"
declared Edmund Burke, "and I will tell you what is to be the
character of the next generation." When the blood of youth is sluggish
and impure; when the young hold wealth more dear than worth, remove
the check of virtue from their selfish aims, establish Mammon as their
god, and, ambitious to govern the world, forget how to govern
themselves,--then nations choke and die. But when the blood of youth
is rich and pure, pulsating through the veins of the universe with
strong, resistless surge; when fathers teach anew the angel's message
of good will and peace, and sons build high their goal upon a pedestal
of service and of truth,--then nations breathe and live. What hope,
then, asks the world, finds the doctrine of peace in the ideals and
aspirations of America's youth to-day?

The nation faces a charge of militarism. It is the indictment of her
critics that never before in American history has the government
entertained an attitude so hostile toward her neighbors and so
dangerous to the interests of peace. They point to the attempt to
fortify the Canal and cry out that America would drain her treasury
to build a monument of reproach to international integrity. They
criticize the vast appropriations for the navy and declare that
America is starving her poor that she may more pompously parade the
seas. They protest against the "war-game" on the Rio Grande[1] and
even charge that in the interest of a Wall Street king America invites
the world to arms. And these are not illusions. The lure of gold has
turned the nation from her mission. The spirit of commercialism has
eclipsed the sentiment of brotherhood and tempted the Republic to
barter her honor for the price of imperial supremacy. Wherein, then,
again asks the world, finds America hope for the future? And to the
charges of her critics, with their dismal prophecy of a "wrong forever
on the throne," this is the nation's answer and defense--that an
eclipse is never permanent, that the world stays not in the valley of
the shadow forever, and that the solution of the problem, the
fulfillment of a national mission, and the hope of world peace find
their common assurance in the changing ideals of America's aspiring
young men.

    [1] Part of the United States army was mobilized on the
    frontier for maneuvers, in 1911, owing to the Mexican
    revolutionary disturbances.--_Editor._

The young American is essentially ambitious. He is wont to seek the
shortest path to leadership, and, when blocked at one highway, to turn
with undiminished ardor to another. And his ideal is a mirror of the
age in which he lives. In revolutionary days he covets the glory of a
minuteman, and in the deeds of Warren and Putnam finds the
consummation of his hopes. Again, in the hour of civil war his eyes
turn toward the battlefield--and from her boys under twenty-one the
Union draws eighty-five per cent of her defenders. But fortunately for
America this drama of the youth's ideal has one more act. The lure of
fife and drum has become a thing of the past. The glamour of military
life has become a dream of yesterday. The young man is learning that
the prize of battle is never equal to the price. And with the growing
conviction of the folly and futility of international strife must
disappear the last apology for war. Nations will cease to struggle,
not when they have learned that war is a tragedy but when they have
discovered that it is a farce.

And the youth of to-day is learning it. In the same deplorable
conditions which the nation's critics have regarded as an alarming
tendency toward militarism, he reads a message of the absurdity of
war. Militarism itself is revealing a mission. Based as it is on the
spirit of aggrandizement, it is teaching to youth the economic value
of a human life. It is uncovering its own selfish motives and
betraying its own senseless ends. It is impressing the world with the
truth that battles are fought for purse string and not for principle.
It is teaching to youth a new ideal; it is itself the answer to
complaints of friends and calumnies of foes. It is the cloud before
the dawn. It heralds the coming of the brightest epoch yet chronicled
in American history. It is the realization of that glorious prophecy
of John Hay that the time is coming when "the clangor of arms shall
cease, and we can fancy that at last our ears, no longer stunned by
the din of armies, may hear the morning stars singing together and all
the sons of God shouting for joy."

And is this but the dream of a visionary? Is it merely the fancied
perception of an inexistent star? Is it nothing more than a
groundless hope and an alluring vagary? The answer is visible
everywhere. And the hope of peace finds its safest assurance among the
institutions of learning in America. James Bryce has referred to the
United States as the nation having the largest proportion of its young
men in college. In the last month of June more than fifty thousand
collegians wore the cap and gown of graduation. It is to the trust of
the college-bred man that the peace movement confides its future, and
modern education assumes no greater responsibility than the training
of the new world-citizen. Already the school has become the most
potent factor in the new uplift. The youth is no longer dependent upon
the newspaper for his knowledge of world-politics. An intelligent
study of foreign affairs is at last regarded as of as much importance
as a study of the past. To broaden the young man's vision of the
world, prominent educators are even advocating traveling fellowships.
In twenty-five of the larger universities of America an association of
Cosmopolitan Clubs is establishing the groundworks for a wider
international fraternity. Plans are already under way to have an
organized delegation of more than a hundred students of all
nationalities present at the third Hague Conference. Day by day the
problem of world-unity is becoming more and more deeply embedded in
the mind and thought of the rising generation. More and more is
youthful patriotism becoming a realization of the truth that "Above
all nations is humanity." The lure of war is losing its magnetic power
and the brotherhood of man becoming more and more an international
reality. A sentiment for universal peace is sweeping the world, and
behind the defenses of advancing civilization, armed with the strength
of a lofty and unselfish purpose, stands an army of America's young
men, mustered from the nation's colleges, enlisted to serve for an
eternity, and invulnerable in the protection of a new and a conquering
ideal.

Therefore the significance of the young man in the world's affairs
to-day is something more than a fancy. Again and again the plea for
world-harmony hears a response in the changing ideals of a new
generation. The growing sentiment of the educated youth of Japan finds
its crystallization in the efforts of Count Okuma toward the
consummation of world-disarmament. The spirit of the youth of England
finds expression in the ambitious dream of George V, whose hope it is
to tie the bond of Anglo-Saxon unity, long since dissevered by George
III. Among the young men of Russia the life of the great philosopher
of world-citizenship has left a lasting conviction of the
senselessness of war. Even in imperialistic Germany the reckless
building of dreadnoughts brings out a vigorous and uncompromising
protest from the thinking youth of the land. In America a vision of
the international parliament of man, growing large in the minds of her
leading statesmen, finds expression in the continued philanthropy of a
great industrial king. And, most significant of all, these are the
world-wide examples that the college man enthrones in the empire of
his thoughts. Sixty thousand European students, bound together by the
cosmopolitan ties of a peace fraternity, have ceased to glorify the
triumphs of the battlefield. The commentaries of the hero-worshiper
to-day do not record the names of a Marlborough or a Bonaparte. Rather
does the young man find his idols in the more humble annals of a
Tolstoy or a Hay. And the new ideal of international peace is not
merely the religion of a few enthusiasts. In an individual way these
apostles of peace voice to the world the spirit of the unnumbered
thousands of obscurer men whose lives and talents are directed, not to
the construction of material kingdoms but to the building of a better
and more world-wide brotherhood.

Such is the Hope of Peace. The nation's critics may continue their
indictment, and, pointing out the crises of the hour, paint in dismal
hues a picture of the problems never to be solved except by shot and
shell. Her skeptics, blinded by thought of the errors of the past, may
prophesy the desecration of her honor and the disappointing failure of
her hopes. The press may pen a graphic story of the military spirit of
the age, and frowning patriarchs relate the deeds of golden days gone
by. But underneath this cloud that overhangs, and almost hidden in the
gloom of history's disparagement, the new world-citizen discerns the
birth-light of a brighter and more steadfast star,--perceives the
coming triumph of good will and peace,--and the awakened eyes of
expectant America look forward with promise to the dawn of that new
day when a nation shall be judged by the weight of its cross and not
by the wealth of its crown.




THE ROOSEVELT THEORY OF WAR

By PERCIVAL V. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

First Prize Oration in the Western Group Contest, 1912, and in the
National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 16, 1912




THE ROOSEVELT THEORY OF WAR


Ex-President Roosevelt has made this astounding statement, "By war
alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the
stern strife of actual life." These words, coming from the lips of a
nation's idol, have fallen like a bomb shell in the camp of the
pacifists. Not that Mr. Roosevelt's opinion was of overwhelming
weight, but that he was voicing the opinion of some of the most
influential thinkers of the modern world. Not long before the German
philosopher Nietzsche had taken a like position, and he was indorsed
by Von Moltke, the statesman; Ernest Renan, the historian; Hegel, the
philosopher; Charles Kingsley and Canon Farrar, the divines. We must
have a care, we peace advocates, how we treat such men's opinions. If
they are right; if, as they maintain, war develops a nation, then we
are fighting against the instrument of our own salvation and
smothering the only hope of the nation itself.

But are they right? Does war make for national greatness? Before we
can give a rational verdict we must answer certain other questions.
What is our nation, anyway? What are the factors that make for its
greatness? And how does war affect these factors?

Plainly our nation is not some abstraction that haunts the marble
halls at Washington. Nor is it our vast dominion on which, like
England's, the sun never sets. You will find it rather in workshop and
store and factory; it is no more nor less than our men. If the
capital at Washington is founded on pygmy manhood, it will be blown
away like thistledown before some passing wind of revolution. Russia,
Turkey, Spain, will tell you that. If our men are giants, the nation
will be lasting as adamant. England and Germany and America are
monumental testimonies.

Now what are the qualities in our men that make the nation great?

Here a problem in analysis confronts us. Let us go about it as does
the student in the laboratory. He dissects a plant or mineral to find
the mysteries of its nature. We are to dissect a civilization to find
the factors of its strength. One little specimen will reveal the
secrets of the whole species. So one sample of civilization will show
the hidden springs of all. Go with me to the public square of any
modern city and there you will behold the qualities that build all
civilization. From the hum and rattle and roar that rises from the sea
of humanity come a thousand various voices, but all speak of one
theme--industry. There in the center of the throng and press a slender
monument rises, crowned perhaps with a figure of Liberty or Justice.
It tells you a simple story of Idealism. Yonder stands a silent,
vine-clad church, crowned by a mighty finger pointing heavenward and
beckoning always to the higher life. What need of going farther?
Industry, Idealism, Morality--already we have found the secret of
human success, the triple key to all advance, of man or group or
nation. Here is Carlyle, with his gospel of labor, the labor that
conquers all things; here is Ruskin, with his exalting idealism, that
gives an aim and purpose to all human toil; here is the great apostle
Paul himself, who transfigures that toil and exalts that purpose with
his everlasting gospel of moral sublimity. Here is our threefold
criterion, by which every nation must stand or fall. The Anglo-Saxon
is what he is through unceasing industry, perpetual aspiration, and
moral strength. The Central African is what he is through inbred
sluggishness, total lack of purpose, and almost total absence of
morality.

These are the basic elements of national greatness. But the great
question still remains, How does war affect them?

Concerning the effect of war on labor, we declare unhesitatingly that
the two are everlasting foes, and that whenever War lays hands on
Labor's throat, it strangles her. This is part of the inevitable
program of war, for note that it is on the laboring men that the
dreadful claims of war must fall. Mark its course. A bugle sounds the
call to arms. From workshop, mill, and factory the laborers pour
forth; out go the men into a trade where plunder and robbery are a
means of livelihood; when pillage and slaughter wane, indolence
becomes the order of the day; commerce degenerates into
blockade-running by sea and marauding by land. How tame the life of
peace to this wild life of war! And all the time the love of toil is
fading from men's minds; at home the factory wheels are turning more
and more feebly, and when at last the sword is laid aside, there is
only "confusion worse confounded," for the channels of labor are
choked with men reared in habits of indolence or trained in the school
of vice. Before the scar on that nation's industry can finally be
healed, decades and perhaps centuries of peace must pass away.

But if war is a scar on the nation's industry, it is likewise a blot
on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems
visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of
progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he
might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys
of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he
pulls himself across the chasm and into the larger life. To advance at
all, man must have ideals--for himself, for his family, for his
nation. But mark the effect of war on these ideals. In place of the
ideal of peace--to serve men and uplift them--one is taught the ideal
of war--to make himself the most widely feared of professional
murderers. Instead of the ideal of peace--to make his family
comfortable, happy, and prosperous--comes in the war ideal, by whose
terms the family head deserts his own flock to kill other family heads
for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes. As for his ideal of
the nation's greatness, we have ample testimony that when bullets and
cannon balls cone crashing through the splendid structure of his
purpose, it speedily crumbles into an ignominious desire to hide
himself behind the nearest tree. No; do not say that war builds up
ideals; it tears them down and tramples them in the dust; aye more, it
sets back crime itself where they should rightly stand.

But if war so dethrones a nation's ideals, what may it not do to a
nation's morality? Imagine if you can a million men, the core of the
national power, turning themselves into machines to carry out blindly
the schemes of leaders who may be right or wrong; schooled in the
belief that manslaughter is manliness, that the rash courage of the
brute is above the moral courage of a man; forgetful of the meaning
of human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of
its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War
is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather
violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew
men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here
is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the
deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering,
makes the infliction of suffering his study and end."

No, Mr. Roosevelt, for once at least you are wrong! We cannot believe
that war builds up a nation. Rather will we believe those words of
Herbert Spencer, more sweeping but far more true, "Advance to the
highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy
and the growth of industrialism."

"But wait," you say; "all this is theory and abstraction. We want
matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have
failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last
appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy,
teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial
and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final
judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and
point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians,
Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of
them. But no, not quite all either. On a sandy stretch of seashore,
half hidden by the unwieldy empires around it, we see a timid,
peaceful little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that
mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries.
Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war
cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion
and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight;
over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over
Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay.
Finally, like the cloud no bigger than a hand, it rises from the
island of Corsica and moves toward Central Europe. All too well does
Europe know its meaning. From north and south, from east and west, she
pours into the field the finest armies that the Old World ever saw.
Then she pauses. Europe grows tense with a nameless dread. The storm
cloud blackens, hovers lower, then bursts with all its fury through
the continent. For ten long years, at the command of an imperial
butcher, the soil is drenched with blood, the sky grows lurid from
burning Paris to burning Moscow, three million homes are draped in
black. Grand, indeed, and glorious! But Europe lost more than her
gorgeous standards, more than her ruined cities; she left her manhood
on those bloody fields.

We might extend the awful picture, but the story is the same, dread
tale of death for nations as for men. Is not this enough? Is it not
clear that this traitor to labor, this despoiler of ideals, this foe
to morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And
shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley
of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a
brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of
scholarship, in spite of history, the day is

      "coming yet, for a' that--
  When man to man, the world o'er,
  Shall brothers be for a' that."




NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS

By RUSSELL WEISMAN, Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio

First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1912, and Second
Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 16, 1912




NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS


The day for deprecating in general terms the evils of war and of
extolling the glories of peace is past. Such argument is little
needed. International trade requires peace. International finance
dictates peace. Even armies and navies are now justified primarily as
agents of peace. Yet so wantonly are these agents looting the world's
treasuries that they are themselves forcing their own displacement by
courts of arbitration. The two hundred and fifty disputes successfully
arbitrated in the past century challenge with trumpet-tongued
eloquence the support of all men for reason's peaceful rule. To-day no
discussion is needed to show that if war is to be abolished, if navies
are to dwindle and armies diminish, if there is to be a federation of
the world, it must come through treaties of arbitration. In this way
alone lies peace; yet in this way lies the present great barrier to
further progress--the conception which many nations, especially the
United States, hold of "national honor and vital interests." The
reservation from arbitration of so-called matters of national honor
and vital interests constitutes the weak link in every existing
arbitration treaty between the great powers of the world. This
reservation furnishes the big-navy men all the argument they need. It
destroys the binding power of the treaties by allowing either party to
any dispute to refuse arbitration. It was by this reservation that the
United States Senate so lately killed the British and the French
treaties. And I contend here to-night that the one subject which
imperatively demands discussion is national honor and vital interests.
That the next important step must be the exposure of the reactionary
influence of the United States in excepting these matters from
arbitration.

Only fifteen months ago President Taft made his memorable declaration
that this barrier ought to be removed from the pathway of peace. He
proposed that the United States negotiate new treaties to abide by the
adjudication of courts in every international issue which could not be
settled by negotiation, whether involving honor or territory or money.
The next morning the proposal was heralded by the press throughout the
world. A few days later the halls of Parliament resounded with
applause when Great Britain's secretary of state for foreign affairs
announced that his government would welcome such a treaty with the
United States. France soon followed. Then, to the surprise of all,
hesitating Germany and cautious Japan showed a like willingness to
enter into such agreements. Universal peace seemed all but realized.

The cause was at once borne up on a mighty wave of public opinion. The
peace societies were in a frenzy of activity. Mass meetings of
indorsement were held in England and America. Editorials of approval
appeared in all parts of the world. The movement was now irresistible.
Within eight months the British and the French treaties were drafted.
Three of the greatest nations of the world were at last to commit
themselves unreservedly to the cause of international peace. Even
disputes involving national honor should not halt the beneficent work
of high courts of law and of reason. The day when the treaties were
signed, August 3, 1911, was hailed as a red-letter day in the annals
of the civilized world. It was proclaimed the dawn of a new and
auspicious era in the affairs of men and of nations.

During all the months preceding the action of the Senate on these
treaties the only statesman of any prominence to raise his voice in
opposition was ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. The gist of his
successive and violent attacks on the treaties is contained in this
utterance, which I quote, "It would be not merely foolish but wicked
for us as a nation to agree to arbitrate any dispute that affects our
vital interests or our independence or our honor." In this spirit, to
the surprise and disappointment of the whole nation, the Senate
amended the treaties out of their original intent, and placed upon
them limitations that defeated their purpose. By the Senate's action
the United States is still committed to the pretense that there may be
occasion for a just and solemn war, that vital interests and national
honor may force us to fight.

What, then, are the vital interests that can be conserved only by
saber and bullet? Nothing more, nothing less, according to various
acknowledged authorities, than a state's independence and its
territorial integrity. Did the keen mind of our former president
really foresee the seizure of some of our territory by England or
France? Yet he protests it that it would be "not merely foolish but
wicked for us as a nation to agree to arbitrate any dispute that
affects our vital interests." Did Senator Lodge and his threescore
colleagues who amended the treaties actually fear an attempt to
overthrow our form of government, to destroy our political
institutions, or to take away those individual rights and sacred
privileges upon which our government was founded? Yet to save us from
such fate they refused unlimited arbitration.

For the United States to except from arbitration her vital interests
is obvious pretense. To add thereto her national honor is extreme
hypocrisy. What is national honor? No man knows. It is one thing
to-day; another, to-morrow. It may involve an indemnity claim, a
boundary line, a fisheries dispute. In fact, any controversy may be
declared by either party, at will, to be a question of national honor.
Thus in the hands of an unskilled or malicious diplomacy, any question
which was originally a judicial one may become a question of national
honor. What, then, will we arbitrate? Every case in which a favorable
award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every
case that does not rouse our anger. Let the _Maine_ blow up and we
fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham
and a delusion.

It is high time the true and humiliating significance of these
fearsome phrases should be as familiar to every taxpayer as is the
burden of bristling camps and restless navies. Read the record of
Great Britain's first offer of unlimited arbitration in the
Olney-Pauncefote treaty of 1897. There, too, you will find national
honor and vital interests clogging the machinery of universal peace.
By these same exceptions the Senate emasculated that treaty and
defeated the spirit of the agreement. Is it conceivable that the
Senate actually feared that our interests would be imperiled by that
treaty? Did it delve out some hidden dangers which escaped the careful
scrutiny of both the English and American embassies, some peril
unforeseen by the keen judicial mind of President Cleveland, who
characterized the defeat of the treaty as "the greatest grief" of his
administration.

But this is not all. The American representatives at both Hague
Conferences were the first to place these same limitations on all
arbitration proposals.

Look at it from what point of view you will, our government's conduct
must appear humiliating. Considering the fact that universal
arbitration treaties have proved practical, it is well-nigh
incredible. Behold our bellicose sister American republics. Argentina
and Chile, Brazil and Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, all have agreements
for the arbitration of all questions whatsoever. All the Central
American republics are bound by treaty to decide every difference of
whatever nature in the Central American Court of Justice. Denmark's
three treaties with Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands withhold no
cause, however vital, from reason's peaceful sway. Norway and Sweden
likewise have an agreement to abide by the decision of the Hague Court
in whatever disputes may occur. The very existence of all these
treaties is significant, yet even more significant is the fact that
they have been triumphantly tested. Norway and Sweden at one extremity
of the globe and Argentina and Chile at the other have thus quietly
settled disputes in which their honor and interests were seriously
involved.

Do you ask further evidence of the hypocrisy with which our Senate
parades our national honor and our vital interests to the undoing of a
grand work? Search our history and you will find it in abundance. In
the great case of the Alabama claims, Charles Francis Adams pronounced
the construction of Confederate ships in English ports to be a
violation of the international law of neutrality. This certainly was a
question of national honor and vital interests, yet he pleaded for
arbitration. In reply Lord John Russell said, "That is a question of
honor which we will never arbitrate, for England's honor cannot be
made the subject of arbitration." The case was debated for six years.
Then came England's "Grand Old Man," the mighty Gladstone, with a
different view. "It is to the interest," he said, "not only of England
and the United States, but of the world, peaceably to settle those
claims." He submitted them to a joint high commission. England lost
and paid. Thus the honor of both nations was successfully arbitrated.
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 principal 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 Japan express a desire to
settle every question at the bar of justice. Impelled by honor we pass
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 Hitchcock, apparently impelled by constitutional
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 God 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 Sussex 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 passionate agitator who points to a
flag that we have learned to love. The tramp, tramp of passing
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 hoarsely! Musket butts crash! Daggers plunge into
quivering flesh! Divine feeling! Glorious patriotism!

The passing 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 noblest 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
substitution 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 godlike Alexander!"

"Godlike!" Oh, but there's new meaning in that word to-day. How much
nobler 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 godlike.

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?"

But there have always been men, with vision unaffected by martial
glamour, who have foreseen in the logic of the world's history the
inevitable end of war, and we have progressed now to a point where
peace is the normal condition in international relationships. But it
is an armed peace, founded on the false principle of suspicion and
distrust, and we come now to consider the practical question of what
the third Hague Conference can do to establish peace upon a firm and
enduring foundation.

You will remember that the First Hague Conference established a
so-called Permanent Court of Arbitration. It is not a definite,
tangible tribunal, but merely a panel of a hundred or more men from
whom the arbiters in each specific case may be selected; and
therefore, though it is a great step in the right direction and though
it has accomplished some good work, it has not commanded full
confidence and recognition. To supplement this court the Conference
of 1907 proposed a new organization--a Judicial Court of Arbitration,
to be composed of seventeen judges of recognized legal authority, to
sit for terms of twelve years, and to be competent to decide all
cases. Here, then, is the nucleus of an easily accessible supreme
court of the world, whose decisions would soon build up a new system
of international law. Its composition, jurisdiction, and procedure are
agreed upon. The vital problem, a mode of selecting the judges,
remains unsettled. Evidently, then, the first great duty of the next
Hague Conference is to put into operation this court, of which all the
nations recognize the need and desirability.

Following logically the establishment of competent machinery for
arbitration comes the second great duty of that conference--the
passage of a convention binding the nations to resort to this court in
all cases that fail of ordinary diplomatic settlement. The Judicial
Court of Arbitration, if the nations are not bound to use it, would
certainly fail of its purpose. A general treaty making arbitration
obligatory is not too much to demand, for the Conference of 1907
declared itself unanimous "in recognizing the principle of compulsory
arbitration." Separate arbitration treaties mounting into the hundreds
have been negotiated between individual nations, but almost all
contain that fatal reservation of questions of "honor and vital
interests." Honor and vital interests--could any words be more vague
and indefinite? Are these not the very cases which interested nations
are least competent to decide? A complete answer to that silly
reservation is found in our hundred years' peace with Great Britain.
As John W. Foster, that keen student of our diplomatic history, has
said, "The United States can have no future dispute with England more
seriously involving the territorial integrity, the honor of the
nation, its vital interests, or its independence, than those questions
which have already been submitted to arbitration." Denmark has agreed
with Italy and the Netherlands to arbitrate all questions that fail of
diplomatic settlement, thus insuring perpetual peace between those
nations. Here indeed is the pathway of true national honor.

Coincident with the establishment of the legal machinery for
arbitration and the growth thereof, we would naturally have expected a
cessation in the mad race for armament-supremacy. But the very reverse
has happened, and to deal firmly with this contradictory situation is
the third great duty of the next Hague Conference. Of what avail are
our Courts of Arbitral Justice when this intolerable economic waste is
permitted! To limit armaments was the avowed purpose of the First
Hague Conference, but nothing was accomplished save the adoption of a
neatly worded resolution that the limitation aforesaid is "highly
desirable for the enlargement of the material and moral well-being of
humanity." In 1907 the subject was again under discussion, the nations
exhorted to a serious examination of the question--and there the
matter rested. We have reached now an insufferable stage where
effective action must be taken. Let us hear no more that deceptive
catch phrase, "If you want peace prepare for war." When bad blood is
likely to arise between individuals the very worst policy to pursue is
to furnish them with weapons. And so it is with nations. Consider, if
you will, the neck-and-neck race between Great Britain and the German
Empire in the construction of battleships. What fool will call that
preparation for war a guaranty of peace? We might be disposed to admit
the sincerity of those who say we must arm and ever arm to maintain
peace, except that they are too often men with professional and
business interests at stake. In England there have been amazing
revelations of this sinister condition--armament companies with peers,
members of Parliament, newspaper owners, officers of the army and
navy, as stockholders; enormous appropriations forced through
Parliament by interested parties; periodic war scares in newspapers
inspired by armament syndicates. Only recently we read how the great
Krupp firm of Germany had been exposed in its practice of bribing
officials to obtain valuable military information and furnishing
French newspapers with war-scare articles calculated to induce Germany
to increase her armament orders. In Russia and France they face a
similar state of affairs. Here in the United States we are undoubtedly
not free therefrom. And then there are the navy leagues in every
country, playing upon the fears of the nations by startling tales of
what the others are doing, and so on through an endless chain,
manufacturing a demand for battleships in the name and under the guise
of patriotism. We shrink from the contemplation of such greed and
selfishness, and appeal for relief to the third Hague Conference.

We come now to a consideration of the fourth prime duty devolving upon
that conference. Ocean commerce in war should be rendered inviolable.
In effecting this we not only abolish a barbarous custom, but at the
same time remove one of the chief causes of great navies. As long as
the safety of the merchant marine is not guaranteed by international
agreement, just so long will nations with commercial aspirations
build enormous navies for their protection. It is true England has
hitherto opposed this reform,--confident in her naval supremacy,--but
she cannot again fly in the face of a general demand without too great
a sacrifice of prestige.

Here, then, are four important problems of the peace movement, all
difficult, but not impossible of solution when we remember that the
Conference of 1907, in good faith, I believe, adopted the following
declaration, "That, by working together during the past four months,
the collected powers not only have learnt to understand one another
and to draw close together, but have succeeded ... in evolving a very
lofty conception of the common welfare of humanity." Whether these
fine words breathe sincerity or hypocrisy the next Hague Conference
has ample opportunity to prove.

And now, what shall we say of the position of America in this war
against war? Her boundless resources; her amalgamation of men from all
parts of the world into one people; her impregnable geographical
situation; her embodiment of the three cardinal principles of
world-union (federation, interstate free trade, interstate courts);
the genius and ideals of our government--all give America a logical
leadership. She can boast of the first peace society in the world, of
a glorious record of arbitration, of a long list of the wisest
international statesmen, of a most advanced position at The Hague upon
the questions of ocean commerce, courts of justice, arbitration,
limitation of armaments. But there is the darker view. The treaties
negotiated by Secretary Knox with France and with England, agreeing to
arbitrate every question that fails of diplomatic settlement--those
treaties were rejected by the United States Senate. There was a
transcendent opportunity to lay the foundation for a speedy
realization of peace universal, with France and England willing, yes,
even anxious to cooperate--and America failed! Mr. Taft has shown that
if the position of the Senate is accepted as international law, then
we may as well bid farewell to any hopes of leadership in the peace
movement, for our nation could then enter upon no general arbitration
agreements because of the prerogative of the Senate in each specific
case to accept or refuse arbitration.

It is at this point, Ladies and Gentlemen, that there is work for the
humblest of us to do. In the intellectual field we can aid in the
creation of an intelligent, forceful public opinion that will induce
the Senate to recede from its fatal attitude, and that will resist a
false, cheap patriotism which is relentlessly endeavoring to crush
America 'neath the burden of militarism. Then in the moral field we
can stimulate and foster a peaceful attitude, a sentiment for peace,
in the hearts of our countrymen; and until this is accomplished there
can be no peace universal, for, as Senator Root has said, "The
questions at issue between disputing nations are nothing, the spirit
that deals with them is everything." And finally, in the educational
field, let us take heed that the men and women of our rising
generation are taught the glorious pages of our arbitration history as
well as they know the battles of our country. Let us take care that it
is grounded into their minds and habits of thought from earliest
years, that "peace hath her victories no less renowned than war."

In conclusion, let us not be deceived by that vain apology for war,
that it is necessary to keep alive the heroic spirit and to stimulate
manly courage. Despite the noble side in war, its bestial side
predominates; its larger effect upon men is demoralizing. And if it be
glorious to die for a cause, how much nobler to live and strive for an
ideal, utilizing the talents that God gave us for its realization! The
movement for peace is not one of weaklings and mollycoddles. It is
championed by red-blooded men, daring to bear the ridicule of the
thoughtless and to fight for the preconceptions of humanity. Peace has
her heroes in daily life--miners, mariners, policemen, firemen, men of
every station, displaying the nobility of their souls often unheralded
and unsung. The venerable William T. Stead, bearing across the ocean
his message of international good will, sacrificed his life on the
_Titanic_ that others might live. He was a hero, yes, but a hero of
peace.

It would be an insult to your intelligence to prove the self-evident
proposition that war is uneconomic, unscientific, unchristian. The
movement for its elimination, above all, is logical and practical, and
should appeal to every man. Is it nothing to you? Yes, it is a great
deal to you. Merely let your imaginations picture the day when the
seventy per cent of our national revenue now sacrificed on the altar
of folly is diverted to the arts of peace, to the amelioration of
social conditions, to advancing the happiness of our people--at peace
with all other peoples in the assurance of international law and love.
Ladies and Gentlemen, if we but do our duty, the dawn of that great
day will come in our generation!




THE ASSURANCE OF PEACE

By VERNON M. WELSH, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois

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




THE ASSURANCE OF PEACE


The birth and rapid rise of the present movement for international
peace are events of recent years. The nineteenth century found its
welcome in the smoking cannon and crimsoned fields of Hohenlinden. At
its close the first great peace conference of The Hague was in
session. One hundred years ago Napoleon was sweeping across Europe in
his terrible attempt to create an empire. To-day France, England, and
America have agreed on treaties that declare for unbroken peace.
Touched by the wand of progress, the Utopian ideal of yesterday has
become the dominant political issue of to-day. It is pertinent, then,
that we seek the true nature of this revolution. Is it borne on the
crest of a popular impulse that will recede as rapidly as it has
risen, or is it a permanent movement, the product of natural forces
working through ordinary channels?

The nineteenth century represents a break with the past. Swept into
the mighty current of transition, the habits and customs of a thousand
years have disappeared. With the development of natural resources, the
establishment and growth of the factory system, the use of means of
rapid communication, nations have entered upon a new era. Commerce and
industry have come to dominate thought and action and are transforming
the very life of the world. Defying the rigorous climate of both the
poles, trade has penetrated the frozen recesses of Hudson Bay and
made of the Falkland Islands a relay station in the progress of
victorious industry. Nor is the equatorial heat more discouraging. The
thick jungles of Africa have yielded their secrets, and the muddy
waters of the Amazon are churned by propellers a thousand miles from
the sea. International trade routes traverse the seas, connecting
continent with continent. In forty years this commerce has increased
from two billions to thirty billions. Giant corporations have ignored
political boundaries, carried trade wherever profitable, and are
supplying the varied demands of entire communities. Tariff walls, but
lately effective barriers, are crumbling before the onslaught of
trade. Nations are no longer independent. The wheat from Canada and
the Dakotas feeds the mill workers of Sheffield and the nobility of
Berlin. The failure of the Georgia cotton crop halts the looms of
England and raises the cost of living throughout Europe. Nations can
no longer exist as self-sufficient economic units. Never before were
they so mutually interdependent. Never before has the welfare and
security of one state depended upon the enterprise and diligence of
another. And the movement for international peace is the chance
offspring of these new social forces, at once a protest and a warning
against the wrecking of modern economic structures by the ruthless
hand of war.

Commerce, the most important of these new forces, flourishes
unprejudiced by armaments and military prestige. In the open
competition of the world's markets stronger powers meet and suffer
from the rivalry of states that have no military standing. Relative to
population, Norway has a carrying trade three times as great as
England's. With her million trained warriors Germany is beaten by the
merchants of Holland. The flag of little Denmark flies at more
mastheads than does the Stars and Stripes. Where then is the
commercial advantage supposed to attend superior military strength?

But it is to prevent the seizure of its commerce by others that
nations must empty their treasuries to keep ironclads afloat. Yet what
could be gained by attempted confiscation? If Germany annihilated
England's navy to-morrow, how would she profit? Commerce is a process
of exchange, the continuance and promotion of which is dependent upon
the degree of mutual profit. Commercial gain is not a consequent of
military success. It is since England seized the gold fields, diamond
mines, and fertile plateaus of lower Africa that British securities
have dropped twenty points. In 1871 Germany humbled and humiliated
France almost beyond toleration, yet her share of the world's commerce
has not been augmented thereby. So would it be with England. True,
Germany might commit some depredations and hinder the passage of
trade, but what would be her motive? How could she gain? Even if the
British Isles were depopulated, it is doubtful whether Germany would
benefit. For by what miracle would Germany be able to develop the
facilities, the shipyards, mills, factories, foundries, mines and
machinery, to supply the trade which the foremost of commercial
nations has been generations in building up? Germany's banner might
wave over the Bank of England, her excise boats police the Thames and
the Clyde, yet she would behold the trade of a conquered province
going to foreign nations. Trade does not follow the flag. Undisturbed
by political changes or military reverses, it flows in constantly
widening channels wherever productive fields are found.

And in the waging of war, do we reckon the direct cost to commerce?
The commercial relations of the entire world are disturbed. Prolonged
conflict is accompanied by the closing of the bank and the factory,
the dismantling of the shop and mill, and the lengthening of the bread
line in every city and town. In what state of prosperity and happiness
might not France have been had Napoleon never lived? With half a
century gone, our own country is still suffering from the devastation
of the Civil War. Our commerce with South America is scarcely beyond
the point it had reached before our week-end tiff with Spain. Yet
there are those who prate of national honor and of war as insuring
prosperity. From the leader of a newborn national party we hear that
without a periodic war America would become effeminate and weak, her
aggressive commercial life timid and corrupt, and within a few brief
years the great Republic would sink to a fourth-rate power. Up, brave
Americans, and man the guns! Awake, sons of freedom, and sweep the
seas! Fourteen years without a war; our beloved land is ruined. You
men of the factory and mill, you men of property and business, you
producers of the nation's wealth, forward into the carnage; burn the
homes of thrift and industry, for commerce will be enriched thereby;
ravage the fields and despoil the cities, for this will insure
vigorous national life; impoverish happy peoples, spread famine and
pestilence through fertile valleys, mark the sites of contented
villages with smoldering ruins, defy your Christian God, and kindle
the fires of hell in human breasts; commit violence, treachery,
rapine, ay, murder,--for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes.
Yet commerce and industry--the glittering prizes which every nation
covets when it builds a dreadnought or enlarges its army--demand that
the creative forces of peace supplant the destructive wastes of war.

To-day the financial relationships of nations are inextricably
entangled. The big banks in the capitals of the world are in
communication with each other every second of the day. During the
American crisis in 1907 the bank rate in England went up to seven per
cent, forcing many British concerns to suspend operations. Because of
the Balkan War the bank rate in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna is the
highest in twenty years, and European securities have depreciated over
six billion dollars. Foreign investments are raising insuperable
barriers to war. Should the French bombard Hamburg to-day they would
destroy the property of Frenchmen. Let Emperor William capture London,
loot the Bank of England, and he will return to find German industry
paralyzed, the banks closed, and a panic sweeping the land. Let
English regiments again move to invade the United States, English
warships draw up in battle line to attack our seaports, and four
billions of the earnings of the English people would bar the way. To
the victor of the present the spoils of war are valueless. Japan,
victor over the great Russian Empire, staggers under a colossal debt.
The Italian government hears rumbles of discontent, because the cost
of winning a victory has been too great. What better proof do we need
that war is profitless, that it means financial suicide? It has been
transformed from a gainful occupation into economic folly, and war
will cease because the price is becoming prohibitive.

In this movement for peace, capital's strongest ally is her most
active enemy. Raised to a position of independence and power by the
Industrial Revolution, labor is wielding an effective influence. The
complexity of modern business has aroused workingmen in every country
to a common interest and sympathy. The International Congress of Trade
Unions, representing twenty countries and over ten million men, has
declared for universal disarmament. Just last month eighty-five
thousand coal miners in Illinois resolved that if the United States
declared war on a foreign power, they would call a general strike.

And why not? Why should the workingmen of one country offer themselves
as targets for those of another? Why should the workers of Germany be
taxed to support a war against England, Germany's best market? Can the
rice growers of Japan profit by killing Americans to whom they sell
their produce? War means suffering and want, and the laborer has come
to know it. He is cold to the sight of its flaunting flags and the
sound of its grand, wild music, for he sees the larder bare, funds
exhausted, and hunger at the door. He refuses to sacrifice his body
and the welfare of his family upon the altar of Mars. No longer can
kings and emperors satisfy their grasping ambitions. Armed by the
ballot, the masses are to-day supreme. Never again will the cruel hand
of tyranny press to their lips the poisoned cup of death. Their sway
is absolute. The destinies of nations are in their keeping. The decree
has gone forth that war must cease.

Born of these greater movements, a host of influences bring nearer the
dawn of peace. The express and the wireless have supplanted the oxcart
and the courier. Chicago and Boston are closer to-day than New York
and Albany a century ago. Within the hour of their occurrence events
that happen in Paris are published in Chicago and St. Louis. Political
boundaries are fading before larger interests. Every railroad train
crossing the frontier, every ship plying the seas, every article of
commerce, every exchange of business, every cable conveying news from
distant lands--all these are potent factors in the cause of
international peace. Add to these the conciliating influence of
foreign investments, the telephone and telegraph, travel, education,
democracy, religion, and you have marshaled a host for peace whose
clarion trumpets shall never sound retreat. Casting aside the
prejudice of ages, modern industrialism flings around the world the
economic bonds against which the forces of militarism are powerless.

Here, then, in the world-wide operations of commerce and industry is
the _assurance of peace_. The skeptic may scoff and the cynic point to
Mexico and the Balkans, but the Industrial Revolution has produced a
multitude of influences that are knitting the nations into an
indissoluble unity. Men are beginning to realize the integrity of
mankind, and a world-consciousness is arising. Kindness and
justice--yesterday but community ideals--are extending their sway
throughout the earth. Even while bayonets are bared in conflict and
cannon thunder against hostile camps, the magic of our civilization is
weaving bonds of union that cannot be broken. Peace, not war, is the
true grandeur of nations; love, not hate, is the immutable law of
God; and so surely as governments and kings are powerless to divide
when home and factory would bind, some not too distant day will find
the battle flags all furled, the sword's arbitrament abandoned, and
the world at peace.




EDUCATION FOR PEACE

By FRANCIS J. LYONS, University of Texas, Austin, Texas,
representing the Southern Group

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake,
May 28, 1914




EDUCATION FOR PEACE


Time was when war was beneficial. Historians have justified the spread
of knowledge by the sword. At the world's awakening, it was well that
the new thought should be diffused even at the sacrifice of human
blood. It was justified because there was no other means. We have to
cast our imagination back through the centuries and realize that then
there were no railroads, no telegraph, no newspapers; that man was
bound by narrow limits; and the elemental processes of the world were
undiscovered. We do not criticize Alexander for conquering the eastern
perils, for he carried in his phalanxes the spirit of new-discovered
thought. We do not denounce Rome for piercing the unknown realms with
her legions, for she was the mother of a new belief. But this was at
the dawn of history, when erudition was in its struggling embryo, and
the physical was the better part of man. Man went forth to battle as a
religion.

The world grew partly wise, and man preached the gospel of
brotherhood. But it did not last. The changing of the peoples
smoldered the fires of rising intelligence, and the world rolled back
again in darkness--a darkness long and black. Centuries passed, and a
new light came, slowly but courageously. Man blinkingly came forth,
dazed and unsteady. The light grew, and man grew with it; but rooted
deep in his heart was the love of war of his ancestors. In a different
spirit, it is true; but it was there, and he went forth to battle not
because it was religion, but because it was brave.

The world rolled on; war grew; it developed with the state; it became
an art; was studied--and now our cycle turns. It faces us as a custom
backed up by the centuries--deep-rooted, a consumer that yields no
returns and, what with our modern appliances, a terror to the hearts
of all the world. Men fought in the early ages because they thought it
was just; men fought in the Middle Ages because they considered it
brave; men of our modern age will banish war because it is a fallacy.

Do you know that to maintain our so-called prestige we spend seventy
per cent of our national income? Think of it! Seventy per cent to
maintain our present status and to prepare for the future! Think of
that awful drain; think, if applied in other channels, what good could
be done! We are proud of our battleship _Texas_. She is a noble war
dog; yet do you realize that if we had applied the money spent on her
in our own state we could have had one gigantic paved highway twice
the distance from El Paso to Galveston? We could have had two hundred
high schools, representing $75,000 each. We could have raised our
institutions of higher learning to a level with any of the East or
North. Fifteen millions gone for a floating war machine which in
twenty years will be a piece of rusted, useless iron; fifteen millions
for a sailing dragon who, each time one of her big guns speaks, wastes
the equivalent of a four-year college education for some
youth--$1700--for a single shot. Our war dogs sail the seas; our
soldiers parade our forts; and we look on and raise a joyous hubbub as
the nations of the world rush madly on, wasting themselves in the
race for military supremacy.

Have you ever considered yourself transported to some celestial
height, and there, from the regions of the infinite, allowed to view a
battle on earth? How foolish it must seem, these pygmies coming forth
to make war. See them as they charge and wound and kill! See brother
slay brother! See the wounded left to die! Hear the cries of distress,
and picture the grief that follows all! Men battling to conquer; men
assuming the prerogative of a god--how foolish, yet how serious! And
these artificial lines that men call boundaries, how punctiliously
they are guarded! "Take but a hundred feet, and we shall war with
thee." How foolish this too must seem when viewed from above--that we
should carry on war over even a slight infraction on any imaginary,
mathematical line.

We cherish the thought that the youth of our land are being taught
self-restraint. It is ever impressed upon them that there are courts
of justice for the settlement of controversies. Law and order have
become stock phrases, dinned into their ears at every turn. The man
who would settle his difficulty by trying the physical metal of his
adversary is of the past. By the new order he is taboo as a savage.
Individual self-restraint rings out in our vocabulary as nationally
descriptive. The babe at the mother's knee learns first the virtue of
it; the child at school is tutored to it soundly; the man in life is
lectured with it regularly. Brotherhood! Love! Self-restraint!

But what of the self-restraint of the nation? In the teaching of the
individual, is it not odd and inconsistent that we forget the
teaching of the unit? We paint the inner rooms of our national
character with colors bright and pleasing, but the exterior, though
weathering the heavier storms, is forgotten. If the child be taught
that individuals should arbitrate their differences, can he not learn
that the individual nations are subject to the same rule? If
arbitration is best for each man, surely it must be best for all. If
the child be taught that self-restraint is the boasted characteristic
of the model American, should he not learn that the model American
nation should be self-restraining? Let us learn this lesson, and
surely we will never war. Herein shall we find the solution of this
great problem. We can preach about peace and write pretty orations,
but if we are to impress it upon the hearts of the world, we must
teach it, and in a systematic manner. It is not to be learned in a
day. It is the labor of a generation and more. It must be a fully
developed characteristic. Man is learning self-development; now we
must turn to the bigger ideals--national restraint, national
development, international brotherhood.

Do you say this is idealism--visionary? On the contrary, it is
thoroughly practicable. The only way to attain world-peace is for the
individual citizen to think peace, to teach peace, and to act in
accordance with such thoughts and teachings. Just as public opinion
causes war, so only through cultivated public opinion can we hope for
peace. I do not say to sink our battleships and turn free our army. I
do not argue that we should quit guarding ourselves and throw
ourselves open to the world; but what I seek is that we should turn
our faces with bright hope to the future, eager to assist in the
abolition of all that tends to war, eager to assist in the only
proper way--the enlightenment of the world-nations.

The call comes naturally to America, the land of new belief; America,
the New World of Opportunity, as Emerson calls it; the land cut off
from the conventional past; a land that has taken world-leadership in
the march of a single century. To America, where problems are studied
and fallacies dethroned, the birthplace and the abiding home of
democracy; to America, the Christian, the civilized! What will the
answer be? Already we can hear the faint responses, as yet vague and
indistinct, the drowned murmurings of the wiser tongues. These must
grow into a national anthem whose echo will challenge the powers of
the world and startle them into the consciousness of the new
brotherhood. We will answer:

"Yes, we have learned the lessons of the centuries--that war is a
fallacy, and armed peace its ill-sprung child; that man is no longer
savage; that with enlightened mind he has controlled his warring
instinct; that human love is a mightier power than war; and that we
are one in the brotherhood of the Master.

"Let us stand before the nations, clad in simple honesty, panoplied in
elemental justice; let us appeal to the common conscience of the
world; let us say to the war-made powers, there is a way out, and we
will lead. We will help you police the sea; we will give our
constabulary to a quota of peace, but we are through. No great
standing army, no more leviathan battleships. We trust to what we
boast of as the highest attainment of the age, the innate justice of
civilized humanity."

To such a national summons, how will Texas respond? Facing the Mexican
boundary for eight hundred miles, Texas is to-day peculiarly the
guardian of our nation. The situation calls not for agitation and
jingoism, bit for rare patience, sanity, and self-control. Through
troubled waters our chosen captain is guiding the Ship of State. It is
no time for mutiny, but rather a time for obedience.

In this critical hour let every loyal citizen say with a contemporary
poet:

    In this grave hour--God help keep the President!
  To him all Lincoln's tenderness be lent,
  The grave, sweet nature of the man that saw
  Most power in peace and let no claptrap awe
  His high-poised duty from its primal plan
  Of rule supreme for the whole good of man.

    In this grave hour--Lord, give him all the light,
  And us the faith that peace is more than might,
  That settled nations have high uses still
  To curb the hasty, regulate the ill,
  And without bloodshed from the darkest hour
  Make manifest high reason's nobler power.




NATIONAL HONOR AND PEACE

By LOUIS BROIDO, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
representing the North Atlantic Group

Second Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake,
May 28, 1914




NATIONAL HONOR AND PEACE


Since the dawn of history the teachers, thinkers, and prophets of
mankind have prayed and labored for the abolition of war. In the
process of the centuries, their hope has become the aspiration of the
mass of men. Growing slowly, as do all movements for righteousness,
the cause of peace first claimed the attention of the world in the
year 1899, when Nicholas of Russia called the nations together to
discuss ways and means for the arbitration of international
differences and for the abolition of war. From that day on, the
movement for peace has progressed by leaps and bounds, and to-day it
has reached the highest point of its development.

Already nations have signed treaties to arbitrate many of their
differences. Holland, Denmark, Argentina, and Chile have agreed to
arbitrate every dispute. But these nations are not potent enough in
world affairs for their action to have an international influence. It
remains for the great powers like England, France, Germany, and the
United States to agree to submit every difficulty to arbitration, and
thus take the step that will result in the practical abolition of war.

If one would find the reasons that thus far have kept the great powers
from agreeing to submit _all_ differences to arbitration, his search
need not be long nor difficult. The Peace Conference of 1907 reports
that the objections to international arbitration have dwindled to
four. Of these objections the one commonly considered of most weight
is this: "We will not submit to arbitration questions involving our
national honor." Even so recently as the spring of 1912, our own
Senate refused to give its assent to President Taft's proposed
treaties with France and England to arbitrate all differences, and
refused on the ground that "we cannot agree to arbitrate questions
involving our national honor." This is the statement that you and I as
workers for peace are constantly called upon to refute.

Let us, therefore, consider what honor is. For centuries honor was
maintained and justice determined among men by a strong arm and a
skillfully used weapon. It mattered not that often the guilty won and
the dishonorable succeeded. Death was the arbiter, honor was appeased,
and men were satisfied. But with the growth of civilization there
slowly came to man the consciousness that honor can be maintained only
by use of reason and justice administered only in the light of truth.
Then private settlement of quarrels practically ceased; trial by
combat was abolished; and men learned that real honor lies in the
graceful and manly acceptance of decisions rendered by impartial
judges.

As men have risen to higher ideals of honor in their relations with
one another, so nations have risen to a higher standard in
international affairs. Centuries ago tyrants ruled and waged war on
any pretext; now before rulers rush to arms, they stop to count the
cost. Nations once thought it honorable to use poisoned bullets and
similar means of destruction; a growing humanitarianism has compelled
them to abandon such practices. At one time captives were killed
outright; there was a higher conception of honor when they were
forced into slavery; now the quickening sense of universal sympathy
compels belligerent nations to treat prisoners of war humanely and to
exchange them at the close of the conflict. At one time neutrals were
not protected; now their rights are generally recognized. A few
hundred years ago arbitration was almost unknown; in the last century
more than six hundred cases were settled by peaceful means.

During the last quarter of a century we have caught a glimpse of a new
national honor. It is the belief that battle and bloodshed, except for
the immediate defense of hearth and home, is a blot on the 'scutcheon
of any nation. It is the creed of modern men who rise in their majesty
and say: "We will not stain our country's honor with the bloodshed of
war. God-given life is too dear. The forces of vice, evil, and disease
are challenging us to marshal our strength and give them battle. There
is too much good waiting to be done, too much suffering waiting to be
appeased, for us to waste the life-blood of our fathers and sons on
the field of useless battle. Here do we stand. We believe we are
right. With faith in our belief we throw ourselves upon the altar of
truth. Let heaven-born justice decide." Here is honor unsmirched,
untainted! Here is pride unhumbled! Here is patriotism that is
all-embracing, that makes us so zealous for real honor that we turn
from the horrors of war to combat the evils that lie at our very
doors.

We know that faith in such national honor will abolish war. We know,
too, that men will have war only so long as they want war. If this be
true, then, just as soon as you and I, in whose hands the final
decision for or against war must ever rest, express through the force
of an irresistible public opinion the doctrine that our conception of
national honor demands the arbitration of every dispute, just so soon
will our legislators free themselves from financial dictators and
liberate the country from the dominance of a false conception of
national honor.

Do you say this ideal is impractical? History proves that questions of
the utmost importance can be peacefully settled without the loss of
honor. The Casa Blanca dispute between France and Germany, the
Venezuela question, the North Atlantic Fisheries case, the Alabama
claims--these are proof indisputable that questions of honor may be
successfully arbitrated. "Does not this magnificent achievement," says
Carl Schurz of the Alabama settlement, "form one of the most glorious
pages of the common history of England and America? Truly, the two
great nations that accomplished this need not be afraid of
unadjustable questions of honor in the future."

In the face of such splendid examples, how meaningless is the doctrine
of the enemies of peace, "We will not arbitrate questions of national
honor. We will decide for ourselves what is right and for that right
we will stand, even if this course plunges us into the maelstrom of
war. We will not allow our country to be dishonored by any other."
Well has Andrew Carnegie expressed the modern view: "Our country
cannot be dishonored by any other country, or by all the powers
combined. It is impossible. All honor wounds are self-inflicted. We
alone can dishonor ourselves or our country. One sure way of doing so
is to insist upon the unlawful and unjust demand that we sit as judges
in our own case, instead of agreeing to abide by the decision of a
court or a tribunal. We are told that this is the stand of a weakling,
that progress demands the fighting spirit. We, too, demand the
fighting spirit; but we condemn the military spirit. We are told that
strong men fight for honor. We answer with Mrs. Mead: 'Justice and
honor are larger words than peace, and if fighting would enable us to
get justice and maintain honor, I would fight! But it is not that
way!'" For it is impossible to maintain honor by recourse to arms;
right may fall before might, and, viewed in the light of its awful
cost, even victory is defeat. In the words of Nicholas Murray Butler:
"To argue that a nation's honor must be defended by the blood of its
citizens, if need be, is quite meaningless, for any nation, though
profoundly right in its contention, might be defeated at the hands of
a superior force exerted in behalf of an unjust and unrighteous cause.
What becomes of national honor then?"

Too long have we been fighting windmills; we must struggle with
ourselves; we must conquer the passions that have blinded our reason.
We have been enrolled in the army of thoughtlessness; the time has
come to enroll in the army of God. We have followed a false ideal of
honor; we must disillusion ourselves and the world. If men declare
that the preservation of courage and manliness demand that we fight,
let us lead them to the fight, not against each other, but against all
that is unrighteous and undesirable in our national life. Men still
cling to an ancient conception of national honor; let us convince them
that there is a newer and higher conception. Men still declare that
peace is the dream of the poet and prophet; let us prove by historical
example that questions, even of national honor, can be happily
settled by arbitration. If men despair, let us remind them that
to-day, as never before, the mass of men are slowly and surely working
out God's plan for this great cause.

The day of triumph is not far distant. Already the moving finger of
Time paints on the wide horizon, in the roseate tints of the dawn, the
picture of Peace--Peace, the victory of victories, beside which
Marathon and Gettysburg pale into insignificance; victory without the
strains of martial music, unaccompanied by the sob of widowed and
orphaned; victory on God's battlefield in humanity's war on war.




THE NEW NATIONALISM AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT

By RALPH D. LUCAS, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, representing the
Central Group

Third Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May
28, 1914




THE NEW NATIONALISM AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT


Nationalism is a precious product of the centuries. The world has paid
a tremendous price to widen the political unit until its boundaries
include continents. It has been an equally difficult task to weld the
spirit of diverse peoples into a homogeneous whole. And the story of
this development constitutes a heritage not soon to be given up. The
tales of victory and defeat are held even more dear to a united people
than life itself. Rightly will any nation jealously defy him who dares
advance to plunder its possessions. And it is well that men do not
wish to surrender it upon slight provocation. That has been a good
diplomacy that sought to protect the nation by war. By the extension
of political unity peoples gain moral and physical strength. Thrift
becomes more common and moral courage greater when a people strike
forward with common aims. And in proportion as the nation as a whole
enjoys these advantages and opportunities, the individual widens his
horizon in peaceful association with fellow men and receives a benefit
beyond computation.

But, good as nationalism has been in the past, a gradual change seems
to be overtaking the world's politics. National diplomacy hesitates
where a century ago it was firm. Forces which once drove the nations
apart seem now to be drawing them together. The discord of disputes
seems to be disappearing in the harmony of cooperation. It is no
longer possible to determine easily what a nation's interests really
are. And it is of the forces that are bringing about this change in
the policies of nations, of this new nationalism and its bearing upon
the peace movement, that I wish to speak.

Within the last two centuries economic forces have worked a mighty
revolution. Continents have been converted into communities. The
prosperity of our eastern industries controls the activities of the
West, and a disturbance from any section throws a tremor over all.
Tribal barter has developed into a world-wide commerce until the most
distant nation may easily acquire the products of another. Steel rails
weave a web of commercialism among the peoples, and the cable welds
them in a mighty network which, responsive to every flash of news,
brings all the nations into a mutuality of interests. So
interdependent are the nations and so vital are their relations that a
single fluctuation in the most distant market finds a response in our
own. A slight disorder in Wall Street strains the whole financial
world. And thus through intercourse in commerce, industry, the press,
Christian missions, and scholastic research a system has been
developed that holds no place for the selfish policy of exploiting
backward peoples. We no longer consider the advance of alien peoples
in wealth and prosperity as a menace to our own. There is being
developed a strong international public opinion which realizes that
anything that destroys the well-being of one member is the concern of
all.

In the light of these facts, future world-politics can have no place
for the settlement of disputes by force. A declaration of war by one
of the large powers to-day would be more terrible than it has ever
been in the past. The man of business, of education, of philanthropy,
of civic advancement cannot reasonably advocate a policy that would
ruin business, stagnate education, increase poverty, and turn progress
over to the ravages of manslaughter. Industry cannot continue when the
shoulder that should turn the wheels of industry grows weary beneath
the weight of the musket. Education cannot proceed when libraries and
lecture halls are deserted for the camp and fortress. A Tolstoy with
all his power of vivid presentation does not overdraw the picture. The
moral fiber and physical strength of a people must forever afterward
bear their scars. A struggling people can never rid themselves of the
evil effects of the conflict, although they may rejoice in the valor
of their heroes. Nations cannot afford to become the theaters of
carnage and bloodshed and the rendezvous of commercial and moral
pirates and civic grafters.

Why, then, do nations throw away their strength in the building and
equipping of armies and navies? The advocates of militarism tell us
that we need a navy to protect our commerce. Possibly it is true that
under the present system of international law this is somewhat
excusable; for although private property on land is exempt from
confiscation and the old forms of privateering have long ago been
abolished by an agreement of the powers, yet the policy does not apply
to maritime warfare. Enemy's goods in enemy's ships are still subject
to seizure. But while this argument does hold for the present, the
condition could easily be remedied. Because a man with foreign capital
operates ships instead of factories, why is there any special reason
for exposing his property to depredation? In the light of common sense
such a policy seems absurd. And it should be one of the first aims of
our diplomats to eliminate all possibility of this licensed robbery,
for as long as it exists there will always be the cry for extravagant
expenditure in order to preserve international peace.

But even if we should not need a navy to protect our commerce, again
the opponents of the policy of settling international disputes by
arbitration say that we need armies and navies to preserve our honor.
They tell us that there are certain questions which cannot be
submitted to any tribunal; that a nation must reserve the right to
submit only those questions it sees fit. Surrender this right, and
prestige and self-respect are gone and we become a nation of
"mollycoddles" whose patriotism has no virile qualities. It is true
that the independence and security of each nation is essential to
international life. It is self-governing nations, not subjugated ones,
that make possible a strong international life. But the converse is
equally true. An international life made up of independent,
cooperating, and mutually helpful nations is the best security by
which national life can be guaranteed. Those who say that questions of
national honor cannot be submitted to a tribunal have a wrong
conception of the essence of national life. Love of country means more
than a mere willingness to serve as a target for the enemy's guns. We
would not deduct one iota from the respect and honor due those who
have served the nation on the field of battle. But what a service they
might have rendered if they had been spared that life to live serving
their fellow men and contributing to the vigor of the race! None of
us will give up his firm resolve to defend his own country with all
his strength. But theirs is a cheap patriotism which depends for its
expression upon the thrilling note of fife and drum. The great test of
patriotism is the everyday purpose to deal justly with one's neighbor.
Let him who would be a patriot and serve the nation put his life into
the work close at hand, and, with a civic temper and moral courage
that can grip the scourge, rid our social life of its damning
influences. This is the spirit of true national honor. This it is that
makes of a nation a real nation. The call to arms is but another
signal of the defeat of the underlying principles of civilization.

Only slowly will any large number of the people accept these new
conceptions. But there are already hopeful signs. The growing
sentiment is rapidly crystallizing. The developing code of
international equity as expressed by the establishment of such an
institution as the Hague Court is a step in the right direction. The
peaceful settlement of the Venezuelan boundary dispute was an honor to
the nations involved. And the work of the International Commission of
Inquiry in the Dogger Bank episode between Russia and England is
significant of the trend. Again, a modern innovation was wrought when
the International Conference in 1906 settled the conflicting interests
of Germany, France, and Spain in Morocco. Within the last century the
powers ratified over two hundred treaties, each providing for the
peaceful settlement by tribunals of specified international disputes.
It is true that most peace treaties have dealt almost exclusively with
legal questions. The nations have hesitated to submit all
international differences to a court of arbitration. But the spirit
for arbitral settlement is widening. And this spirit is not for a mere
avoidance of war, but seeks the substitution of a better method than
war for determining justice between nations. Each nation has its own
individual problems to deal with, and in this respect all cannot
proceed according to set rules. The movement does not mean the
extinction and obliteration of nationality and national rights. The
individual has not been minimized because he consents to submit his
differences with his fellow men to a court for settlement. And this
must be the ultimate attitude of nations whose honor we have a right
to guard jealously.

What, then, shall be our program? Whatever attitude is to be adopted,
most people agree that the day of universal peace is far in the
future. The Balkans and Mexico remind us of the difficulty lying
before the coming generations. But the numerous peace societies whose
purpose it is to circulate authentic documents, that the great mass of
citizens may be brought into sympathetic touch through accurate
information, are doing much for the cause. The erection of the Hague
Court gives something lasting and tangible to work from. And, above
all, the nations will rise to higher standards principally by adopting
the ideals of the individual. As man has risen above his barbaric
ideals, so will the nations throw their military expenditures into the
coffers of public welfare as they come more and more to judge their
successes, not by victories in war but by achievements in education,
commerce, industry, and artizanship. And, proceeding with such aims,
the established international court must be the medium through which
all differences will be settled. We shall discover that our internal
policy of dealing with the individual can be more easily applied to
international relations than was at first supposed. And having reached
this point in the evolution of international peace, there must be
added to the international court a world-wide police force. As the
system develops and our prejudices are abandoned, a method of policing
must stand as an enforcer of international law. Until then there is
little hope that military expenditures will radically diminish, for we
cannot reasonably abolish our present methods unless we have something
secure to substitute.

Perhaps such a system will not abolish the utter possibility of war.
Only the future can tell us what heights of success the policy will
reach. There are those of us who have high hopes because we believe in
the good sense of the American people and of our great contemporaries.
By the past we are made confident of the future. But if the goal is to
be reached, it is for us as individual citizens to contribute our
influence toward developing the attitude of peace among our fellow
men. For our international welfare and for the honor of the newest of
great nations, may we in this issue throw our influence, as a united
people, on the side of a higher international morality! May the united
peoples of the world abolish the prejudices of misconceptions and,
drawn together by common interests, resolve that the priceless
heritage of centuries shall not be imperiled by war! And thus over a
warring humanity the breaking day of peace shall be hastened, at whose
high noon there shall be heard not the clashing of arms but the
increasing hum of prosperity under the sway of the new and better
national life.




MAN'S MORAL NATURE THE HOPE OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

By VICTOR MORRIS, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon representing
the Pacific Coast Group

Fourth Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May
28, 1914




MAN'S MORAL NATURE THE HOPE OF UNIVERSAL PEACE


Two thousand years ago the coming of a Prince of Peace, the Prince of
Peace, inaugurated the fulfillment of the prophetic promise that
"peace shall cover the earth," and that "man shall learn war no more
forever." From the time of Jesus until now men have passively accepted
the idea, but have failed to do their part in its fulfillment. To-day
there are few indeed but believe that it would be desirable to abolish
war. Many also feel in a way that war is brutal. But here our feelings
on this great question largely end. We are not aroused to talk, and
work, and fight against war as inhuman, as economic folly, as
unreason, and especially as an immorality and a sin. Now we are not
here to harangue about the physical sufferings wrought through war,
but we are here to inquire and find out what we can do about it. How
are we going to attack the war problem in order to bring about action,
instead of simply talk and discussion? In considering this war problem
it is well to bear in mind the fact that war is a resultant of a
deeper cause, the war spirit. The war spirit is the spirit of him who
first made war in heaven; the war spirit--ambitious, aggressive,
covetous and revengeful, rampant through the centuries, never
conquered by force, in war subdued only by exhaustion. This war spirit
still exists to scourge the nations with war, to stagger with its
problem of war the brains of statesmen believing in peace. How are we
to attack this stupendous problem? What appeal can we make to the
nations that will be strong enough to do away with the war spirit?

In order to overthrow this mighty evil, certainly every possible force
must be enlisted. The thought which I wish to bring to you is this:
While such appeals as those to economy and to reason are of value,
they are not in themselves strong enough to cause the nations to
abolish war; and hence, in view of the real inner nature of the war
spirit, man's moral nature, working through a developed conscience
upon war, is the only force strong enough to effect universal peace.

Against war peace-advocates appeal with force from a business
standpoint, on grounds of economy and financial expediency. The vast
system of international trade and commerce calls for world peace. The
prosperity of world-industries and business requires good will and
brotherhood between the nations. So heavy, also, have the burdens of
war and militarism become that three fourths of our own expenditures
go for war purposes, past and present, and in Great Britain two thirds
are so spent.[1] Every German citizen, it is said, carries a soldier
on his back. By the testimony of financiers and ministers of state
themselves, nothing but financial ruin and bankruptcy await the
nations if the present military tragedy continues. But has this
obvious condition of affairs affected the race for armaments? Not
unless it has accelerated it. To every appeal to economy the reply is
that the outlay is necessary if we are to exist at all. But even
suppose that for a season the economic motive should lead us to
abolish war, as soon as financial advantage was apparent to a nation
through war it is evident that all restraints would be removed and war
ensue again. The same motive used to abolish war would bring war once
more. Again, when we remember that it is the deeper cause, the war
spirit, that we must quench, we can understand why this appeal is
often made to those who bear not. So far as the great mass of men is
concerned, purely economic considerations cannot change the spirit and
impulses of the soul. History reveals no great uplifting of humanity
or change in ideals as having arisen through purely economic or
financial considerations.

    [1] The percentages as a matter of fact are not so large, but
    the argument is not impaired by the fact.--_Editor._

The peace plea has also been based on grounds of reason. Clearly has
it been pointed out that reason demands that no person shall sit in
judgment on his own case, yet this we do in a resort to arms. War is
not arbitrament by reason, but arbitrament by the sword. Every plain
argument of reason condemns war and militarism. The arguments of
reason have, indeed, been strong, and have attracted much attention,
resulting in the settlement of many disputes by arbitration. But as
concerns the final wiping out of war and the surrendering of heavy
armaments, reason alone cannot present a permanent powerful appeal,
for it is easy in times of stress to plead that reason and justice
demand the war. Never was there a fight but the contending parties
claimed they were justified. But the chief fact that seems to put
reason in the category of impotent appeals is the fact that it is an
appeal to the mind, while the war spirit can only be removed by an
appeal to the heart, wherein it resides. We may reason with nations
all we please, but when the war fury arises, then all the reasoning
proves to have been in vain, the appeal to the mind turns out to be
too feeble.

Appeals to economy and reason, then, are appeals we must make, but
they are too weak in themselves to make a permanent impression against
the war spirit. We must then look for some additional, some more
compelling, force.

Let us examine the real inner nature of war, for this ought surely to
throw some light upon our problem. War is not economy; it is not
reason. Is war, then, morality? Is it virtue? It would hardly seem
necessary for us to answer this question, for modern civilized nations
long ago recognized blood feuds with their kindred as contrary to real
morality, as nothing but murder; but they seem unable to recognize
that war is just the same--nothing but legalized, organized murder.
From the use of violence in settling our international disputes arise
all the deadly passions of the soul, such as treachery, insolence,
revenge, and a murderous spirit, with the accompanying fruits of
robbery, misery, and blood. Surely, O nations! nothing which bears
such fruits can be anything but corrupt, for a good tree cannot bring
forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Look also at its relationship to civilization and citizenship, and its
effects upon theme. "War and civilization," said one of the great
English ministers, "are contradictory terms, even as Christ and Mars."
Particularly damaging is the effect of war upon citizens. For does it
not blunt the sensibilities, harden the heart, inflame the mind with
passions, and deaden the consciences of men? Said the same great
English preacher, "The sword that smites the enemy abroad, also lays
bare the primeval savage within the citizen at home." And again, "War
is not so horrible in that it drains the dearest veins of the foe, but
in that it drains our own hearts of the yet more precious elements of
pity, mercy, generosity, which are the lifeblood of the soul."

What now must be our conclusion about war? Had we ten thousand voices,
surely every one would be in honor bound to declare war an immorality.
Every incident of war declares it such. Every result of battle hands
down the same decree. In the words of a famous Russian battle painter,
we too may define war as "the antithesis of all morality."

This clear idea of the real inner nature of war ought surely to enable
us to find our ground of attack. Since war is sin and war is crime,
the conclusion which we draw is, that if it is possible ever to
abolish war, man's conscience, his sense of right and wrong, is the
only force powerful enough to accomplish the result.

The great searchlight of morality must be turned on war--a searchlight
which is always bright and strong and which never has failed to reveal
the truth. To turn this on full and strong means to awaken the
consciences of men. It must be an individual proposition--not simply
the developed consciences of a few leaders who may be submerged by the
war spirit of the masses, but there must be developed consciences of
all the people individually. All our arbitration treaties and the
actual settlement of disputes by arbitration are of great value and
should be pressed as far as possible; but are these sufficient forces
to develop the consciences of men against war as an immorality and a
sin? What are the forces that have always come to our support against
an immorality and a sin?

How about our churches? Have they been doing their duty? Have they
made it clear that war is sin and war is crime? Has not the Church
been too easy? Has its voice sounded clear and strong on this
world-evil? Surely a duty rests upon the ministry to be insistent in
its characterization of war. What peace-advocates must do is to urge
this upon the Church and bring it to a realization of its duty. Church
members know the character of war and simply need to have the matter
brought home to their hearts.

What about our schools,--not simply the colleges and universities, but
all the schools,--which offer fertile ground to sow the seeds of
peace? Thus far in the history of our schools too much emphasis has
been laid upon military history, etc. Dates and events of national
wars have been thoroughly drilled into students, and the glory and
blaze of war brought out. We have actually made it a glory and a
virtue. One of the most encouraging signs of the times, however, is
the fact that many of our text-books are dropping out the prolonged
study of wars and centering more on the peaceful pursuits of the
nation and the commercial relations with foreign powers. How about
direct peace teaching in the lower schools? How much of it do we
include in the work? None at all. Many are the speakers who address
the schools on war reminiscences, but few indeed are the appeals made
for peace. Not until this movement is strongly emphasized in our
schools from the very beginning can we hope completely to drive out
the war spirit; for time is required to develop in the individual
conscience a full realization of the real nature of war, and such
development should begin with the plastic period of youth.

With Church and school lined up on the side of peace, the home
teaching will soon fall in line; and Church, school, and home combined
can develop so strong a conviction concerning war, can make so
forceful an appeal to man's moral nature, that the war spirit will
take its leave and be gone forever.

We always look to history for a confirmation of our beliefs, and let
us glance now to the records of the past and learn her teachings.

First of all, look at the duel as the mode of settling a personal
difficulty if peaceful settlement appeared impossible. First, it was
heartily accepted as a gentlemanly, honorable, and brave mode of
settlement. Then, tolerated and simply suffered to exist. Finally,
condemned by conscience as an immorality and a sin, it was banished
from civilized nations.

Look also at slavery. At first heartily accepted as a divine
arrangement. Then tolerated by the world as undesirable, yet not
necessarily wrong. Next its overthrowal attempted on grounds of pity
and of reason; until finally, recognized as an immorality and a sin,
it too was blotted from the pages of civilization.

No great uplift of humanity, no great movement in civilization, but
has found its path to success in the developed moral sense of man. No
great change in civilized institutions but has found itself produced
by the dynamic, moving forces of morality.

War must be abolished. Only the great powers of morality are vital
enough, are dynamic and powerful enough, to carry out our peace
program. These forces lie dormant, and simply need stimulation and
development. Recognizing the impotency of appeals to economy and to
reason, what are we going to do?

In the name of humanity let us impeach war and the war spirit. It is a
traitor to every ideal of civilization and of justice. It is the
instrument of hatred and of pride, the agent of jealousy and of
avarice. In the name of the dead and dying, in the name of justice,
which it dethrones, in the name of those whose loved ones it demands,
we impeach war as a traitor, guilty of all high crimes and
misdemeanors. What else shall we do? Stir up from its greatest depths
the heart of man. Educate his conscience till he is unwilling to
suffer war to exist. Begin early in Church, school, and home to instil
in the minds of young and old continually the true conception of war,
that it is an immorality, contrary to every principle of Christianity
and to every teaching of our Christ.

Let us bring into the conflict against war the great, dynamic, motive
force--the Moral Nature of Man. And when we shall have thus developed
the consciences of men, there will henceforth be laid up for us a
crown of victory, as there will then be a fuller realization that in
man's moral nature is the Hope of Universal Peace.




THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By HAROLD HUSTED, Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas, representing the
Western Group

Fifth Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May
28, 1914




THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY


Age by age, civilization advances. Each successive era has contributed
that invention or accomplished that achievement which has placed
another round in the great ladder of civilization. The development of
many small states into powerful nations, and many wonderful
improvements in other fields, such as steam navigation, the railroad,
the telegraph, and wireless communication, crown the last as the
greatest of centuries in the history of the human family. It is
difficult to understand why the human mind, whence these mighty
inspirations originated, has been incapable of realizing that there
still remains the most degrading, the most deteriorating, the foulest
blot that ever disgraced this world--the killing of civilized men, by
men, as a permissible mode of settling international disputes. This
world can never attain its highest standard of civilization until this
one disgraceful blemish, called war, is obliterated. It is the
collective task of the people living in this twentieth century to
bring into reality the millennium of Tennyson,

  Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
  In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

The beginning of this social task, then, is the enlightenment of the
peoples as to the immorality, waste, and ineffectiveness of war. God
commanded, "Thou shalt not kill." Who shall presume to declare that
this precept was directed not to nations but to individuals only?
that one man shall not kill, but nations may? We are horrified at the
report of a single murder, yet, if viewed from the light of truth,
what is war but wholesale murder? What tongue, what pen, can describe
the bloody havoc of the battle of Gettysburg, where, between the rise
and set of a single sun, fifty thousand of our fellow men sank to
earth, dead or wounded?

What sentiment in human hearts which needs to be perpetuated sent rank
after rank, column after column, of blue soldiers against the
impregnable stone wall of Fredericksburg? And who will place the blame
for the carnage of Cold Harbor elsewhere than upon the folly of
misguided patriotism and cruel, selfish interests that made the bloody
battle possible?

Every soldier is connected, as all of us, by dear ties of kindred,
love, and friendship. Perhaps there is an aged mother, who fondly
hoped to lean her bending form on his more youthful arm; perhaps a
young wife, whose life is entwined inseparably with his; perchance a
sister, a brother. But as he falls on the field of battle, must not
all these suffer? His aged mother surely falls with him. His young
wife is suddenly widowed, his children orphaned. That husband's
helping hand is forever stayed. A parent's voice is stilled, and the
children's plaintive cries for their loving father fall on unheeding
ears. Tell me, friends, you who know the bitterness of parting with
dear ones whom you watched tenderly through the last hopeful moments,
can you measure your anguish? Yet, what a contrast! Your dear ones
departed soothed by kindness and love, while the dying soldier gasped
out his life on the battlefield alone.

And what a waste is war! We are just beginning to realize the
tremendous cost, the incalculable wastefulness, not only of actual war
but of the preparation for future possible wars. For the current
fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, the United States has appropriated
in round numbers $535,000,000, in preparation for future wars and
because of wars fought in the past. Sixty-seven cents out of every
dollar expended by our national government goes to feed the
present-day mania for war, present and past, leaving only thirty-three
cents out of each dollar for the combined expense of the executive,
legislative, and judicial departments of our national government. When
we realize that the cost of a single battleship exceeds the total
value of all the grounds and buildings of all the colleges and
universities in the state of Kansas, the figures indicating this
expense have more meaning to us. And when we reflect that the cost of
a single shot from one of the great guns of that battleship is $1700,
enough to send a young man through college, the common man realizes
that the United States cannot afford to go to war or even prepare for
war.

And all this suffering and cost are to no purpose. War is utterly
ineffectual to secure or advance its professed object. The
wretchedness it involves contributes to no beneficial result, helps to
establish no right, and, therefore, in no respect promotes harmony
between the contending nations.

When the Saviour was born, angels from heaven sang to the children of
the human family this benediction:

  Glory to God in the highest,
  Peace on earth, good will toward men.

And at last, in the beginning of this twentieth century, nations seem
to be visibly approaching that unity so long hoped and prayed for; and
that nation which shall precede all others in the abolition of war
will be crowned by history with everlasting honor. The risk will be
very little, the gain incalculable.

We are coming to believe that the most significant fact about man and
his civilization is their improvability. Individual inventive genius
has added improvement after improvement until it would seem that man's
mastery over nature is to be well-nigh complete as these ideas and
inventions are socialized and extended to benefit all. We are now
entering the era of social achievement when mankind unitedly
undertakes by organization and cooperation mightier tasks than ever
accomplished before. Many dreadful diseases are disappearing before
preventive medicine, and sanitary science is eliminating many plagues;
pestilence is coming to be a thing of the past. Human welfare is now
the concern of cooperative mankind, and social science will condemn
and banish war or fail to establish itself as an applied science. It
_can_ be done! It _ought_ to be done! It _will_ be done!

And although this consummation seems to many far away, it may be
accomplished by very simple methods. It only waits the time of
concerted action on the part of the leading nations when the
principles of arbitration can be invoked more fully, and a world-court
established with plenary powers for settling all disputes between the
nations.

International legislation has occurred repeatedly, though no
world-court has as yet been established. In the case of the Universal
Postal Union we have what is tantamount to world-legislation, in that
all civilized nations have entered into a formal agreement regarding
the delivery of mail. Another instance of practical world-legislation
is that of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Many
other examples might be given in which several nations are parties to
an agreement regarding some important measure, such as the respect
paid to the flag of truce, the regulations concerning commerce on the
high seas, and the etiquette of diplomacy. Paramount in
world-importance has been the agreement of the leading nations of the
world in the establishment of the Hague conferences for the
amelioration of war.

Since a conference of nations can meet and decide on the mitigation of
the horrors of war, it is certainly conceivable that a tribunal of
nations can prevent war. Such a tribunal would in no respect differ
from the Supreme Court of the United States in its fundamental
foundations. As our Supreme Court is final in settling all disputes in
this country, so the international court would be final in adjusting
all controversies between the nations. And such a court is clearly the
next decisive step in the promotion of this great task of securing
world-peace.

If nations can agree to establish war as their arbiter of peace, why
can they not establish a more peaceful substitute? It is possible, for
there is nothing in the nature of strife that cannot be settled, no
quarrel that cannot be judged, no difficulty that cannot be
satisfactorily adjusted.

With the establishment of a true world-court, there would rise on the
vision of the nations for the first time the prospect of justice for
the united whole of mankind. Justice to the smaller countries would
be secured; encroachments by the strong upon the weak would be
prevented; the moral standard of politics would be uplifted; and
though every step would be exposed to the selfishness, corruption, and
love of despotism that are prevalent in all men, yet is it not
reasonable to suppose that, as progress is now being made in the
various nations for overcoming these evils, so it would be made in
this united whole, to the unspeakable benefit of mankind?

This country has been foremost in the promotion of this great movement
to organize the world. It is especially fitting that the United States
should take the lead. The greatest nation having a government of the
people and by the people, with the longest experience and the greatest
success, is best fitted to lead others. We have the form of national
government which foreshadows the form of world-government.
Theoretically, our states are sovereign; all rights which are not
formally surrendered by accepting the Constitution of the United
States are reserved to them. In a like manner, referring to the
establishment of a world-court, the nations individually will be
expected to surrender to the nations collectively only such
jurisdiction as pertains to the settling of their controversies.

A world-court would appeal to the strongest, the purest, and the
deepest thinkers of every race. It would cover a new field, appealing
to reason and altruism and justice. It would by its very effect upon
individuals tend to develop the qualities it demands, and would prove
a mighty influence for uplifting the intellectual and moral standards
not only of men but nations. It would by its very international nature
annihilate all national antipathies and promote an era of universal
good will and genuine understanding.

To send a husband or father, glorious in the perfection of physical
manhood, out on the field of carnage to be slain in an effort to
settle international difficulty or to uphold fancied national honor,
is unquestionable barbarism. It is far more humane to terminate
disputed questions by arbitration than by the keen-edged sword.
International peace compacts can hold mankind together by unbreakable
yet unburdensome bonds and greatly promote prosperity and social
progress. The wanton woe and waste that inevitably follow in the train
of war will soon be things of the past. The twentieth century, already
so full of radiant promise, so enlivened by a new social conscience,
will devote its collective energies to the abolition of war and the
substitution of its successor--a world-court, based on the facts of
humane solidarity and the principles of international peace.




THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION

By BRYANT SMITH, Guilford College, North Carolina, a Senior in
Guilford College

Prize-Winning Essay in the Pugsley Contest, 1912-1913


THE PUGSLEY PRIZE-ESSAY CONTESTS

In 1908 Mr. Chester DeWitt Pugsley, then an undergraduate student in
Harvard University, gave $50 as a prize to be offered by the Lake
Mohonk Conference for the best essay on "International Arbitration" by
an undergraduate student of an American college. The prize was won by
L. B. Bobbitt of Baltimore, a sophomore in Johns Hopkins University.
The following year (1909-1910) a similar prize, of $100, was won by
George Knowles Gardner of Worcester, Massachusetts, a Harvard
sophomore. A like prize of $100 in 1910-1911 was won by Harry Posner
of West Point, Mississippi, a senior in the Mississippi Agricultural
and Mechanical College.

The prize of 1911-1912, of which John K. Starkweather of Denver,
Colorado, a junior in Brown University, was the winner, was the first
offered to men students only (other similar prizes having been offered
to women students) in the United States and Canada.

In the fifth Pugsley contest (1912-1913) the prize was awarded to
Bryant Smith of Guilford College, North Carolina, a senior in Guilford
College at the same place, whose essay follows. The judges were
Chancellor Elmer Ellsworth Brown of New York University, Rollo Ogden,
editor of the New York _Evening Post_, and Lieutenant General Nelson
A. Miles, U.S.A., retired.

Each winner is invited to the Lake Mohonk Conference next following,
where he publicly receives the prize from its donor, Mr. Pugsley.




THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION


The first concerted effort looking toward an eventual world-wide peace
was the Hague Conference of 1899, where representatives of twenty-six
nations assembled in response to a rescript from the Czar of Russia,
whose avowed purpose, as set forth in the rescript, was to discuss
ways and, if possible, devise means, to arrest the alarming increase
in expenditures for armaments which threatened to bankrupt the
national governments.

Unable to accomplish anything definite in this respect because of the
vigorous opposition headed by Germany, the delegates turned their
attention toward giving official recognition and concrete form to
ideas which had already obtained in the settlement of international
disputes, and toward the formation of a court before which the nations
might have their differences adjudicated. The principles embodied in
good offices and mediation and commissions of inquiry have given
gratifying evidence of their efficiency, each in its respective
capacity. The original achievement of the conference, however, was the
Permanent Court of Arbitration. The composition of this court was to
include not more than four persons from each of the signatory powers;
from which panel, in case of an appeal to arbitration, each party was
to select two judges, who, in turn, should elect their own umpire
unless otherwise provided by the disputants. That it would be subject
to criticism might have been expected. That twenty-six nations could
unanimously agree upon any court whatever was the real occasion for
surprise. The four cases arbitrated during the eight years intervening
between this and the Second Hague Conference served to bring out its
defects, chief of which were its decentralized and intangible nature.
Nominally a court, in reality it was but a panel scattered all over
the world from which a court could, with great difficulty and expense,
be selected. Nominally permanent, in reality it had to be re-created
for each case to be judged.

The Second Hague Conference, working on a basis of this short
experience, undertook to remedy these inherent defects in the arbitral
machinery by leaving the Permanent Court just as it was, and by
creating besides an International Court of Prize to serve a special
function indicated by its name, and a court of Judicial Arbitration to
supplement the work of, if not eventually to supplant, the former
court. To insure greater impartiality and also to encourage the weaker
powers the expenses of the new court, instead of falling upon the
litigants in each case, were to be prorated among the ratifying
powers. To insure greater tangibility and permanency the new court was
to be composed of only seventeen members, each to serve a term of
twelve years at a salary of $2400 per annum, with an additional $40
for each day of actual service. Furthermore, the court was to meet
once a year and to elect each year a delegation of three of its
members to sit at The Hague for settling minor cases arising in the
interval between regular sessions, having the power also to call extra
sessions of the entire court whenever occasion should demand. To
insure a more judicial personnel the convention specifies that members
shall be qualified to hold high legal posts in their respective
countries. The method by which members of the court were to be
appointed--the one point upon which the delegates were unable to
agree--was deferred for subsequent determination.

This, in addition to the one hundred and fifty-odd treaties privately
entered into by two or more nations, many of which contain pledges to
submit certain classes of disputes to the Permanent Court, is, in
brief, what has been accomplished by way of constructive political
organization by the modern peace movement.

How much does this signify? In view of the present attitude of the
social mind, what are we to infer from this as bearing upon the
ultimate outcome of international arbitration? It shall be the purpose
of this paper to answer that question.

In an address before the Mohonk Conference of 1911 Dr. Cyrus Northrup,
ex-president of the University of Minnesota, said: "What is really
wanted is not continued talking in favor of peace with the idea of
converting the people; for the people are already converted! They are
ready for peace and arbitration!" In the October number of the _Review
of Reviews_ for 1909, Privy Councillor Karl von Stengel, one of the
German delegation to the First Hague Conference, is quoted as follows:
"It must be stated emphatically that in its ultimate aims the peace
movement is not only ... Utopian, but ... dangerous...." These
quotations are given as typical of the attitude manifested by the two
extremes, the injudiciously optimistic and the ultraconservative,
toward every social reform. All true progress pursues a course
intermediate to these two.

The idea entertained by so many enthusiastic peace advocates, that the
world is ready for peace if we but had institutional facilities
adequate to carry out the will of the people, is erroneous. In all
democratic states political institutions are but a concrete expression
of the social mind, the media created by the people, through which
society executes its will. "With a given phase of human character ...
there must go an adapted class of institutions."[1] Therefore, I
submit that if the people were ready for peace they could easily
provide the means necessary for its accomplishment.

    [1] Herbert Spencer, "The Study of Sociology."

The first gentleman quoted above drew his conclusion from the
indications that of the two million inhabitants of his state, one
million nine hundred thousand would favor arbitration as shown by the
enthusiasm manifested at a meeting of the state peace society a few
weeks before. Similar conditions in other parts of the country, he
thought, would corroborate the application of his assertion to the
entire country. Such a conclusion is fallacious in that it fails to
consider three essential facts about the people of the United States
which largely determine the attitude of any people toward war. First,
they have no grievance. Second, no appeal is being made to their
patriotic bias. Third, their emotions and passions are quiescent.

The first of these needs only brief mention. No people in this
enlightened age wishes to fight as a matter of course, regardless of
any reasonable pretext. If nations never had any personal interests
involved, there would, of course, be no more war. In this respect the
people of the United States are not ahead of the other parts of the
civilized world. Disinterested parties have been in favor of peace for
two thousand years.

The other two facts deserve more extended consideration.

The disposition in individuals to pluck motes out of their neighbors'
eyes and leave beams in their own, in the nation becomes what Herbert
Spencer calls the bias of patriotism. According to him patriotism is
but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own
interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view
international affairs apart from national interests, we are
handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial
arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes
patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all
the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for
armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed
bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust
of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers'
Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to
reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the
price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize
a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted
that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the
individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question
the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with Japan,
England's course in South Africa, and America's attitude toward the
Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three
countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the
other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic
pride.

The chief respect in which this bias interferes with the progress of
international arbitration is in restricting the scope of general
arbitration treaties, the average formula of such treaties excluding
all questions which involve "national honor and vital interests." A
greatly modified survival of the spirit which in primitive peoples
regarded the tribe over the mountain or across the stream as a fit
object of hatred and fear, the objection to a judicial settlement of
such questions assumes that a nation's honor and vital interests are
goods peculiar in that they may be inconsistent with justice. The
attitude of the United States toward the recently proposed treaty
between England and America may be taken as typical of the attitude
which prevails on this subject generally. The formulators of the
treaty took an advanced step in that, instead of reserving questions
of national honor and vital interests, they provided for the
arbitration of all differences which are "justiciable in their nature
by reason of being susceptible of decision by the application of
principles of law or equity," thereby recognizing the judicial nature
of arbitration. The action of the Senate, however, which sustained the
opinion of the majority report of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, objecting to the last clause of Article III of the
treaty,[2] would indicate that the significance of a general
arbitration treaty attaches not so much to the definition of its scope
as to who shall determine what cases conform to the definition. It
would seem that the nature of the reservation is relatively
unimportant so long as its interpretation devolves upon the parties at
variance. The majority report, objecting to the delegation to the
joint high commission of the power to determine the arbitrability of
cases in terms of the treaty, contains this statement[3] in which the
minority report likewise concurs: "Every one agrees that there are
certain questions which no nation ... will ever submit to the decision
of any one else." As cases of this nature it enumerates territorial
integrity, admission of immigrants, and our Monroe Doctrine. The
significance of this insistence upon a means of evasion is evident.
There is not yet enough international confidence. The powers are not
yet ready to submit to unlimited arbitration.

    [2] The clause, referring to the commission of inquiry,
    reads:

        "It is further agreed, however, that in cases in
        which the Parties disagree as to whether or not a
        difference is subject to arbitration under Article I
        of this Treaty, that question shall be submitted to
        the Joint High Commission of Inquiry; and if all or
        all but one of the members of the Commission agree
        and report that such difference is within the scope
        of Article I, it shall be referred to arbitration in
        accordance with the provisions of this
        treaty."--_Editor._

    [3] See Senate Document 98, 62d Cong., 1st Sess.,
    9-10.--_Editor._

The other enemy to rational judgment--and rational judgment must be
the only basis of arbitration--is the danger of emotionalism. The
average man is yet largely irrational. When cool and self-possessed,
and when his prejudices and traditions do not interfere, he can pass
rational judgment upon questions in which his own interests are not
concerned; but when his passions are aroused he dispenses with any
effort to reason and acts in obedience to blind impulse. He knows that
it is expensive to fight, that it is dangerous, and that it is wrong;
but when he is provoked, he fights. The characteristics of the average
man are the characteristics of society. We have not yet outgrown the
mob.

Interwoven with this impulsive temperament and associated with some of
the most cherished affections of the human heart is the spirit of war,
developed by thousands of generations of ancestral conflict and passed
on to us as a heritage to be rooted out of our nature before we shall
realize in its fullness the ideal for which we strive. Mortal conflict
sanctified by religion, devastation idealized by literature, pillage
justified by patriotism, fellow-destruction ennobled by
self-sacrifice--these form a complex of contradictory emotions from
which men are as yet unable to unravel the one essential
characteristic of war; namely, the attempt to dispense justice in a
trial by battle, and make it stand out in its revealed inconsistency,
dissociated from its traditional concomitants of which it is neither
part nor parcel. The romance of knighthood and chivalry still appeals
to the human heart, notwithstanding the fact that war, love, and
religion, the knight's creed, are an inconsistent combination. Most
men can be made to see this in their minds, but cannot be made to feel
it in their souls. Many old Civil War veterans, who would not consent
for their sons to volunteer in the Spanish-American War, would have
gone themselves had they been able. Some did go. To men so disposed it
is useless to talk of the horrors of war. Give us a just grievance;
let some competent enthusiast inflame this passion with a war cry like
"Remember the Maine," "Fifty-four forty or fight," "Liberty or death,"
and, reenforced by the animal inherent in man, it will arouse popular
demonstrations devoid of all reason, creating a force that cannot be
controlled by a cold, calculating intellect. Can you listen to a bugle
call on a clear, still night without a quickening of the pulse as
there flashes through your soul a suggestion of all past history with
its marshaling hosts and heroic deeds? Can you see a military parade
without a suggestion of "Dixie" and the Star Spangled Banner, or
feeling your bosom swell with patriotic pride? This association may
be, and doubtless is, a delusion, but it is a delusion developed and
fortified by thousands of years of custom and precedent and it would
be contrary to the history of human progress if man should become
disillusionized in one generation. It may take centuries. If we are to
have international arbitration in the near future, we must have it in
spite of this spirit of war rather than by destroying the spirit. In
fact, the only practical way to destroy it is to let it, like
vestigial organs of which biologists tell us, degenerate from disuse.
This inherited emotional tendency remains as a threat with which we,
as exponents of arbitration, must reckon before we are justified in
saying that the world is ready for peace.

Because of these two social characteristics--the patriotic bias
which perverts judgment, and uncontrolled passions which submerge
reason--the educational propagandists still have a task to perform.

Let us now examine the stand-pat idea that unlimited arbitration is
but a dream as expressed in the quotation from Privy Councillor
Stengel. This is farther from the truth than the other extreme just
discussed. He who will, with an unprejudiced mind, examine cross
sections of history at widely separated stages, cannot fail to see
that along with the growing tendency of reason to predominate over
passion, superstition, and custom there has been a parallel tendency
to restrict militarism as a social activity. From a war conceived as
religion to war as patriotism, then war as commercialism and the tool
of ambition, man is now coming to the more rational conception of war
as the despoiler of nations. David speaks of the "season of the year"
when nations went forth to battle. Fifteen hundred years later
governments pretended at least to justify their military operations on
rational grounds. To-day war is the last resort, and even its most
ardent defenders do not attempt to justify it except in disputes which
involve national honor and vital interests.

In view of the foregoing facts it is evident that the modern peace
movement has by no means the whole of the task to perform. Rather, we
can almost justify ourselves in the assumption that war is not long to
remain one of our social inconsistencies and that it is now making its
last, and, therefore, most determined, stand on questions of national
honor and vital interests.

Among the numerous forces contributing to this evolution of
international peace, the chief agencies have been, and still are,
moral and industrial. These same forces are working to-day with
cumulative effect.

Warfare is becoming more and more inconsistent with the ethical spirit
of the times. Men may talk of the expenses, horrors, and devastations
of war as paramount causes for the tendency to substitute arbitration;
but antedating all other causes, underlying and strengthening all
others, is the slowly changing social conscience which, as each
generation passes, appreciates more fully warfare's inconsistency with
justice and antagonism to right. This same cause found civilized
society taking keen delight in the heathen barbarity of a gladiatorial
combat, and has transformed and lifted it up to where it is horrified
at a bull-baiting or a prize fight. It found human beings with
absolute power of life and death over other human beings and has
evolved the view that all men are created free and equal. It found
individuals settling questions of honor by a resort to arms, and has
substituted therefor a judge, counsel, and a jury. These three
institutions--gladiatorial combats, slavery, and dueling--were no more
regarded in their day as only temporary phenomena of social evolution
than is war so regarded by military sympathizers of to-day; yet these
have one by one been eliminated, and war is fast becoming as much out
of harmony with the ethical spirit of this age as was each of the
above out of harmony with the spirit of the age which dispensed with
it, and the effort to demonstrate that war is just as dispensable is
meeting with success. The teachings of Christ, who two thousand years
ago announced the doctrine of human brotherhood and surrendered his
life to make this doctrine effective, have slowly but surely wrought
their leavening influence upon the source of all war; namely, the
hearts of men. Warfare has for centuries been gradually yielding to
this deepening consciousness and that it must eventually, if not soon,
take its place beside the long-discarded gladiatorial profession, the
outlawed slave trade, and the discountenanced custom of the duelist
must be evident to any one who takes more than a superficial view of
the great determining forces which shape human progress.

Besides moral forces, industrial forces were mentioned as a factor
tending to the adoption of arbitration. During recent times, under the
impetus caused by the relatively modern innovations of steam,
electricity, and the press, this class of causes has been unusually
effective. Industry has overstepped international boundary lines.
Through the division of labor we are passing from the independence of
nations to the interdependence of nations. International banking,
transportation, and commerce, by establishing communities of interest
in all parts of the world, are binding the peoples of the earth into
one great industrial organization. As striking evidence of this
development, more than one hundred and fifty international
associations[4] and more than thirty-five international unions of
states have been formed. The modern intricate system of communication
is a veritable nervous system which, in the event of any local
paralysis or upheaval, informs the entire industrial organism. The
figure is no longer "the shot heard, round the world," but becomes
"the pulse-beat felt, round the world." If Spencer's definition of
patriotism--that is, coextensive with personal interests--is correct,
the bias of patriotism cannot <DW44> the progress of arbitration much
longer, for patriotism will be a world-wide feeling, since personal
interests are no longer restricted to nationality.

    [4] "Annuaire de la Vie Internationale," 1910-1911, reports
    on 510.--_Editor._

No, Herr Stengel, each passing year finds the causes which make for
war weakened and the causes which make for arbitration proportionately
reenforced. The skeptics are the dreamers and the peace workers are
the practical men of affairs.

From the foregoing synopsis of the technical accomplishments of the
modern peace movement to date, and from the effort to interpret their
significance in the light of fundamental social characteristics and
the present social attitude, I trust three things have become evident:

_First._ The movement for international peace through arbitration, far
from being a mere bubble on the surface of society to be burst by the
first war cloud which appears on the horizon, is a movement, centuries
old, coincident with social evolution, deep-rooted in the very nature
of a developing world-wide civilization.

_Second._ International peace through arbitration is not to be a
ready-made affair, coming in on the crest of some wave of popular
enthusiasm as was expected by many in 1899.

_Third._ Being an outgrowth of the natural laws of human development,
a result so much deeper and more fundamental than political laws can
produce, international peace through arbitration may be furthered, but
cannot be accomplished, by legislation; may be delayed, but cannot be
prevented, by the neglect to legislate. To undertake to hasten
arbitration by forcing legislative proceedings beyond what the people
will indorse, would be as futile as to turn up the hands of the clock
to hasten the passage of time.

To those who can appreciate these facts there is no occasion for
discouragement in the suspicious attitude manifested by the powers
toward any definite step in the direction of unrestricted arbitration,
apparently so inconsistent with their general pacific professions.
"Rapid growth and quickly accomplished reforms are necessarily
unsound, incomplete, and disappointing."[5]

    [5] F. H. Giddings, "The Elements of Sociology."

With the truth of these deductions granted, it would seem safe to
assume that the institutions for the settlement of international
difficulties will develop in much the same way as have the
institutions for the settlement of difficulties between individuals.
It should be profitable, therefore, to compare the present growth of
arbitration with the evolution and decay of the various modes of trial
as the idea of judicial settlement diffused itself through the mind of
the English people causing established forms to give way to something
better. Dispensing with the blood feud, which hardly deserves the name
of trial, the oldest form of such institution was trial by ordeal
which, according to Thayer in his "Evidence at the Common Law," seems
to have been "indigenous with the human creature in the earliest
stages of his development." This form gradually fell into disuse
before the more rational form of compurgation introduced into Teutonic
courts in the fifth century. In 1215 it was formally abolished.
Compurgation was abolished in 1440 as its inferiority to trial by
witnesses became fully recognized. In the latter form, instituted
early in the ninth century, when the witnesses disagreed the judicial
talent of the day conceived of no other method of decision than to
fight it out. Thus we have trial by witnesses and trial by battle
developing concurrently, although they were recognized as distinct
forms. After two centuries of effort to abolish it, trial by battle
was made illegal in 1833, the last case recorded as being so decided
occurring in 1835. Out of the trial by witnesses has evolved our
modern trial by jury, at first limited to certain unimportant cases,
then having its sphere extended as its superiority became more
evident, until finally it superseded all other forms and to-day is the
accepted mode of settling even questions of honor.

The growth and extension of international arbitration has not been
dissimilar to this. Six cases were arbitrated in the eighteenth
century, four hundred and seventy-one in the nineteenth, while more
than one hundred and fifty cases have been arbitrated during the first
thirteen years of the twentieth century. Between the First and Second
Hague Conferences only four uses were submitted to the Permanent Court
of Arbitration. Since the Second Conference, notwithstanding the
unsatisfactory disposition of the Venezuelan affair, eight cases have
been tried, a ninth is pending, a tenth will soon be docketed if the
United States is not to act the hypocrite in her international
relations by refusing to submit to England's request to arbitrate the
question as to whether or no we exempt our coastwise vessels from toll
duty through the Panama Canal. Defects have been detected in the
Permanent Court of Arbitration and we are well on the way toward a
better court. Representatives of only twenty-six nations took part in
the deliberations of the First Hague Conference; representatives of
forty-four nations took part in the deliberations of the Second Hague
Conference. Wars of aggression and conquest, though not formally
outlawed, are effectively so, and arbitration for the recovery of
contract debts is now practically obligatory. As time passes and its
feasibility gains credence, arbitration, like the jury trial, will
extend its sphere of usefulness until it too settles questions of
honor. Nor need we imply from this analogy that it will take such an
age to accomplish this result. Because of the increased mobility of
society, resulting from the greater like-mindedness and consciousness
of kind incident to our modern communities of interests and systems of
communication, and from our greater susceptibility to rational rather
than traditional appeals, a reform can be wrought more easily and the
people can adjust themselves to the change far more readily than
several centuries ago.

Bearing in mind, then, our attempted analysis of counter social forces
at work, our deductions from this analysis and the foregoing analogy
the significance of which grows out of the truth of these deductions,
let us conclude with a suggestion as to what the next Hague Conference
should attempt. It should, of course, like the former Conferences,
extract as many teeth as possible from war. As to improving our
arbitration facilities, its first task evidently should be to
determine some method whereby members of the Judicial Arbitration
Court shall be apportioned and selected. If, as has been suggested, it
is decided to use the same scheme of apportionment as that for the
International Court of Prize, the provision that each party to a case
shall have a representative on the bench should be changed so as to
provide that neither party shall have a representative on the bench.
If this court is not to be a misnomer like the Permanent Court of
Arbitration, its rulings must be in accord with the principles of
jurisprudence rather than with the spirit of compromise such a
provision would tend to produce. With this accomplished and the
Judicial Court of Arbitration put in practical working order "of free
and easy access" to the powers, it may be doubted whether anything
further can be done. If the powers can be made to agree to submit to
the court all cases growing out of the disputed interpretation of
treaties, a great advance will have been made, but it is doubtful
whether the present state of public opinion would indorse such a
progressive step. These international legislators can do no more than
provide channels through which the spirit of international peace can
exercise itself as it expands, and the Judicial Court of Arbitration,
at the optional use of the nations, conforms admirably to this
requirement. The delegates should, therefore, avoid the universal
tendency of such bodies to legislate too much. None of these Hague
Conferences can alone accomplish the ultimate purpose of the so-called
dreamers, but each Conference may be a landmark on the upward journey
toward that consummation, anticipated by Utopians from the earliest
times, foretold by prophets from Micah and Isaiah to Robert Burns and
Tennyson, labored for by practical statesmen from Hugo Grotius to
William H. Taft, when each man shall be a native of his state and a
citizen of the world.


AUTHORITIES

  For acts and conventions of Hague Conferences:
    "Texts of the Peace Conferences" by James Brown Scott.

  For data concerning proposed treaty with England:
    Text of treaty and majority and minority reports of Senate
    Committee on Foreign Relations.

  For statistics of arbitration treaties:
    "Revised List of Arbitration Treaties," compiled by Denys P.
      Myers.

  For development of trial by jury:
    "Evidence at the Common Law" by Thayer.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate
Peace Association, by Intercollegiate Peace Association

*** 