VI
THE REMEDY
I have made out the best case I can for our people. These chapters have listed every excuse that can reasonably be given for our failure to declare ourselves on the moral issue of this war. They have said that a careless, busy folk, like those of the Middle West, need many facts to enable them to see where the truth lies. They have pointed out how short-sighted is the foreign policy of the Allies which gives few facts to the American public. They have shown how the best of our radicals have failed to think clearly because they have been befuddled by a vague pseudo-internationalism. I have stated what I believe to be the falsity in our present-day conception of Europe, the self-complacency in our monopoly of freedom and justice; and I have tried to reveal how that assumption of merit blinded our eyes to the struggles of other peoples for the same causes. I have blamed our failure on Germany and on England. But after every explanation has been made, it is still true that our people ought to have been sensitive. At a great moment of history we failed of greatness. There remains a shame to us that we held aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts needed to convince France that we were fighting for human rights in our Revolution. Three thousand miles of water did not drown the appeal of our extremity. But to-day our leaders are so bewildered by dreams of universal brotherhood that they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our common people have their eyes to their work, and do not look up, as the workers of Lancashire looked up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the balance of 1863.
This war has shown to us that we are not at the level of earlier days. We have lost our national unity, our sense of direction. The war has revealed in us an unpreparedness in foreign and domestic policy. It is a curse to know one's weakness unless one cures it. So this war will not leave us blessed until we take a program of action. It is a waste of time to write a book on the war except to convince and move to action.
The steps are clear.
Our first step is to set our house in order. We need to recover our self-consciousness, to restate what we mean by America. A half million newcomers each year will not help us to find ourselves. We shall be the better friends of freedom if we digest our present welter. Let us fearlessly and at once advocate a stringent restriction of immigration. Our citizenship has become somewhat cheap. Our ideals have become somewhat mixed. Let us take time to locate the direction in which we wish to go, and decide on the goal at which we aim. "Thou, Oh! my country, must forever endure," said a famous patriot; but in a few years his country had been melted down into an autocracy. We cannot rely for all time on luck and happy drift. Size, numbers, the physical economic conquest of a continent – these are not a final good. They are at best only means toward worthy living. It is easier to rush in fresh masses of cheap labor than it is to deal with the workers already here as members of a free community, aid them in winning a high standard of living, and establish with them an industrial democracy. The cheapest way of digging our ditches and working our factories, and sewing our shirts, is of course to continue holding open our flood gates and letting the deluge come. It is the clever policy of our exploiters, and the sentimental policy of the rest of us who love to be let alone, if only we can cover our unconcern with a humanitarian varnish. But the result of it is the America of to-day with its oligarchy of industrial captains and bankers, with its aristocracy of labor, made up of powerful trades unions and restricted "Brotherhoods," and with its unskilled alien masses of mine and factory labor, unorganized, exploited. Let us begin to build the better America by sacrificing the easy immediate benefits of unrestricted immigration.
Our second step is to teach our tradition to the hundred million already here. It is a large enough classroom. We can advertise for new pupils when our present group matriculates. When it has matriculated, there will be no popularity for phrases like "He kept us out of war," nor for songs of "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." The teaching of that tradition will reveal the interweaving of the American and the French Revolutions as products of a single impulse toward world liberation. If we had known our history, we should have answered the need of France, as Hall, Chapman, Thaw, Seeger, and many more answered it who have laid down their lives for their friend, France. The teaching of the American tradition will reveal to our awakened astonished minds that our policy has not been that of neutrality toward oppressed peoples like the Belgians. It will reveal that the British fleet has served us well from the time of Canning down to Manila Bay. It will stir in us loyalties that have long been asleep. It will show what a phrase like "Government for the people" has meant in terms of social legislation. It will point to the long road we must tread before we reach that ideal goal. We cannot leave the teaching of our tradition to the public schools alone. Courses of evening lectures for the people, the newspapers and periodicals, clergymen and economists and social workers, all must help.
Our third step is a deep understanding sympathy with the forces in the world making for righteousness. We should have been sensitive enough to see the right and the wrong of the present war. But that chance has gone by. Let us now make ready to contribute to the future. The fundamental question is this: Are the democracies of the world to stand together, or is the world-fight for freedom to be made, with our nation on the side-lines? The whole emphasis of the world's emotion has shifted from war to peace. When thought follows this emotion and rationalizes it, we can begin constructive work. The test of our desire for peace will be found in this: Do we mean business? Pacifism is valueless, because it is a vague emotion. Peace is a thing won by thought and effort. It is not alone a "state of mind." If we are willing to give guarantees by army and navy, and to back up protest by force, we can serve the cause of peace. But if we continue our "internationalism" of recent years, we shall not be admitted to any such effective league of peace as France and England will form. We must take our place by the side of the nations who mean to make freedom and justice prevail throughout the world.
Our fourth step will be that measure of preparedness which will render us effective in playing our part in world history. We cannot go on forever asking the English fleet to supply the missing members in our Monroe Doctrine. We cannot go on forever developing a rich ripeness, trusting that no hand will pluck us. In a competitive world, which builds Krupp guns, we cannot place our sole reliance in a good-nature which will be touched to friendliness because we are a special people. That preparedness will not stop with enriching munition makers, and playing into the hands of Eastern bankers. It will be a preparedness which enlists labor, by safeguarding wages and hours. It is the preparedness of an ever-encroaching equality: a democracy of free citizens, prosperous not in spots but in a wide commonalty, disciplined not only by national service of arms, but by the fundamental discipline of an active effective citizenship. It is a preparedness which will call on the women to share the burden of citizenship. It is a preparedness which mobilizes all the inner forces of a nation by clearing the ground for equality. It will be a preparedness not against an evil day, but for the furtherance of the great hopes of the race.
SECTION III
THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD
I
LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS
In presenting the facts that follow of the behavior of the German Army, I am fortunate in being able to introduce them with a statement written for me by Lord Bryce. The words of Lord Bryce carry more weight with the American people than those of any other man in Europe, and his analysis of the methods of the German Staff is authoritative, because he was the Chairman of what is known as the "Bryce Committee," which issued the famous report on German "frightfulness." When I told him that our country would respond to a statement from him, he asked me to submit questions, and to these questions he has written answers.
The first question submitted to Viscount Bryce was this:
"America has been startled by Cardinal Mercier's statement concerning the deportation of Belgian men. Our people will appreciate a statement from you as to the meaning of this latest German move."
Lord Bryce replied to me:
"Nothing could be more shocking than this wholesale carrying away of men from Belgium. I know of no case in European history to surpass it. Not even in the Thirty Years War were there such things as the German Government has done, first and last in Belgium. This last case is virtual slavery. The act is like that of those Arab slave raiders in Africa who carried off negroes to the coast to sell. And the severity is enhanced because these Belgians and the work forcibly extracted from them are going to be used against their own people. Having invaded Belgium, and murdered many hundreds, indeed even thousands, among them women and children, who could not be accused of 'sniping,' the German military government dislocated the industrial system of the community. They carried off all the raw materials of industry and most of the machinery in factories, and then having thus deprived the inhabitants of work, the invaders used this unemployment as the pretext for deporting them in very large numbers to places where nothing will be known of their fate. They were not even allowed to take leave of their wives and children. Many of them may never be heard of again. And von Bissing calls this 'a humanitarian measure.' Actually, it is all a part of the invasion policy. They defend it as being 'war,' as they justify everything, however inhuman, done because the military needs of Germany are alleged to call for it. It shows how hard pressed the military power is beginning to find itself at this latest stage of the war. It is said that Attila, when he was bringing his hosts of Huns out of Asia for his great assault on Western Europe, forced the conquered tribes into his army, and made them a part of his invasion. I can hardly think of a like case since then. In principle it resembles the Turkish plan when they formed the Janissaries. The Turks used their Christian subjects, taken quite young and made Moslems, and enrolled them as soldiers (to fight against Christians) to fill their armies, of which they were the most efficient part. These Belgians are not indeed actually made to fight, but they are being forced to do the labor of war, some of them probably digging trenches, or making shells, or working in quarries to extract chalk to make cement for war purposes. The carrying off of young girls from Lille was terrible enough, and it seemed to us at the time that nothing could be worse. But the taking away of many thousand of the Belgian population from their homes to work against their own countrymen, with all the mental torture that separation from one's family brings – this is the most shocking thing we have yet heard of. I have been shown in confidence the reports received from Belgium of what has happened there. The details given and the sources they come from satisfied me of their substantial truth. The very excuses the German authorities are putting forward admit the facts. In Belgian Luxemburg I hear that they have been trying to stop the existing employment in order to have an excuse for taking off the men."
The second question read:
"How are such acts of German severity to be accounted for?"
Lord Bryce replied:
"When the early accounts of the atrocious conduct of the German Government in Belgium were laid before the Committee over which I presided they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted them, going carefully through every case, and rejecting all those that seemed doubtful, we found such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from different sources, and carefully tested by the lawyers who examined the witnesses, that we could not doubt that the facts which remained were beyond question. You ask how German officers came to give such orders. The Committee tried to answer that question in a passage of their report. They point out that for the German officer caste morality and right stop when war begins. The German Chancellor admitted that they had done wrong in invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack their way through. The German military class had brooded so long on war that their minds had become morbid. To Prussian officers war has become, when the interests of the State require it, a sort of sacred mission: everything may be done by and for the omnipotent State. Pity and morality vanish, and are superseded by the new standard justifying every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said the Committee, 'is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.' You will find these doctrines set forth in 'Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on the usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German Staff. What military needs suggest becomes lawful. You will find in that book a justification for everything the German Army has done, for seizing hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants of an invaded area, and shooting them if necessary. You will find what amounts to a justification even of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries captured on prisoners offer the proof that the German officers acted upon this principle. 'This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church, has perverted the conception of Duty, and become a source of danger to the world.' This doctrine spread outside military circles. I do not venture to say that it has infected anything like the whole people. I hope that it did not. But national pride and national vanity were enlisted, and it became a widespread doctrine accepted by the military and even by many civilians. The Prussians are far more penetrated by the military spirit than the Americans or English or French, and such a doctrine ministered to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It was part of Prussian military theory and sometimes of practice a century ago. But in the rest of Germany it is a new thing. There was nothing of the kind in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years ago.
"In an army there will be individual cases of horrible brutality – plunder, rape, ill-treatment of civilians. There will always be men of criminal instinct whose passion is loosed by the immunities of war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn a decent soldier into a wild beast. But most of the crimes committed in Belgium were not committed by drunken troops. The German peasant, the 'Hans' whom we know, is a good, simple, kindly sort of fellow, as are the rural folk in every country. But remember in the German army there is a habit of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely severe in military discipline. They will shoot readily for a minor infraction. It is the officers more than the private soldiers that were to blame. And some of the officers were shocked by what they were forced to do. 'I am merely executing orders and I should be punished if I did not execute them,' said more than one officer whose words were recorded. How can an officer in war time disobey the orders of the supreme military command? He would be shot, and if he were to say he could not remain in an army where he was expected to commit crimes, to retire in war time, if he were permitted to retire, would mean disgrace to his name. It is the spirit of the Higher German Army Command that is to blame. The authority that issued the orders is guilty. The German people as a whole are not cruel, but many of them have been infected by this war spirit.
"And we little realize how strict is the German censorship. The German people have been fed with falsehoods. So far are they from believing in the record of their own army's cruelties, that they have been made to believe in cruelties alleged to have been committed by French and English troops. They have been fed on stories of soldiers with their eyes put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the German Empire in a press communication said:
"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out, and after having at first shown friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were sleeping.
"There was no truth at all in these stories."
The next question was submitted as follows:
"Has the German Government made any effort to prove their general charges and to disprove the detailed charges of your report and the report made by the French Government?"
Lord Bryce writes in reply:
"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have been published throughout the world, and no question has been raised of their authenticity. They contain testimony to outrages committed in Belgium and France that is overwhelming. No answer is possible. The German Government have never made a reply to the Report of the British Committee. They attempted to answer some of the reports made by the Belgian Government. But their answer was really an admission to the facts, for it consisted in allegations that Belgian civilians had given provocation. They endeavored to prove that Belgian civilians had shot at them. It would not have been strange if some civilians had shot at those who suddenly burst into their country, but no proof has ever been given of more than a few of such cases, nor of the stories of outrages committed by Belgian priests, women and children on German soldiers. Even if such occasional shooting by civilians had taken place, as very likely it did, that did not justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent persons and the burning of whole villages. In the burning of the 26 houses at Melle, which you tell me you witnessed, no allegations were made of shooting by civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to whom you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The woman, eighty years old, had not shot at them. These severities were committed as a method to achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the civilian population, and destroy the spiritual resources of the nation."
The final question was this:
"As the result of this war, what hope have we of reconstruction and an altered policy in Germany?"
Viscount Bryce answered:
"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will so completely defeat Germany as to discredit the whole military system and the ideas out of which the horrors of German war practice have developed. It is essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive in the eyes of the German people that they will have done with their military caste and its nefarious doctrine, and it is essential to discredit the methods themselves – discredit them by their failure – in so thorough a manner that no nation will ever use them again. The way, then, of ending what is called 'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It is our task to show that shocking military practices and total disregard of right do not succeed. We must bring to pass the judgment of facts to the effect that such methods do not avail. In this determination our British people are unanimous as they have never been before. The invasion of Belgium, the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of the Lusitania– these three series of acts united the whole British people in its firm resolve to prosecute the war to a complete victory. Now on the top of these things and of isolated crimes of the German Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and Captain Fryatt, come these abominable deportations of Belgians into a sort of slavery."
In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels the accurate fair-minded scholar. He is without heat and partisanship. He added in a note:
"We know that our British soldiers fight hard, but they fight fair, and they have no personal hatred to their enemies. I have been at the British front and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men when they take a prisoner often clap him on the back and give him a cigarette. There is no personal hatred among our officers or men. Efforts are properly made here at home to keep bitterness against the German people as a whole from the minds of our people, but it is right that they should detest and do their utmost to overthrow the system that has produced this war and has made it so horrible."