Their fighting can have in method none of the old-time chivalry, such as was witnessed at Fontenoy when the French commander courteously invited his English rival to fire first. The present is a chemical, mechanical war, than which no circle in Dante"s _Inferno_ is more horribly repellent.
When was better justified the terrible but beautiful imagery in Milton"s poem of _The Nativity_, when he says of Nature:
"Only with speeches fair She woos the gentle air To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, And on her naked shame Pollute with sinful blame The saintly veil of maiden white to throw; _Confounded that her Maker"s eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities._"
The snow cannot hide the horrors of the present conflict. Even night, in other wars more merciful, no longer throws its sable mantle of mercy over the dying and the dead. By the use of powerful searchlights the work of destruction continues. As though the surface of the earth were no longer sufficient for this malignant exercise of the genius of man, the heavens above and the waters under the earth have become at length the battlefields of the nations. Even from the infinite azure falls
".... a ghastly dew From the nations" airy navies, grappling in the central blue."
Can all history afford a parallel in malignity to the submarine, which, having sunk one vessel with all its human lives, calmly awaits, with its periscope projecting above the water like the malignant eye of a devil fish, the arrival of rescuing ships to sink them also?
Was the gracious refrain of "Peace on earth, good will among men,"
merely a mockery of man"s hope, making of his civilization a mere mirage? Will
"Caesar"s spirit ranging for revenge With Ate from his side come hot from h.e.l.l"--
forever crucify afresh and put to an open shame the gentle Galilean?
The angelic song of Bethlehem was neither the statement of a fact nor even a prophecy. In its true translation it was the statement of a profound moral truth, upon which in the last a.n.a.lysis the pacification of humanity must depend. The great promise was "Peace on earth _to men of good will_."
_Peace to the pacific_, that was the great message. For all others the great Teacher had but one prediction and that was "the distress of nations, ... men"s hearts failing them for fear." Until civilization can grasp the truth that there can be no peace until there is among all nations a spirit of conciliation and a common desire of justice, the cause of peace can be little more than a beautiful dream. Hague conventions, international tribunals, and agreements to arbitrate, while minimizing the causes of war and affording the machinery for the pacific adjustment of justiciable questions, will yet prove altogether ineffectual, irrespective of the size of the parchment, the imposing character of the seals, or the length of the red tape, unless the nations which execute them have sufficient loyalty to civilization to ask only that which seems just and to submit any disputable question to the pacific adjustment of an impartial tribunal.
I appreciate that some questions are not justiciable and cannot be arbitrated. The historic movements of races, like those of glaciers, cannot be stopped by mortal hands, and yet even these slow-moving ma.s.ses of ice are stayed by an Invisible Hand and melt at length into gentle and fructifying streams. To create the universal state and to develop a spirit of paramount loyalty to it affords the only solution of this seemingly insoluble problem.
History affords no more striking ill.u.s.tration of this fact than the present war. Each of the contending nations was pledged to peace. All of the greater ones were signatories to the Hague Convention, but as the chain can never be stronger than its weakest link, the pacific efforts of England, France, and Russia to adjust a purely justiciable question by negotiation and mediation wholly failed because Austria and Germany had determined to test the mastery of Europe by an appeal to the sword. The fundamental cause of the conflict was their lack of loyalty to civilization, due to a misguided and perverted spirit of excessive nationalism.
Until with the slow-moving progress of mankind the greater unit of the Universal State can be created, it should be the common and equal concern of all nations, not merely to defeat this primitive appeal to brute force but to make impossible the recurrence of such an iniquitous reversion to barbarism. To do this, while any nation unjustly appeals to force, force is unhappily necessary, but there would be few occasions to repel force by force if there were sufficient solidarity in mankind to make it the common concern of the civilized world to suppress promptly and effectually any disturber of its peace.
If the present wanton attack upon the very foundations of civilization had been regarded as the common concern of all nations, it would never have taken place and might never occur again. To prevent such recurrence, thoughtful men of all nations should cooperate, so that when the present t.i.tanic struggle is over, an earnest and universal effort can be made to create such a compact between the civilized nations as will insure cooperative effort when any nation attempts to apply the torch of war to the stately edifice of civilization. May not this great war prove the supreme travail of humanity, whereof this n.o.bler era will be born?
It should be the especial duty of the United States to lead in this onward movement. It has been in no small measure the liberator of mankind. Let it now be its pacificator! Can it do so in any better spirit than that voiced by one of the n.o.blest of its Presidents at the close of another gigantic conflict, of which he was to be the last and greatest martyr, when he said:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as G.o.d gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation"s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan; _and to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace_.