"It is nonsense to talk of any great war in which this country will ever be engaged," said a wise and experienced public man to me one day, in discussing our future. "There is no place in the world for distinguished service by an American soldier. He can wear his uniform; he can study his tactics; he can be a warrior of the ball-room; but, after all, he is only a kind of policeman."
This conversation occurred some years ago. The fallacy of this conservative (shall we not say short-sighted, for sometimes they are mistaken for one another) man"s conclusion has been revealed by recent events. And these events are only an index of similar possibilities.
Not that we want war; not that it is desirable; not that it should not be avoided, if possible; but that the movement of the p.a.w.ns by Events on the great chess-board of the world and history may force us to war, no matter how unwillingly.
It may be that in the ultimate outcome, to use a double superlative, "a parliament of man and federation of the world" will be established which shall divide and distribute commerce as railroads are now said to agree on division of business and equality of rates.
But before such a n.o.ble condition arises there will surely be vast and destructive conflicts, unless the temper, nature, and att.i.tude of men and nations change; and, if they do occur, no one but a fanatic of reaction imagines for one instant that we shall be able to keep out of them.
So that not all the battles have been fought, not all the strategy thought out. And if you are a soldier and mean business, you need not despair of the possibility of winning one of the highest of honors given man to win--the honor of fighting for your country and of dying for your flag.
The Russo-j.a.panese War has demonstrated that military science is as much more complex and difficult to-day than during our Civil War, as it was then more complicated than in the time of battle-ax and lance.
The recent conflict in Asia shows that it is as important to get wounded men cured and back on the firing line as it is to punish the other side. A nation that would now enter into armed conflict without a general staff or some similar body of men would be hurling its soldiers, however brave, to certain death.
And yet Von Moltke, Germany"s greatest captain, originated the modern general staff; and the United States, with all of our American progressiveness, had no general staff at all until Secretary Root prevailed upon Congress to provide one. These general staffs plan, during the long years of peace, every possible conflict. They map out with absolute accuracy every imaginable field of operations in the country of every possible enemy; they equip the general in the field with information on all subjects, perfect to the smallest detail.
j.a.pan"s general staff has been preparing day and night for the present war for every month of every year of an entire decade. Oyama"s victories were ripening in the brain of this modern Attila for ten long years. Von Moltke had thought out the conquest of France years before fate blew the trumpet that set the tremendous enginery of his plans in motion. Yes, but these men kept thinking, thinking.
n.o.body heard _them_ saying that all great wars had been fought.
Perhaps they did not know whether all wars had been fought or not; but they knew this: That if any future wars were to be fought, those wars would be bigger than any conflict that had gone before, and that their armies would have to be handled with greater precision, and their tactics would have to be more daring than even those of Napoleon, or Hannibal, or Caesar.
Very well, the Franco-Prussian War did come. The Russo-j.a.panese War did come. And when the time for these dread duels between peoples arrived, those men were in the saddle. Battles whose red desperation have made the world"s historic combats look small, have within a year taught all men that the art of war requires as much original thinking as it did when the Corsican overwhelmed the muddled military minds of Europe, weakened and palsied by the belief that nothing more was to be learned in warfare.
Manchuria"s awful lesson teaches you, young man, that the profession of arms, dreadful as it is honorable, holds out to you all the possibilities by which every great captain of history made his name immortal.
"I think the statesmanship of Joseph Chamberlain is the most comprehensive and instructive since that of Bismarck," said a pa.s.senger on an ocean steamer to an Englishman of considerable distinction in the world of letters.
"I fail to see the statesmanship," said the latter; "will you kindly point it out?"
"Why," said the admirer of Chamberlain, "the British Empire needed unifying; it needed to be bound together by ties of sentiment, by all those means which consolidate a nation. Its connections were too loose. Chamberlain has, by the Boer War, begun its unification.
Canadians have fallen on the same field with England"s soldiers.
"Australians have poured out their blood as a common sacrifice for England"s flag. The empire has been knit together by a common heroism, a common sacrifice, a common glory, and a common cause. It should not be hard to induce all portions of the empire to unite on a great scheme of parliamentary representation. I call that great statesmanship."
"Yes, indeed it is," said the English litterateur, "but Joseph Chamberlain never had such a thought."
The point of the conversation is that, whether Mr. Chamberlain had this thought or not, the _materials for the thought existed_. The conditions for this really constructive statesmanship were there. They awaited the hand of the master. Conditions of equal magnitude exist in half-a-dozen places in the world. Russian development of Siberia and seizure of Manchuria are one.
It had for several years appeared to me that Manchuria was the point about which the international politics of the world would swirl for the next quarter of a century. So certain did this seem, that I hastened to this great future battle-field in the year 1901; and while the diplomats of all the nations, including our own, scoffed at the possibilities of war between Russia and j.a.pan, the certainty of that mighty contest could be read in the very stars that shone above Manchuria, in the very j.a.panese barracks, on every j.a.panese drill-ground.
Settlement of this tremendous dispute will call for larger statesmanship than the world has seen for half a century. The movements of all the powers at the present crisis, and, indeed, their entire Oriental policy, are of the most solemn concern to the Republic not only for the immediate moment, but even more for the future.
This is especially true of j.a.pan; for, with cheap labor, rare apt.i.tude for manufacture, and propinquity of position, the Island Empire now becomes the most formidable compet.i.tor for the trade of China.
And China is the only--or at least the richest--unexploited market where American factories and farms can, in the future, dispose of their acc.u.mulating surplus. England almost monopolized China"s coast markets until, recently, Germany began rapidly to overhaul her. But j.a.pan will, in the near future, distance both. American interests in the Far East are vital even now; and they are only in their beginning.
We cannot longer be indifferent to any statesmanship that involves the commercial development of Asia. Solution of the great problems which the Russo-j.a.panese war has stated, and the resultant steps thereafter taken, are of keenest interest, and may be of most serious import, to the American people.
It is very possible, as I pointed out in "The Russian Advance," that j.a.pan will attempt the reorganization of China. Indeed, that development is quite probable. That is certainly j.a.pan"s plan and ideal. Any one of a half dozen courses may be adopted. And, I repeat it, any one of them may present the gravest of situations to American statesmanship. As I write it is quite sure that Russia is beaten on the field. Think now, young man, of the immensity of the statesmanship required right now, _which five years ago everybody would have declared impossible and absurd_.
Especially will j.a.panese dominance of the Orient, military and commercial, upon which j.a.pan is determined, bring us Americans face to face with a new set of conditions, requiring the highest order of careful thought, the clearest, firmest announcement of national policy. Do not fear, young man, lest all of this be over before the time has come for you to play your part on the stage of human affairs.
The new problems which the whole Orient will propose to the entire world, and particularly to America, will last for a century at least.
Indeed, it is probable that our relations with the East will become and remain one of the leading subjects of American statesmanship as long as the Republic endures. For that matter, you may go further, and say that the great human question of modern times is the meeting face to face of Oriental and Occidental ideals, of the white and yellow theory of life and morals, and the gradual destruction of one by the other, or their mutual modification and adjustment.
But we are getting into deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow"s national and world problems will be deeper still?
There are three or four great international questions for this Republic to solve on this Western hemisphere, the working out of any one of which means immortality for the statesman who does it.
Of course, the great industrial and sociological questions are the profoundest of all. The world has been at work on these since men arranged themselves into organized society. But the incredibly swift evolution of modern business itself seems to be hastening the time when some satisfactory solution of these master problems must at least be begun.
So that, if you really have the material of a statesman in you--the stuff that thinks out the answer to great questions--there is a field before you compared with which the opportunities of Hamilton and Washington and Jefferson almost seem small, leviathan as those opportunities were and masterfully as those great men improved them.
The editor of one of our big modern newspapers gave it to me as his opinion that the art of producing a newspaper is as much in its infancy as is the science of electricity. "The yellow journal," said he, "is an evolution, just as trusts in their deeper significance are an evolution. We have had the didactic editor; he did his work and has pa.s.sed away. We are now having the editor who deals with facts--"cold facts," as d.i.c.kens would say--but, in his turn, he is only a part of the general evolution. There is not an editor in this country, no matter what his own views may be as to his own paper, who does not know, and in his heart admit, that the ideal paper is yet to be produced."
Excellent and even wonderful as the public press of to-day is, the above is the opinion held by the great ma.s.s of men; and it is the correct opinion. I mean what I say when I use the words "excellent and wonderful" as applied to newspapers. To me the newspaper is a daily astonishment. What we are all in search of is fresh and vital thought and suggestion; and no one can acquire the _art_ of newspaper reading without getting, each day, one or many new points of view on the world and its great human currents.
Each one of our metropolitan papers is at enormous outlay to get strong, capable men--young men with new minds and old men with wise minds. It is simply out of the question for these men, working together, to bring forth a product that does not have in it some remarkable thing--some new point of view, some fact which your most careful research has not disclosed to you.
I remember an instance in my own experience. There was a subject to which I had given some years of off-and-on study. I felt that at least the facts had been acc.u.mulated. All that remained was to deduce the truth from these facts. But an editorial on this subject in a notable daily paper brought out a salient fact which none of the books had mentioned, and yet which, when one"s attention was called to it, was so apparent that it really ought to have suggested itself. Yet all the speeches of the specialists on this subject, and all of the volumes, had failed to note it.
Some vigorous young mind on that paper had discovered it in studying the elementary factors of the problem itself. But this is digression.
I am simply calling your attention to the fact that there are opportunities for you to be greater in the world of journalism than Greeley, or Raymond, or Bennett, or Bowles, or Dana, or any of the extraordinary men that have illumined the whole science of journalism by their intellect, accomplishments, and character.
Electricity is a mysterious force which excites not only all the speculation but all the mysticism in man. I contemplate its manifestations--equally deadly and vital--with feelings of wonder and awe. I always search for an electrician and listen to his stories of the mysterious power with which he deals. One of the greatest of them said to me last year:
"No, we really know nothing about it, after all. We have managed to do a great many things with it. We have learned some of its properties, but it holds fast its inner secrets. The great universe of electrical discovery has hardly been entered." But electricity is not the only modern mystery.
Take photography, that wizard-like science. The man who, fifty years ago, would have predicted the moving picture which has already become commonplace to us, would have been rejected as a madman.
Tele-photography is almost as remarkable as the moving picture.
Color-photography will yet be reduced to perfection. The chemists are constantly astounding us with suggestions so remarkable that they are weird.
Luther Burbank creating new species of plant life, Max Standfuss doing the like with insects, make the Arabian Nights commonplace and dull.
Think of the Roentgen rays! Think of the achievement of the wonderful young Italian! Marconi"s invention seems uncanny, so impossible does it appear even when you watch his magic instrument at work.
In the laboratories of Europe and America investigations are this very moment being made into Nature"s securest secrets. The mystery of to-day will be to-morrow"s accepted and commonplace truth. One seizes one"s head and closes one"s eyes in bewilderment at the possibilities of science in every direction.
All the great inventions, all the great discoveries, made! How like the egotism of the infinitesimal mind of the human race that thought this!
If all the great inventions and discoveries have been made, man has already mastered all of the laws of G.o.d"s universe, and applied them practically to all conditions and substances in existence. How absurd!
The field of invention and scientific discovery is like that strange and awful manifestation known as the "Milky Way." We see it with our naked eye--numberless stars and a pale, growing blur around and behind them, and we childishly call it the "Milky Way."
That miracle called the telescope is invented; we look again, and there are more and new stars--but, still farther on in the infinite depths, the blur of light. Higher and higher goes the power of telescope after telescope, but all that they reveal is a bewildering infinitude of more new stars--and beyond that again the "Milky Way."
This is an old and commonplace ill.u.s.tration, I know very well; but it exactly represents the possibilities of new and vast inventions, of strange and priceless discoveries, wherever you turn your eye.
The only question is whether you have the _eye_. The conditions are there to be discovered--_begging_ for discovery. If you have vision and do not produce a great invention, the fault is not in the universe about you. Of course, if you haven"t vision, do not attempt it. Darius Green and his flying machine are ridiculous always.
What I have said of invention, war, statesmanship, literature, journalism, and the law, may be applied to every conceivable field of human thought. I merely wish to impress upon the great ma.s.s of young Americans that not only have all the great things not been done, but that the greatest of great things are yet to come.