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Page 26
"They did their part. With adventurous faith they glorified their
cause and offered their fresh lives to make it good. Their sacrifice,
the idealism which lay behind it in their respective communities--the
unofficial perceptions that they, the fathers and mothers and the
boys, were fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over the
material factors of life--this has made an imperishable gift to the
new world and our children's lives. When an entire commuity rises to
something of magnanimity, and a nation identifies its fate with
the lot of weaker states, then even mutilation and death may be
gift-bringers to mankind.
"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood of
youth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dicker
for the material fruits of conquest. Not how to obtain peace but how
to exploit victory--to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from
the fallen foe--became their primary concern. So the youth appear to
have died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, for
the furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as against
that, for the seizing of the markets of the world. They supposed they
fought 'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find their
accredited representatives contemplating universal military service
in frank expectation of 'the next war.' They strove for the
'self-determination of peoples' but find that it was for some people,
but not all. And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has
recently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for
'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!'"[19]
[Footnote 19: _Can the Church Survive_? pp. 14 ff.]
Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determining as
distinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay a
commercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerful
minorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used the
machinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked and
brutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy?
Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the same
for all these small governing groups as they operated from behind the
various shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the
contending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the common
springs of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker,
ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they accept
the rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct.
They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social and
political establishment which, pretending to civilization, always
turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers to
physical force as the final arbiter.
It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalistic
principle still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled,
not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear to
be replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions are
being made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency
of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixed
and mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras and
as new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justice
is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and
practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is
the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding
around which life may order and maintain itself.
Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man
but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions
beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant
naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean
and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment
of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by
governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the
physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious
attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of
the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical
or political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universally
impotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The only
law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and
political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of
love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a
twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come now
and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of his
dreams," that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. For
this clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources of
civilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed and
appointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed
upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes have
happened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming the
embodiment of the state today.
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