Topics of the Time
TACTICS THAT THE FRIENDS OF PEACE MAY LEARN FROM THE MILITARISTS
THROUGH Matthew Arnold we have been made familiar with one of the figures clearly limned by Clarendon. It is that of Falkland, whose humane spirit and love of peace made the casting of his lot in the time of the civil war in England seem peculiarly tragic. Often in the course of that bitter and bloody conflict he was heard to “ingeminate” the word “peace.”
A similar feeling of grief and frustration in the presence of war is one of the distinguishing marks of our own day. The best and wisest in the world hold peace congresses and conferences on arbitration (as they are to do soon in St. Louis), and seem to gain painful inches only to have all their efforts made apparently vain by some inrush of the war spirit. The Hague Tribunal is founded and The Hague agreement solemnly entered into, but that does not prevent one of the covenanting nations from seizing another’s land by the sword. Projects for universal arbitration are mooted, amid the applause of Christendom, and plans for the judicial settlement of international disputes are ripening, at the very time when tens of thousands of men are about to be killed in battle.
So it is that peace seems to be to the civilized world only an unattainable longing. We think of war to-day, in the Scripture phrase, with groanings that cannot be uttered. Never so hated, it sometimes appears as if it were never so fated.
It is well for peace-lovers now and then to put the case thus strongly, in order that they may face the difficulty at its darkest. The fact that the evil they struggle against is persistent is but one argument more for their own persistence. Pacifists must be as ready and resourceful as the militarists. If ever it is right to learn from an enemy, it surely is in this instance. Something has been gained in this way. The late William James, for example, contended that we must admit that there are some good, human weapons in the hands of the war party, and that the peace men must study, not only how to appreciate them, but how to use them. Professor James would have sought in peaceful pursuits the equivalents of the appeal which war makes to certain manly qualities. Heroism in private life, in scientific pursuits, in exploration, in reform—this is what he urged. The patriotic impulse transmuted into great engineering works, vast plans for sanitation, campaigns against disease and misery—that is what peace can offer to ardent youth. All this is sound, and good as far as it goes; but the question arises to-day whether there is not need of something more positive and aggressive, whether the spirit of militarism cannot be turned against itself; whether, in a word, there should not be war against war.
The conduct of a military campaign calls for an enormous amount of preparation and organization. Let the advocates of peace take this to heart. They cannot win simply by wishing to win. It is for them, too, to be far-sighted, to lay careful plans, to enlist every modern method of working in unison to a definite end. War mobilizes men. Peace must muster ideas, sentiments, influences. In theKriegspielthe strategist seeks to mass his troops upon the enemy’s weakest point. The tactics of peace should be similar. Argument and persuasion and appeal should be made to converge upon the exposed flank of the militarists. This may be found, at one moment, in the pressure of taxation, which needlessly swollen armaments would make unbearable. At another time, it may appear that the thing to hammer upon is the pressing need of social reforms, even attention to which will be endangered if all the available money and time are squandered upon preparing for a war that may never come. Let peace, too,acquire a General Staff, whose duty it shall be to survey the whole field, to work out fruitful campaigns, to tell us where to strike and how, to lay down the principles of the grand strategy to be followed.
Nor need individual effort be ruled out. Despite the large and coördinated movements of soldiers in a modern battle, there yet remains room for personal initiative and daring. The shining moment comes when some one in the ranks or in command is called upon to risk all with the possibility of gaining all. And there are still “forlorn hopes” to be led. Why should not these methods and appeals of war be imitated by those who are fighting for peace? They can point to many services calling for volunteers. There is ridicule to be faced, unpopular opinion to be stood up for calmly in the teeth of opposition and even scorn, testimony to be borne, questions to be asked, protests to be made. There is, in short, every opportunity to import from war the heroic element and give it scope and effect in the propaganda of peace. The very wrath of man can be made to praise the growth of civilization.
War against war can be made very concrete and practical. Committees can be formed to watch the military authorities and Congress, and to elicit an expression of opinion when it will be most useful. It is a matter of frequent lamenting on the part of peace men in the House of Representatives that their hands are so feebly held up by the opponents of war. The other side is alert and active. When big-navy or big-army bills are pending, the mail of congressmen is loaded with requests—usually, of course, interested requests—to vote for them. The lovers of peace, on the other hand, appear to be smitten with writer’s cramp. They act as if they were indifferent. This state of things should not be permitted to go on. There should be minute-men of the cause all over the land ready to spring into action. That a sound opinion of the country exists, only needing concerted effort to call it forth, has been shown again and again. It was proved at the time when President Taft’s treaties of universal arbitration were pending in the Senate. In those days the desire of the best people of the United States came to Washington like the sound of the voice of many waters. Schools and colleges, chambers of commerce and churches, sent in petition piled on petition, and remonstrance heaped on protest. One of the senators who opposed ratification admitted to the President that he had never had so formidable a pressure from his own State as on this question.
That lesson should not be lost. By organization, by watchfulness, by determination, the peace spirit of the land can be given much more effective expression than it has yet had. The situation is not at all one that justifies discouragement; it simply calls for fresh and more intelligent action, with heightened resolution. If only the genius of a Von Moltke could be devoted to organizing and directing the forces that make against war, we might reasonably hope for a realization of the poet’s vision of peace lying like level shafts of light across the land.
WITH THE RENEWED SUGGESTION OF A WIDE-REACHING PROJECT OF FLOOD-MITIGATION
ONE cannot read of the recent disastrous overflow of the rivers of the Ohio Valley watershed without a sinking of the heart, to think how near is happiness to grief. That thousands, apparently through no fault of their own, should be overwhelmed by the relentless powers of nature, takes us back to a pagan conception of the universe, until we begin to sum up the unpagan-like solidarity in the sympathy of mankind, the touch of human nature that makes the whole world kin. Senator Root recently said that “the progress of civilization is marked by the destruction of isolation,” meaning, of course, by the drawing together of men through common ideas, interests, and even sorrows. It is no perfunctory thought that out of such calamities come many of the heroisms, the sacrifices, the lightning-like-flashes of spiritual revelation that ennoble humanity.
With becoming awe at what seems to have been unpreventable, it is sadly appropriate to inquire what might have been done in past years to lessen the recurrent tragedy of the western floods. To be sure, one cannot by a gesture bid the tempest stand, but nothing is more demonstrable than that the greed and neglect of man have greatly contributed to the destructiveness of floods. The devastation of the ax leads direct to the devastation of the waters. The excessive deforesting of Ohio and Indiana for a hundred years is no illusory or negligible factor in the crisis of death and desolation that has fallen upon those States.
In this magazine for August, 1912, in an article entitled “A Duty of the South to Itself,” written apropos of the Mississippi floods of last year, we renewed a suggestion which we first made in 1904 and have since several times repeated, looking toward the mitigation of the annual peril to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It presented the urgent necessity of setting on foot a policy of coöperation among the Eastern States to save from destruction the flood-restraining upper reaches of the entire Appalachian range. As a matter of public interest, this article was sent to all senators and members of Congress, to the Southern and other newspapers, and to the governors and Chambers of Commerce in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Although the suggestion was in the plainest conformity with scientific opinion, it apparently fell upon deaf ears. The imagination of no governor or legislator has been roused to the point of action. After we have reckoned up the cost of the recent floods in lives and money, shall we lie down again to pleasant dreams, oblivious of the fact that to sow neglect is to reap calamity?
NON-PARTIZAN QUESTIONS ON WHICH PRESIDENT WILSON BEGINS WELL
HE is a poor patriot who can wish a new administration anything but success—at least in policies unrelated to party differences—and it is creditable to the American people that the new President enters upon his difficult task amid general good-will. His lack of previous acquaintance with “the way the thing is done” in Washington, though it excited the apprehension of some of his warmest friends, proves to be a positive advantage. If precedents are broken they are not his, and sometimes the breaking is done with a naïveté just this side of innocence, as in the discountenancing of the time-honored but expensive and meaningless inaugural ball. The President evidently realizes his responsibilities and the conventional obstacles that must be cleared out of his path if he is to accomplish much for the good of the country. The idealism of his inaugural address, with its appeal for the coöperation of “honest, patriotic, and forward-looking men,” is already being supplemented by practical action so fraught with “saving common sense” as to seem revolutionary.
Seen in the retrospect, what could be done more wise or simple than the shunting of the office-seekers to the heads of departments? What more useful or self-respecting than the announced policy of disapproval of legislation carrying “riders”—of which, by the way, a flagrant example is found in the Panama tolls exemption, to which both the President and the Vice-President have announced their opposition? What more direct or reassuring than the kindly words of warning to Central American revolutionists? What more prompt than the announcement through the Secretary of State that the United States cannot ignore its responsibilities toward Cuba? or, again, through the Postmaster-General, that there is to be no wholesale looting of the offices, with the object-lesson of the retention or promotion of several public servants of marked efficiency? or, still again, the immediate action through the Secretary of War and the Attorney-General toward the safeguarding of the public interests in Niagara Falls? What more prudent than the disentanglement of our relations in the Far East from financial loans to China? These events, occurring in the first fortnight of the administration, display a point of view of government as an instrument of public service which, though it may do violence to traditions, makes thoughtful citizens exclaim, “Why not?”
It is not to be expected that we are to have another Era of Good Feeling, or that, when questions of party policy arise, Mr. Wilson’s opponents will yield their convictions. He cannot fail to meet with many a storm, within and without party lines; but he will do much to advance his ideas if he shall preserve the poise of direct and unsophisticated common sense which he has shown at the beginning.
THE EXPLOITATION OF WHIMSICALITY AS A PRINCIPLE
THE recent admirably arranged exhibition in New York made by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and including a full representation of the work of the Cubists and the Post-Impressionists, has proved in one respect a veritable success, namely, in point of attendance. If not, as one critic puts it, asuccès de scandale, it has been asuccès de curiosité. It contained pieces of historic work of great beauty by eminent painters of France and America—Ingres, Daumier, Puvis de Chavannes, Childe Hassam, Alden Weir, and others, but no great point was made of their inclusion and they were not the attraction for the crowds. What drew the curious were certain widely talked-of eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madnesses, by which, while a few were nonplussed, most of the spectators were vastly amused.
At the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design, which followed, one unaccustomed visitor was heard to say to another, “Oh, come on, Bill, there’s nothing to laugh at here.” It will be impossible to repeat the Parisian sensation another season; and, happily, the eccentricities have served to awaken a new interest in genuine types of art, both in and out of their own exhibition, and have furnished that element of contrast which is useful if not essential in the formation of a robust taste.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of the young and unthinking, it is well to keep on inculcating the fact that while art is not a formula, nor even a school, it is subject, whether in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, or music, to certain general principles tending to harmony, clarity, beauty, and the stimulus of the imagination. A fundamental error is that its laws are hampering, the fact being that it is only as one learns them that he can acquire the freedom of individual expression. The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, uglinesses, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is to society, and the practitioners need not so much a critic as an alienist. It is said that a well-known Russian musician has begun a new composition with (so to speak) a keynote of discord involving the entire musical scale, as a child might lay his hand sidewise upon all the notes of the piano it can cover. A counterpart of this could have been found in more than one ward of the recent exhibition. One can fancy the laughter over the absinthe in many a Latin Quarter café of those who are not mentally awry, but are merely imitators, poseurs, or charlatans, at learning that their monstrosities, which have exhausted the interest of Paris, have been seriously considered by some American observers. They have only been trying to see how far they could go in fooling the public. But he laughs best who laughs last, and we believe that Americans have too much sense of humor not to see the point of this colossal joke of eccentricity, or to endure its repetition.
THE COMMERCIALIZING OF GREAT SCENERY
ONE need not be afraid of exaggerating the peril to the beauty of Niagara in allowing its waters to be used for commercial purposes when a man of such moderation and public esteem as Senator Burton of Ohio says, as he did in the Senate on the fourth of March:
I want to say, Mr. President, that in all my experience in either house of Congress I have never known such an aggregation of persons to come here seeking to rob and to despoil as those who have come here after this power. If there is any one who wishes them to succeed he must answer to the country for it. They not only desired the water above the Falls, but they now desire to withdraw the waters below in the rapids, which are second in beauty only to the Falls themselves. Persons have come here under the guise of public spirit, or even of philanthropy, when it was but a thin veil to conceal a scheme to get possession of the waters of the Niagara River. We ask that for a year this law be continued to stay the hand of the despoiler.
I want to say, Mr. President, that in all my experience in either house of Congress I have never known such an aggregation of persons to come here seeking to rob and to despoil as those who have come here after this power. If there is any one who wishes them to succeed he must answer to the country for it. They not only desired the water above the Falls, but they now desire to withdraw the waters below in the rapids, which are second in beauty only to the Falls themselves. Persons have come here under the guise of public spirit, or even of philanthropy, when it was but a thin veil to conceal a scheme to get possession of the waters of the Niagara River. We ask that for a year this law be continued to stay the hand of the despoiler.
The law referred to was the Burton Act under which for three years the assaults of the commercial interests have been stayed. Even with a concession to the companies of 250,000 horse-power instead of 160,000, Mr. Burton, owing to a filibuster by Senator O’Gorman, was not able to secure the desired extension, and the Falls seem to be at the mercy of those who are interested in turning great scenery into dividends. We are much mistaken if the new administration does not find some way of thwarting this form of vandalism. Meanwhile it is well that public opinion should be directed upon senators and representatives.
Of the damage that has already been done Senator Burton says: “... The ruthless hand of the promoter has been laid upon this river; and thus the cataract has been diminished in size and the scenic effect has been impaired not only by diminishing the flow and the quantity of the water, but by structures on the banks.” A question of jurisdiction has been raised as between the State of New York and the National Government, though the river as a boundary line has long been the subject of an international treaty. The fact that the taking of water for commercial purposes whether on the Canadian or the American side has virtually the same effect on the river makes joint action of the two countries imperative.
The willingness to destroy or impair great scenery by commercializing it, whether at Niagara or in the Yosemite National Park, makes it necessary that the fight for our natural treasures should be kept up with vigilance. Happily, the good judgment of the late Secretary of the Interior, Warren L. Fisher, has blocked the attempt of the city of San Francisco to destroy the wonderful Hetch Hetchy valley by converting it into a reservoir of water for drinking and power purposes,—which confessedly can be had elsewhere in the Sierra “by paying for it,”—the Secretary wisely holding that such a diversion of the valley from the original purpose of its reservation is too important a matter to be determined by any power but Congress. Three Secretaries of the Interior—Hitchcock, Ballinger, and Fisher—are thus on record against the ruthless project of the city authorities, and we believe it will not be more successful with Secretary Lane. Should its advocates go to Congress, it must be remembered that the same principle underlies the defense of Niagara and of Hetch Hetchy—the conservation of great scenery for the ultimate benefit of mankind.