WARLIKE AMERICA
IN a speech at Huntsville, Alabama, President McKinley said:
“We are not a military people. We are not dedicated to arms. We love peace, and the United States never goes to war except for peace, and only where it can have it in no other way. We have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation or for territory, but always for liberty and humanity, and in our recent war with Spain the people of the whole United States as one man marched with the flag for the honor of the nation, to relieve the oppressed people in Cuba.”
The American people are a singularly “cantankerous” people. True we are not “military,” but that was not what the president meant to affirm; he meant that we are not “warlike,” which is a very different thing. The Germans are military, the North American Indians are warlike. To be warlike is to be fond of war; to be military is to cultivate the arts and sciences of war, to make the artsof peace subservient to them, to maintain a powerful standing army, with armaments of high efficiency. A people may be both warlike and military, or it may be either and not the other. The distinction was evidently not in the president’s mind, for he said that we love peace, that we go to war only to assure it, and so forth. What are the facts?
There have been four generations of politically independent Americans. Each of the four fought a war of magnitude, not counting the small affairs and the “continuous performance” against the Indians. There were the war of 1812 against Great Britain, the war against Mexico, the war among ourselves, the war against Spain. We may say that all these were fought to assure peace, and that is true—peace on our terms. No war is undertaken for any other purpose. It was for that that Alexander invaded Asia and Hannibal Italy. It was for that that the Turks laid siege to Vienna. It was for that that Napoleon overran Europe.
It seems that “we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory;”we have the word of a president for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people, and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had “territorial aggrandizement” been the spirit of our purpose and the heart of our hope.
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations. They insist upon having their own way, and in dealing with vanquished enemies are without conscience. If it were not for the restraints that powerful European sovereigns are able to put upon their subjects, Europe would be a theater of continuous war. We lack that element of restraint. Happily we lack, also, many of the hereditary animosities that inflame the jealous peoples of the Old World; but whenthe fire is kindled it burns; there is nobody to quench it. We have always a hand upon the sword, and if we do not more frequently strike, it is because, in the first place, it is not much of a sword, and, in the second, the enemy is commonly out of reach. In our navy we have now a sword that is a trifle longer and stronger, but our army is still a dull and clumsy weapon.
In the future, as in the past, we shall have wars and enough of them—wars of honor, wars of conquest, wars of hatred and revenge. War has never found us ready. War has never found any modern nation ready, excepting Prussia, and her only once. If we will learn nothing by experience, let us try observation. Let us cease our hypocritical cant, rise from our dreams of peace and of the love of it, confess ourselves the warlike people that we are, and become the military people that we are not.
The notion that a standing army of whatever strength could be a “menace to American liberty” is one of the crudest and most discreditable of errors. It is an outgrowth ofignorance, and rooted in a false analogy. It assumes that the “common people” of the Old World monarchies are oppressed, discontented, ripe for revolt and republican government; that they are held in subjection by the powerful armies that serve their tyrants. Of course all this is mere moonshine, but if true it would hold no such lesson for us as we think we read in it, namely, that all armies are serviceable tools to tyrants and usurpers. A European army, recruited by conscription and officered by noblemen and the sons of relatives of noblemen, is an entirely different thing from what we have, and very different indeed from what we may have if we choose. The monarchical army sustains the monarchy, not because an army is naturally and necessarily monarchist, but because monarchy is the constitutional government; and armies, more generally than other human organizations, are faithful to duty and obedient to law. For the same reasons an American army will sustain the republic. Whenever a monarchical army hasnotsustained the monarchy—has assisted to overthrow it and set up a republic—then, indeed, have we been given a reason to distrust “the military”—of a monarchy.
An army of raw volunteers springing to thecolors to meet some unforeseen emergency is an inspiring spectacle, but that kind of army is good for nothing when pitted against trained and seasoned troops. Every military man knows this, although there are no large recent instances free from obscuring elements, like “the war of 1812.”
In European countries that have universal conscription the years that the young men pass in the army are the best spent years of their lives. Those who enter the service as ignorant peasant lads, brutally stupid, leave it well set up in body and mind—with better health, better morals and better intelligence. The American peasant is of course perfect in respect of all that, but perhaps his refining society would be of advantage to his officers.