TV
The Commoner
FEBRUARY, 1916
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America's invasion. But they tell us that if it
is not the Germans from Europe who are going
to invade us, it is certain to ho the Japanese.
The Japanese are one of the heaviest taxed
peoples in the world. They are still under the
burden of the debt left by their war with Russia.
More than thirty-five per cent of Japan's foreign
trade, by which alone she is able to keep alive,
is with America. The moment she declares war
on America that large proportion of her income
immediately ceases. With what Japan has re
cently done to Germany's Oriental possessions
still rankling in German hearts, and with the
Kaiser's remark, "That Germany never forgets"
cherished by his people as a profound piece of
statesmanship, in less than forty-eight hours
after Japan strikes at us it will occur to the
Germans that such will be a good time to settle
old scores with the island empire.
If Germany emerges from this war victorious
and able to fight anybody, and determined to
fight somebody, all tremendous "ifs," she will, in
all probability, first try smaller and more acces
sible nations close at home. The moment she
started for the United States she would not only
have on her hands the most powerful nation in
the world in potential resources, but all of her
present enemies besides.
America today has not only the protection of
her navy upon which she has spent billions of
dollars; of her virtually unlimited power as a
fighting nation were she attacked by a trans
oceanic enemy; has not only the protection of
vast seas about her, across which no nation
could bring an invading army without enormous
risks, but in addition to all these, because she
has kept out of the present world insanity, she
has half the world arrayed against the other
half, each side ready to attack the other that
first takes us on as an enemy. . Our guns, our
power, our distance from the base of the at
tacker's supplies our vast potential resources,
already enormously increased into actual re
sources by our engagement in the manufacture
of ammunition for the present European war,
plus all the resources of either side in Europe
which does not attack us, is not after all such a
deplorable defense as our military men who, for
public" consumption, dream nightmares day and
night tfnd profess to see the land swarmifrg with
victorious conquerors, would have us believe.
EVERY DAY THAT THE WAR LASTS EUROPE
GROWS RELATIVELY WEAKER
There is something else radically wrong with
tV reasoning powers of those who are howling
for more guns. They overlook the fact that while
Germany has spent forty years in preparing for
this war, that every day she engages in war she
is not only shattering her enemy's guns and sup
plies, she is using up her own supply of all that
constitutes her fighting efficiency. There have
been single battles around a single city in which
during one hour two hundred thousand high ex
plosives have been discharged from German guns
alone. And the fronts where the fighting is al
ways going on with more or less intensity,
stretch over a distance of many hundreds of
miles. The life of all vast guns which it takes
months to manufacture, is limited. A certain
number of discharges and the hellish things rack
themselves to pieces so that they are no longer
accurate. Our own Hudson Maxim has recently
shown that modern warfare is so exhausting on
ordinary rifles that each soldier must be supplied
with four in order to be certain that one shall al
ways be ready for action. Let this war go on
for months and months, as in all human prob
ability it will go on possibly for years and
German preparedness which. our people are being
so sedulously taught to fear, will be a thing
.greatly, decimated and attenuated compared to
what it-was when thenar began, not only tnjmen
and 'joaoney, as I shall presently show, but also
in 'all the ordinances of war Itself.
Every day that this war lasts, in
all that constitutes ultimate force efficiency,
Europe is growing rapidly weaker and we rela
tively stronger. The proud Europe that began
this war will in no wise resemble the Europe
thatvemerges irom it, any morethan a cripple
who -has been bled within an jnch of his life re
sembles an athlete in perfect health. It will be
a Europe covered with from five to ten millions
of new-made graves in which will lie the very
pick and flower of its military manhood. Do you
know what that means? Allowing for each body
two feet by six, so that literally corpse would be
touching corpse, to bury five million men would
take a trench forty-two feet wide that would
stretch from Chicago to St. Louis two hundred
and seventy-five miles forty-two feet wide of
solid dead bodies of tho picked physical manhood
of Europe, each one of them a year and a half
ago a living man with all the loves and hopes
and joys of life that belong to you and me.
Would that these dead bodies could bo gathered
together In one vast open grave where they
might lie in all their hideous mutilation, ghast
liness and stench, while around it were gathered.
all the Kaisers and war-lords, Bornhardis and
Homer Leas, and tho whole military tribe who
try to hide the, horrors of war under tho high
sounding names of glory and valor would that
all such could bo forced to march around that
grave and look and look; while their ears were
pierced by the wails of millions of women and
children robbed of their loved ones, until these
defenders of war were cured of their mental and
moral insanity that war is a necessary part of
every nation's life, that would make and keep
"a place in the sun."
CAN NOT RURY MH.LIONS OF SOLDIERS
AND STILL BE PREPARED
Do not tell me that Europe can bury five or
ten millions of her best trained soldiers and still
be prepared for conquest. But that is not all.
Besides these five or ton millions of dead men,
taken out of the world at just that period when
they are best fitted to pay back sorao equivalent
for the infinite pains of their rearing, Europo
will have to provide for tho care and support of
an equal number of millions of living cripples
poor, handless, armless, legless, maimed, blind
and mentally deranged (no war in history has
produced anything like the insanity as this one)
creatures who have been rendered absolutely un
fit for military services and economically ineffi
cient for life by the fires of hell through which
they have been passed. These helpless men
Europe must provide for. Allowing one dollar
per day as the average earning power of these
five millions of men who were slain, and fifty
cents a day as the earning power of the cripples,
in the next thirty years Europo will be just
ninety billions of dollars poorer for having
slaughtered and maimed these victims.
But that is not all. Besides these hosts of
dead and cripples, there will be the millions of
widows left to be the solo support of from five
to ten millions of helpless little half orphan
children who are to struggle for a bare existence
in an economic order swamped in debt and more
frightfully disarranged than any that complex
modern civilization has ever witnessed. Tho
war itself is inconceivably horrible; but the re
construction period is to witness for years to
come, a silent human misery which will rival
in its torments the fiercest of the battlefields.
To one with Christian sympathies and imagin
ation, the condition of Europe's poor, even be
fore this holocaust, was little less than tragic.
What will this be for the survivors of this deluge
of blood? The soldiers died amid the excite
ment of battle and their agonies were soon over.
But what human mind can conceive the bitter
ness of life to these millions of widows and
children pinched by slow but certain starvation,
as they cry for bread, and finally lie down to
die in festering heaps amid the universal ruin
wrought by war? Men who measure the after
effects of this war by other wars of the past,
forget that the last half century has witnessed
the enormous growth of city life, and complex
industrial interdependence. After other wars most
of the people were on the soil where they could
dig at least a subsistence out of the ground.
But today a vast part of Europe's population Is
in great industrial centers where literally the
daily bread depends upon the uninterrupted play
of industrial and economic forces. Only those
of us wJio have witnessed at close hand the mis
ery of large elements in the industrial workers
of a great tiity during the time of a panic can
begin to conceive of the unutterable horrors
which are before the laboring people of a con
tinent which has destroyed its bread winners,
wiped out billions of its productive property and
spent all its free capital for the work of murder.
But what we have seen of human misery for the
laboring people in our great American cities in
time of non-employment was but a gentle zephyr
to a cyclone, compared to the inevitable miseries
and agonies which are going to fall like moun
tains upon the city population of Europe's indus
trial centers during the first years of reconstruc
tion following this continual suicide. Here is a
part of that infinite madness which beggars all
calculation. As certain as tomorrow's sun
shines, out of this struggle of the common people
who" are left in Europe there are going to grow
revolutions on such a scale and so irresistible
that the minds still haunted, after this war is
over, with Insane dreams of military ambition,
will be kept busy at home for a long time to
come.
Tho world will have never seen such suffering
and want to be ministered unto In the name of
the merciful God, as will bo found In Europo
during the first decade following the close of tho
present war. If that Is true, and the words of
Jesus Christ concerning human brotherhood
mean anything whatever to us, wo are forced to
the conclusion that If there ever was a time
when It was not only unnecessary and unwise,
but positively criminal for a great nation to bo
thinking supremely of arms, and talking pre
paredness, such Is tho time with America today.
What an Indictment of the feebleness and lit
tleness of our own Christian spirit lies in this
awful fact, that at a time when all tho people
from whose loins we sprung, and from whom wc
have received our religion, our art and all tho
groat constructive Ideas of our civilization, all
that has made us what we are when these to
whom wo are close akin In blood and ideals and
religion are dying by tho millions and being
plunged Irresistibly forward Into vast hells of
universal misery and death, that the mind of
America should bo excited over nothing but get
ting ready to fight those who are left. Surely
if there is a father in Heaven, who In any degree
resembles the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, He
sorrows not more over Europe's tragedy than He
does over America's threatened apostasy, whop,
in such an hour as this In the world, markets
and stocks and trade, and battleships and guns
and soldiers and "preparedness" interest us a
thousand times more than anything that Jesus ;
Christ ever said. Call me a lunatic if you will,
a fool, a freak, a molly-coddle, a coward, a
knave, I can not but hold that Jesus Christ's
ideal of the Kingdom of a God on earth among
men where men bear to one another brotherly
relations, Is something as much more worth dy
ing for than a nation, as the British Empire is
vaster than an African tribe. And if it Is good
and heroic and right for men to spend all, even
life itself for patriotism; it is infinitely more
good and righteous for Christians to risk some
thing, yes, all, In the effort to establish some sort
of a world-order in which men of different na
tions may not be set to blowing off each other's
heads every time some Intriguing fool upon a
throne can get his hand on a hair trigger. '
SHOULD PREPARE TO MINISTER TO THE
DISTRESSES OF EUROPE
Would that America today were not under
the domination of minds who see nothing in hu
man nature but that which is responsive to fear!
Would that we really were a Christian people.
Would that once again we could believe in the
common people as our fore-fathers believed when
they founded a republic which was "of the peo
ple, for the people and by the people." Would
that at this hour in the light of the world's mis
cry, our nation could be led as one people, not
by the priests of Baal, but by the mind of Christ,
and the God in whom we .irofess to trust, to do
for once in the world a great Christian thing. If
America has two billions of dollars to take from
productive industry in the next decade, let her
not put it into things which will inevitably be
used by the military minds of all other nations
as an excuse, and as a self-evident reason why
they too, should proceed to get more heavily
prepared; let her not put it into things which
must, in the very nature of things, be used to
help blow the fires of hate and fear and sus
picion around the whole earth; into things which
thereby may bring on other wars, or, if no wars '
come, can do no human being any earthly good.-'
If we were a Christian people at this very hour,
congress, instead of being beseeched by a great
daily press And by thousands of excited- citizens
over the question of billions for preparedness,
would be pressed by millions of Americans de
manding that as a nation wo be prepared to min-'
ister generously to all the distress of the Euro
pean world. The money spent to help the Bel
gians in their hour of supreme need has more
completely disarmed Belgian animosity towards
us. than all the power of German arms could
ever do. ' f
While this generation lasts, the man in Bel
gium who would propose evil for America would
be looked upon by his countrymen as nothinr
less than a moral monster. What has done this
wonderful thing? Christian kindness, charity,
and a living sense of human brotherhood. By
the time this war has ended all Europe will be in
a state of ruin and misery, want and exhaustion
rivaling that of Belgium. If we could take that
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