Fear God and take your own part

Front matter

tilB»ER\ED,

atljaca. Jfew ^nrk

El on H,. Hooker, C.U. '94.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Julia Ward Howe

because in the vital matters fundamentally affecting the life of the Republic, she was as good a citizen of the Republic as Washington and Lincoln themselves. She was in the highest sense a good wife and a good mother; and therefore she fulfilled the primary law of our being. She brought up with devoted care and wisdom her sons and her daughters. At the same time she fulfilled her full duty to the commonwealth from the public standpoint. She preached righteotisness and she practised righteousness. She sought the peace that comes as the handmaiden of well doing. She preached that stern and lofty courage of soul which shrinks neither from war nor from any other form of suffering and hardship and danger if it is only thereby that justice can be served. She embodied that trait more essential than any other in the make-up of the men and women of this Republic — the valor of righteousness.

Contents

PAQB

Dedication ....... v

Battle Hymn of the Republic . . . vii Introductory Note ix

Chapter I

ttAS. GOD AND TAKE YOUR OWN PART

READERS of Borrow will recognize in the heading of this chapter, which I have also chosen for the title of the book, a phrase used by the heroine of Lavengro.

Fear God ; and take your own part ! Eear God, in the true sense of the word, means love God, respect God, honor God ; and all of this can only be done by loving our neighbor, treating him justly and mercifully, and in all ways endeavoring to protect him from injustice and cruelty; thus obeying, as far as our human frailty will permit, the great and immutable law of righteousness.

We fear God when we do justice to and demand justice for the men within our own borders. We are false to the teachings of righteousness if we do not do such justice and demand such justice. We must do it to the weak, and we must do it to the strong. We do not fear God if we show mean envy and hatred of those who are better ofif than we are; and still less do we fear God if we show a base arrogance towards and selfish lack of consideration for those who are less well off. We must apply the same standard of conduct alike to man and to woman, to rich man and to poor man, to employer and employee. We must organize our social and industrial life so as to secure a reasonable equality of opportunity for all men to show the stuff that is in them, and a reasonable division among those engaged in industrial work of the reward for that industrial work, a division which shall take into account all the qualities that contribute to the necessary success. We must demand honesty, justice, mercy, truthfulness, in our dealings with one another within our own borders. Outside of our own borders we must treat other nations as we would wish to be treated in return, judging each in any given crisis as we ourselves ought to be judged — that is, by our conduct in that crisis. If they do ill, we show that we fear God when we sternly bear testimony against them and oppose them in any way and to whatever extent the needs require. If they do well, we must not wrong them ourselves. Finally, if we are really devoted to a lofty ideal we must

i6 in so far as our strength permits aid them if they are wronged by others. When we sit idly by while Belgium is being overwhelmed, and rolling up our eyes prattle with unctuous self-righteousness about "the duty of neutrality," we show that we do not really fear God ; on the contrary, we show an odious fear of the devil, and a mean readiness to serve him.

But in addition to fearing God, it is necessary that we should be able and ready to take our own part. The man who cannot take his own part is a nuisance in the community, a source of weakness, an encouragement to wrongdoers and an added burden to the men who wish to do what is right. If he cannot take his own part, then somebody else has to take it for him; and this means that his weakness and cowardice and inefficiency place an added burden on some other man and make that other man's strength by just so much of less avail to the community as a whole. No man can take the part of any one else unless he is able to take his own part. This is just as true of nations as of men. A nation that cannot take its own part is at times almost as fertile a source of mischief in the world at large as is a nation which does wrong to others, for its very existence puts a premium on such wrongdoing. Therefore, a nation must fit itself to defend its honor and interest against outside aggression; and this necessarily means that in a free democracy every man fit for citizenship must be trained so that he can do his full duty to the nation in war no less than in peace.

Unless we are thorough-going Americans and unless our patriotism is part of the very fiber of our being, we can neither serve God nor take our own part. Whatever may be the case in an infinitely remote future, at present no people can render any service to humanity unless as a people they feel an intense sense of national cohesion and solidarity. The man who loves other nations as much as he does his own, stands on a par with the man who loves other women as much as he does his own wife. The United States can accomplish little for mankind, save in so far as within its borders it develops an intense spirit of Americanism. A flabby cosmopolitanism, especially if it expresses itself through a flabby pacifism, is not only silly, but degrading. It represents national emasculation. The professors of every form of hyphenated Americanism are as truly the foes of this country as if they dwelled outside its borders and made active war against it. This is not a figure of speech, or a hyperbolic statement. The leaders of the hyphenated- American movement in this country (who during the last eighteen months have been the professional German-Americans and Austro-Ameri-

i8 cans) are also leaders in the movement against preparedness. I have before me a little pamphlet, circulated by a "German-American" organization, consisting of articles written by a German- American for a paper which claims to be the leading German paper in Illinois. This pamphlet is a bitter attack upon the policy of preparedness for the United States, and a slanderous assault on those advocating this American policy. It is, therefore, an effort in the interest of Germany to turn the United States into a larger Belgium — an easy prey for Germany whenever Germany desires to seize it. These professional German- Americans and Pro-Germans are Anti-American to the core. They play the part of traitors, pure and simple. Once it was true that this country could not endure half free and half slave. To-day it is true that it can not endure half American and half foreign. The hyphen is incompatible with patriotism.

Patriotism should be an integral part of our every feeling at all times, for it is merely another name for those qualities of soul which make a man in peace or in war, by day or by night, think of his duty to his fellows, and of his duty to the nation through which their and his loftiest aspirations must find their fitting expression. After the Lusitania was sunk, Mr. Wilson stated in effect that such a time was not the right time to stir up patriotism. This statement is entirely incompatible with having a feeling of deep patriotism at any time. It might just as appropriately have been made by George Washington immediately after his defeat at the Brandywine, or by Abraham Lincoln immediately after the surrender of Fort Sumter; and if in either of these crises our leaders had acted on any such principle we would not now have any country at all. Patriotism is as much a duty in time of war as in time of peace, and it is most of all a duty in any and every great crisis. To commit folly or do evil, to act inconsiderately and hastily or wantonly and viciously, in the name of patriotism, represents not patriotism at all, but a use of the name to cloak an attack upon the thing. Such baseness or folly is wrong, at every time and on every occasion. But patriotism itself is not only in place on every occasion and at every time, but is peculiarly the feeling which should be stirred to its deepest depths at every serious crisis. The duty of a leader is to lead; and it is a dreadful thing that any man chosen to lead his fellow-countrymen should himself show, not merely so* profound a lack of patriotism, but such misunderstanding of patriotism, as to be willing to say in a great crisis what President Wilson thus said at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania.

This statement, coupled with his statement made about the same time as to being "too proud to fight," furnishes the clue to the Administration's poHcy both before and since. This policy made our great democratic commonwealth false to its duties and its ideals in a tremendous world crisis, at the very time when, if properly led, it could have rendered an inestimable service to all mankind, and could have placed itself on a higher pinnacle of worthy achievement than ever before. Patriotism, so far from being incompatible with performance of duty to other nations, is an indispensable prerequisite to doing one's duty toward other nations. Fear God ; and take your own part ! If this nation had feared God it would have stood up for the Belgians and Armenians; if it had been able and willing to take its own part there would have been no murderous assault on the Lusitania, no outrages on our men and women in Mexico. True patriotism carries with it not hostility to other nations but a quickened sense of responsible good- will towards other nations, a good-will of acts and not merely of words. I stand for a nationalism of duty, to oneself and to others; and, therefore, for a nationalism which is a means to internationalism. World peace must rest on the willingness of nations with courage, cool foresight, and readiness for self-sacrifice to defend the fabric of international law. No nation can help in securing an organized, peaceful and justice-doing world community until it is willing to run risks and make efforts in order to secure and maintain such a community.

The nation that in actual practice fears God is the nation which does not wrong its neighbors, which does so far as possible help its neighbors, and which never promises what it cannot or will not or ought not to perform. The professional pacifists in and out of office who at peace congresses pass silly resolutions which cannot be, and ought not to be, lived up to, and enter into silly treaties which ought not to be, and cannot be, kept, are not serving God, but Baal. They are not doing anything for anybody.^ If in addition these people, when the concrete case arises, as in Belgium or Armenia, fear concretely

'See the excellent little book called "Is War Diminishing?" by Woods and Baltzly. The authors deal, as they necessarily must if truthful deal, with the mischievous activities of those professional pacifists among whom Mr. Andrew Carnegie has attained an unhappy prominence : activities which in this country for the last five years have worked nothing but evil, and very serious evil, to our nation and to humanity at large, and to all genuine movements for the promotion of the peace of righteousness. The writers instance Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler as presenting in typical manner the shams and perversions of fact upon which the professional pacifists rely for their propaganda, and remark that these pacifists, "who pride themselves on having the superior moral point of view, openly disregard the truth," and ask "these professors of ethics, law and justice, these presidents of colleges, these moral educators, if morality is not necessarily bound up with truth." The pacifist movement in this country has not only been one of extreme folly and immorality, but has been bolstered by consistent and unwearied falsification of the facts, laudation of shallow and unprincipled demagogues, and condemnation of the upright public servants who fearlessly tell the truth.

to denounce and antagonize the wrongdoer, they become not merely passive, but active agents of the devil. The professional pacifists who applauded universal arbitration treaties and disarmament proposals prior to the war, since the war have held meetings and parades in this country on behalf of peace, and have gone on silly missions to Europe on behalf of peace — and the peace they sought to impose on heroes who were battling against infamy was a peace conceived in the interest of the authors of the infamy. They did not dare to say that they stood only for a peace that should right the wrongs of Belgium. They did not dare to denounce the war of aggression by Germany against Belgium. Their souls were too small, their timidity too great. They were even afraid to applaud the war waged by Belgium in its own defence. These pacifists have served morality, have shown that they feared God, exactly as the Pharisees did, when they made broad their philacteries and uttered long prayers in public, but did not lift a finger to lighten the load of the oppressed. When Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bryan made this nation shirk its duty towards Belgium, they made us false to all our high ideals; for they acted and caused this government to act in that spirit of commercial opportunism which refuses to do duty to others unless there is in it pecuniary profit for oneself. This combination of mean timidity and mean commercial opportunism is peculiarly odious because those practising it have sought to hide it by profuse outbursts of wordy sentimentality and loud professions of attachment to impossible and undesirable ideals. One of the besetting sins of many of our public servants (and of not a few of our professional moralists, lay and clerical) is to cloak weakness or baseness of action behind insincere oratory on behalf of impractical ideals. The true servant of the people is the man who preaches realizable ideals; and who then practises what he has preached.

Moreover, even as regards the pacifists who genuinely desire that this nation should fear God, it is to be remembered that if the nation cannot take its own part, the fact that it fears God will be of no practical consequence to any one. Nobody cares whether or not the feeling of the Chinese people is against international wrongdoing; for, as China is helplessly unable to take her own part, she is in practise even more helpless to take the part of any one else and to secure justice and mercy for any one else. The pacifists who are seeking to Chinafy the United States are not only seeking to bring the United States to ruin, but are also seeking to render it absolutely impotent to help upright and well-behaved nations which are oppressed by the military power of unscrupulous neighbors of greater strength.

The professional pacifists, the leaders in the pacifist movement in the United States, do particular harm by giving well-meaning but uninformed people who do not think deeply what seems to them a convincing excuse for failure to show courage and resolution. Those who preach sloth and cowardice under the high-sounding name of "peace" give people a word with which to cloak, even to themselves, their failure to perform unpleasant duty. For a man to stand up for his own rights, or especially for the rights of somebody else, means that he must have virile qualities: courage, foresight, willingness to face risk and undergo effort. It is much easier to be timid and lazy. The average man does not like to face death and endure hardship and labor. He can be roused to do so if a leader of the right type, a Washington or Lincoln, appeals to the higher qualities, including the stern qualities, of his soul. But a leader, or at least a man who holds a leader's place, earns praise and profit unworthily if he uses his gift of words to lull well-meaning men to sleep, if he assures them that it is their duty to do the easy and selfish thing, and furnishes them high-sounding phrases with which to cover ignoble failure to perform hard and disagreeable duties.

Peace is not the end. Righteousness is the end. When the Saviour saw the money-changers in the Temple he broke the peace by driving them out. At that moment peace could have been obtained readily enough by the simple process of keeping quiet in the presence of wrong. But instead of preserving peace at the expense of righteousness, the Saviour armed himself with a scourge of cords and drove the money-changers from the Temple. Righteousness is the end, and peace a means to the end, and sometimes it is not peace, but war which is the proper means to achieve the end. Righteousness should breed valor and strength. When it does breed them, it is triumphant; and when triumphant, it necessarily brings peace. But peace does not necessarily bring righteousness.

As for neutrality, it is well to remember that it is never moral, and may be a particularly mean and hideous form of immorality. It is in itself merely unmoral; that is, neither moral nor immoral; and at times it may be wise and expedient. But it is never anything of which to be proud; and it may be something of which to be heartily ashamed. It is a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong. Impartiality does not mean neutrality. Impartial justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong. Moreover, submission to an initial wrong means that all protests against subsequent and lesser wrongs are hypocritical and ineffective. Had we protested, in such fashion that our protest was effective, against what was done in Belgium by Germany, and against the sinking of the Lusitania by Germany, we could have (and in such case we ought to have) protested against all subsequent and minor infractions of international law and morals, including those which interfered with our commerce or with any other neutral rights. But failure to protest against the first and worst offences of the strongest wrongdoer made it contemptible, and an act of bad faith, to protest against subsequent and smaller misdeeds; and failure to act (not merely speak or write notes) when our women and children were murdered made protests against interference with American business profits both offensive and ludicrous.

The pacifists have used all kinds of arguments in favor of peaceful submission to, or refusal to prepare against, international violence and wrongdoing, and among others the very ancient arguments based upon the supposed teaching of the New Testament against war. In the first place, as I have already pointed out, this argument is quite incompatible with accepting the lesson taught by the action of the Saviour in driving the money-changers from the Temple ; not to mention, incidentally, that the duty of preparedness has rarely been put in stronger form than by St. Luke in the direction that "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one."

In the next place, the plea is merely an instance of the adroit casuistry that can twist isolated teachings of the Gospels in any required direction. As a matter of fact, the Gospels do not deal with war at all. During the period they covered there was no war in Judea, and no question arising from the need of going to war. The precepts and teachings upon which the pacifists rely apply not to war, but to questions arising from or concerning individual and mob violence and the exercise of the internal police power. In so far as sincere and logical pacifists are concerned, they recognize this fact. There are schools of pacifists who decline to profit by the exercise of the police power, who decline to protect not merely themselves, but those dearest to them, from any form of outrage and violence. The individuals of this type are at least logical in their horror even of just war. If a man deliberately takes the view that he will not resent having his wife's face slapped, that he will not by force endeavor to save his daughter from outrage, and that he disapproves of the policeman who interferes by force to save a child kidnapped by a black-hander, or a girl run off by a white-slaver, then he is logical in objecting to war. Of course, to my mind, he occupies an unspeakably base and loathsome position, and is not fit to cumber the world — in which, as a matter of fact, he exists at all only because he is protected by the maintenance by others of the very principle which he himself repudiates and declines to share.

Such a position I hold to be as profoundly immoral as it is profoundly unpatriotic. But, at least, the men holding it are trying logically to apply the principles which they profess to follow. Messrs. Bryan, Jordan, Ford, and the other professional pacifists, however, are either insincere in their denunciation of war, or else must announce that the same principle which makes them denounce a just war entered into for the sake of the welfare of the nation as a whole, also makes them denounce the man who, by force, endeavors to protect his daughter against infamy, or the woman who opposes her feeble strength to the brutality of the kidnapper of her child. Either these gentlemen, as regards their own families, approve of tame submission to kidnapping and white slavery, and disapprove of suppression of kidnapping and white slayery by the police, or else they are either thoroughly unintelligent or else thoroughly dishonest in their denunciation of national preparedness and of readiness to enter into just war on behalf either of ourselves or of others.

Let us beware of confusing names with things. The fuglemen of President Wilson have kept praising him because, forsooth, he has "kept us out of war." Every now and then one of them reverses his praise, and says that in any event President Wilson could not have gone to war, because war can only be declared by Congress. But as a matter of fact, President Wilson has gone to war, both with Hayti and with Mexico.

This is a matter of deeds, not of words. When our armed forces attack the chief seaport city of a foreign country, as we did in the case both of Mexico and of Hayti, and take it by violence, after conflicts in which scores of our own men and either scores or hundreds of our opponents are killed and wounded, the act is one of war. It may be successful war like that which Mr. Wilson nerved himself to wage with tiny Hayti — for Mr. Wilson was not afraid of Hayti. It may be utterly inefifective war, as in the case of Mr. Wilson's little war with Mexico. But both were wars; and each was waged without any Congressional action whatever. Mr. Wilson sent the fleet down to Vera Cruz, and took it in order to get a salute for the flag. The men wearing the United States uniform, who carried out his command, suffered a considerable loss of life and inflicted a greater loss of life. He then brought our forces away without achieving the object he had in view. His little war was an ignoble war, and he was beaten in it. But it was a war.

Some of his defenders now say that, although defeated in the avowed purpose of the war, he succeeded as regards the unavowed purpose, which was to drive out Huerta in the interests of Villa. This is, of course, a confession that their statements on behalf of Mr. Wilson are untrue, that he has not kept the country at peace, but has put it into a war, not to serve any public purpose, but to gratify his personal feelings. It is, of course, a statement absolutely incompatible with Mr. Wilson's own claim that he did not intervene in Mexico. Therefore, these admirers of Mr. Wilson come to his defence by vociferating what he asserts to be contrary to the truth.

As a matter of fact, in this case they are correct. Mr. Wilson has more than once interfered — to use his own scholarly and elegant phraseology, "butted in"— by making war in Mexico. He never did it, however, to secure justice for Americans or other foreigners. He never did it to secure the triumph of justice and peace among the Mexicans themselves. He merely did it in the interest of some bandit chief, whom at the moment he liked, in order to harm some other bandit chief whom at the moment he disliked. Under such circumstances his methods of action, and his defence of his action, are worthy of a Byzantine logothete — ^but not of an American statesman who is true to the traditions of Washington and Lincoln, and an heir to the valor shown by the soldiers of Grant and of Lee.

Mr. Wilson has been President when the urgent need of the nation was for action. He has met the need purely by elocution. A friend, writing to me last Christmas Eve, remarked that he had just found in Cymbeline "in anticipation of the gentleman in the White House":

"Prithee have done.

And do not play in wench-like words with that Which is so serious."

Peace is not a question of names. It is a question of facts. If murders occur in a city, and if the police force is so incompetent that no record is made of them officially, that does not interfere with the fact that murders have been committed and that life is unsafe. In just the same way, if lives are taken by violence between nations, it is not of the slightest consequence whether those responsible for the government of the nation whose citizens have lost their lives do or do not assert that the nation is at peace. During the last three years we have been technically at peace. But during those three years more of our citizens have been killed by Mexicans, Germans, Austrians and Haytians than were killed during the entire Spanish War. It is true that the American citizens killed during the past three years have been mostly non-combatants, including women and children, although many men wearing the national uniform have also been killed, some of them on American soil. But the fact that women and children are killed instead of full-grown men in uniform surely increases rather than diminishes the horror. We have had a great many more citizens killed during this time of alleged peace, and thanks to the activities of the emissaries of foreign governments with the torch and the bomb on our own soil, we have had much more American property destroyed, than was the case during the open war with Spain ; and whereas, thanks to the abject quality of Mr. Wilson's tameness, no benefit whatever, to us or to mankind at large, has come from this loss of life and destruction of property during the last three years, the short war with Spain brought incalculable benefits to Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, not to speak of ourselves.

On February 12th it will be a year since the 33 time when we notified Germany that in case any of our citizens were killed, we would hold her to a strict accountability ; and during these eleven months the passenger ships sunk by German or Austrian submarines in defiance of our warning have included among others the Falaba, Lusitania, Arabic, Hesperian, Ancona, Yasaka, Ville de la Ciotat and Persia. They were British, Italian, Japanese and French. Many hundreds of Americans were among the passengers and a couple of hundred of these, including many women and children, were killed. The total deaths on these ships since March last amount to between 2,000 and 2,100. The campaign against them has been a campaign of sheer murder, on a vaster scale than any indulged in by any of the old-time pirates of the Indian Ocean and the Spanish Main. Now, the total number of lives of non-combatants, including many hundreds of women and children, thus taken exceeds many times over the aggregate in all the sea-fights of the War of 1812, both on the American and on the British side. It is over double the number of lives lost by the British navy in Nelson's three great victories, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of the Baltic, combined. It much exceeds the total number of lives lost in the Union navy — and indeed in the Union and

Confederate navies combined — during the Civil War. That is, this nation has been "peaceful" during the past year, while peaceful ships on which its citizens were sailing lost a larger number of lives than we lost at sea in the entire War of 1812 and than we inflicted at sea in the War of 1812, a much greater loss than Farragut's fleet sufifered in the aggregate in all its victories, a greater loss than Nelson's fleets suffered in his three great victories. If any individual finds satisfaction in saying that nevertheless this was "peace" and not "war," it is hardly worth while arguing with him ; for he dwells in a land of sham and of make-believe. Of course, incidentally, we have earned contempt and derision by our conduct in connection with the hundreds of Americans thus killed in time of peace without action on our part. The United States Senator, or Governor of a State, or other public representative, who takes the position that our citizens should not, in accordance with their lawful rights, travel on such ships, and that we need not take action about their deaths, occupies a position precisely and exactly as base and as cowardly (and I use those words with scientific precision) as if his wife's face were slapped on the public streets and the only action he took was to tell her to stay in the house.