The foes of our own household

Front matter

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Foreword

The man who still asks "why we are at war/' or apologizes in any way for Germany, should look to his own soul; he is neither a patriot nor a true American, nor a lover of mankind; and the foes of his own household are the folly and the cowardice and the cold selfishness of his own heart.

We should hold Germany in horror for what she has done. But we should regard with contempt and loathing the Americans who directly or indirectly give her aid and comfort; whether they do so by downright attack on our own country, by upholding Germany, by assailing any of our allies, by trying to discourage our people from vigorous, resolute, unyielding prosecution of the war, or by crying on behalf of peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace.

In the long run we have less to fear from foes without than from foes within; for the former will be formidable only as the latter break our strength. The men who oppose preparedness in our military and our industrial life ; the business or political corruptionist or reactionary and the reckless demagogue who is his nominal opponent; the man of wealth and greed

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FOREWORD

who cares for nothing but profits, and the sinister creature who plays upon and inflames the passions of envy and violence; the hard materialist, the self-indulgent lover of ease and pleasure, and the silly sentimentalist — all these are the permanent foes of our own household. From their ranks are drawn our immediate foes; the faint-hearted who fear Germany, the puzzleheaded who refuse to understand her, and the men of foul soul who do her evil bidding. The Hun within our gates masquerades in many dis- / guises; he is our dangerous enemy; and he V . should be hunted down without mercy. High-minded men and women should brace their souls against the Menace of Peace without Victory for the Right. It is worse than idle to talk of a League to Enforce Peace for the Future, unless we, who are now partners in the League to Smite Down Wrong in the Present with iron will carry the war through to overwhelming triumph.

Contents

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Foreword. ....... ix

CHAPTER

Chapter I The Instant Need; And The Ultimate Need

'Tp HE world is at this moment passing through one of those terrible periods of convulsion when the souls of men and of nations are tried as by fire. Woe to the man or to the nation that at such a time stands as once Laodicea stood; as the people of ancient Meroz stood, when they dared not come to the help of the Lord against the mighty ! In such a crisis the moral weakling is the enemy of the right; and the pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrong-doer.

At the outbreak of the war our people were stunned, blinded, terrified by the extent of the world disaster. Those among our leaders who were greedy, those who were selfish and easeloving, those who were timid, and those who were merely short-sighted, all joined to blindfold the eyes and dull the conscience of the people so that it might neither see iniquity nor gird its loins for the inevitable struggle. The moral sense of our people was drugged into stupor by the men in high places who taught us that we had no concern with the causes of this war, that all the combatants were fighting for the same things, that it was our duty to be neutral between right and wrong, that we should look with tepid indifference on the murder of our unarmed men, women and children, that we ought to be too proud to fight for our just rights, that our proper aim should be to secure peace without \ victory for the right. But at last we stand with our faces to the light. At last we have faced our duty. Now it behooves us to do this duty with miasterful efficiency.

We are in the war. But we are not yet awake. We are passing through, in exaggerated form, the phase through which England passed during the first year of the war. A very large number of Englishmen fooled themselves with the idea that they lived on an island and were safe anyhow, that the war would soon be over, and that if they went on with their business as usual, and waved flags and applauded patriotic speeches, somebody else would do the fighting for them. England has seen the error of her ways; she has paid in blood and agony

i6 for her short-sightedness; she is now doing her duty with stern resolution. We are repeating her early errors on a larger scale ; and assuredly we shall pay heavily if we do not in time wake from our short-sighted apathy and foolish, selfsufficient optimism.

We live on a continent; we have trusted to that fact for safety in the past; we do not understand that world conditions have changed and that the oceans and even the air have become highways for military aggression. The exploits of the German U-boat off Nantucket last summer — exploits which nothing but feebleness, considerations of political expediency and downright lack of courage on our part permitted — showed that if Germany, or any other possible opponent of ours, were free to deal with us the security that an ocean barrier once offered was annihilated. In other words, the battle front of Europe is slowly spreading over the whole world.

We are fighting this war for others. But we are also, and primarily, fighting it for ourselves. We wish to safeguard to all civilized nations which themselves do justice to others, the right to enjoy their independence, and therefore to enjoy whatever governmental system they desire. But rightly and properly our first concern is for our own country. Our own welfare is at stake. Our own interests are vitally concerned. We are fighting for the honor of America and for our permanent place among the self-governing nations of mankind. We are fighting for our homes, our freedom, our independence, our self-respect and well-being. We are fighting for our dearest rights, and to avert measureless disaster in the future from the land in which our children's children are to dwell when we are dead.

In international relations, the Prussianized Germany of to-day stands for ruthless selfaggrandizement, and contempt for the rights of other nations. She stands for the rule of might over right; of power over justice. If Germany now conquered France and England, we would be the next victim; and if the conquest took place at this moment we would be a helpless victim. France and England have been fighting the battle of this nation as certainly as they have been fighting for themselves. Every consideration of honor, of self-respect, of self-interest, and self-preservation demand that we Americans throw our full force into this war immediately, without reservation, with entire loyalty to our allies, and with the stern and steadfast determination to fight the war through to a victorious finish. Moreover, we should act at once. We have to atone for three years of folly and indecision.

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We are a nation of a hundred millions of people, richer in wealth and resources than any other on the earth. Yet we were so utterly unprepared that although Germany declared war on us seven months ago we are still merely getting ready our strength, we still owe our safety exclusively to the fleets and armies of our hard-pressed and war-worn allies, to whose help we nominally came.

It is this utter unpreparedness which should convey the real lesson to us of this war. And remember that as yet we, as a people, acting through our governmental authorities, have not taken one step to avert disaster in the future by introducing a permanent policy of preparedness. By actual test the system, or rather no-system, upon which during the last three years we have been told we could rely has proved entirely worthless. The measures under which we are now acting are temporary makeshifts, announced to be such. We have been caught utterly unprepared in a terrible emergency because we did nothing until the emergency actually arose; and now our Government announces that what we are doing is purely temporary; that we shall stop doing it as soon as the emergency is over, and will then remain equally unprepared for the next emergency.

It is this blind refusal — from the nation's

THE FOES OF OtIR OWN HOUSEHOLD

standpoint I can only call it this criminal refusal — to provide for the future that forces every honest and far-sighted lover of America to speak. I would far rather speak words of boastful flattery; it is not pleasant to tell unpleasant truths. Probably it is personally more advantageous to utter high-sounding platitudes; but platitudes are not what this nation needs at this time. I would gladly refrain from pointing out our shortcomings of the present and the immediate past were there any indication that we intended to provide for the future. But there is no such indication. And yet now is the time to formulate our permanent policy; now, when the lessons of the war are vivid before our eyes, when for the moment the silliness of the professional pacifists has less influence than in time of peace. Flag-waving, and uttering and applauding speeches, and singing patriotic songs, are excellent in so far as they are turned into cool foresight in preparation and grim resolution to spend and be spent when once the day of trial has come; but they are merely mischievous if they are treated as substitutes for preparedness in advance and for hard, efficient work and readiness for self-sacrifice during the crisis itself.

It is not our alien enemies who are responsible for our complete unpreparedness. It is the foes of our own household. The leaders who have led us WTong are these foes ; and in so far as our own weakness and short-sightedness and love of ease and undue regard for material success have made us respond readily to such leadership, we ourselves have been our own foes.

Preparedness against war cannot be real, cannot be thoroughgoing, unless it rests on preparedness for the tasks of peace. The I. W. W. and similar organizations, including the bulk of the "scientific" party socialists, have showed themselves the enemies of this country in this crisis, and will be its permanent enemies ; and exactly the same thing is true of the selfsatisfied, short-sighted rich men who oppose, or are inertly indifferent to, the effort to remove the causes of that preventable misery and wrong which drive honest poor men to follow the false prophets of evil. The dishonest demagogue and the corrupt reactionary are equally the foes of social and industrial justice; and mere ignorance — simple, sheer inability to understand the facts of present-day life — may prevent good people from trying to help the farmer and the workingman to help themselves, until it is too late to give such help save at the price of social convulsion.

The foes of our own household are our worst enemies; and we can oppose them, not only by

i2J exposing and denouncing them, but by constructive work in planning and building for reforms which shall take into account both the economic and the moral factors in human advance. We of America can win to our great destiny only by service; not by rhetoric, and above all not by insincere rhetoric, and that dreadful mental double-dealing and verbal juggling which makes promises and repudiates them, and says one thing at one time, and the directly opposite thing at another time. ■ Our service must be the service of deeds, the deeds of war and the deeds of peace.

The deeds of peace are for the future. The instant need is for the deeds of war. If we wish to preserve our own self-respect we must do our own fighting; and not merely pay — or feed — others to fight for us. We must not make this a mere dollar war, or potato war. The dollars and potatoes are needed; but the great need is for armed men who are sternly ready to face death in a great cause. Pawnbroker patriotism is a poor substitute for fighting patriotism.

At present our prime duty is to fight effectively and to send constantly increasing masses — millions — of fighting men to the front at the earliest moment. Then we must care for these men ; we must till our farms, make our f actories more efficient, increase our taxes and subscribe to our loans; and back up the Red Cross and similar organizations. Our governmental representatives must show both disinterestedness and common sense in dealing with business. We need maximum production; and improper restriction of profits, and, therefore, improperly low prices, will put a stop to maximum production. It is criminal to halt the work of building the Navy or fitting out our training camps because of refusal to allow a fair profit to the business men who alone can do the work speedily and effectively; and it is equally mischievous not to put a stop to the making of unearned and improper fortunes out of the war by heavy progressive taxation on the excess war profits — taxation as heavy as that which England now imposes; and as regards the proper profits that are permitted and encouraged, we should insist on a reasonably equitable division between the capitalists, the managers and the wage workers; and when the wage worker gets a first-class wage we should insist that in this crisis, as a matter of vital patriotic duty, he does first-class work for the first-class wage.

Universal suffrage should be based on universal service in peace and war; those who refuse to render the one have no title to the enjoyment of the other. We stand for the democracy of service; we are against privilege, and therefore against the privilege which would escape service in war. If a man's conscience forbids him to fight, put him to dangerous work, such as mine-sweeping or digging trenches, where, although his own life is in peril, he does not attempt to kill anyone else; and if his conscience forbids him to do this kind of work then let it be understood that our consciences forbid us to let him vote in a country whose destiny must ultimately be decided by men who are willing to fight. No human being is entitled to any ''right," any privilege, that is not correlated with the obligation to perform duty.

We must continue this war with steadfast endurance until we win the peace of overwhelming victory for righteousness; and even while thus fighting we must prepare the way for the peace of industrial justice, and the justice of industrial democracy, which are to come after, and to make perfect, the war. These are the two needs; the instant need and the ultimate need; and both must be met. At the moment our chief foes are outside of our border; but they are now a danger to us only because of the folly and short-sightedness and wrong-doing of those who, wittingly or unwittingly, are our permanent foes — the foes of our own household. The passions and follies of each of us individually are such foes. And the men in whose souls these passions and follies gain the upper hand are the permanent foes of this great republic.

In the present crisis the most evil of these foes of our own household are the men who wish us to accept peace without victory. In the old days on the Western plains we had a proverb, "Never draw unless you mean to shoot.'' The braggart, the man who uses words which he does not translate into deeds, is a source of fearful wrong and suffering in any serious crisis. Having gone into this war, we earn dishonor unless we exert our utmost strength and fight the war through, at all costs, to a successful finish; unless we fight until we win the peace of victory. When we went to war there was neither talk nor thought of "making the world safe for democracy" — if war for that purpose was necessary then it had been necessary for the preceding two years and a half. We went to war because for two years the Germans had been murdering our unarmed men, women and children, and had definitely announced their intention to continue the practice. After we had been at war a few weeks the President announced that our purpose was to make the world safe for democracy. This phrase, uttered by the President when we were already at war, solemnly pledged us to exert our whole strength, and suffer any losses, in a terrible crusade, not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of mankind as a whole. To make such a pledge lightly, or to abandon it when once made, would be infamous. Therefore we must keep it. And, therefore, we must understand what it means. There is a certain rhetorical lack of precision about Mr.

Wilson's phrase. It cannot mean that we are to force our allies, Belgium, Servia, Montenegro, England, all of them monarchies, to abandon the forms of government which they find suitable, and for which they have battled with devoted courage. Neither can it mean that we are to let peoples which show themselves incapable of self-government continue permanently as centres of infection in an otherwise reasonably healthy world-polity. Mr. Wilson's action in regard to the two republics of Hayti and San Domingo shows that if in any weak country he regards democracy as unsafe for others, as a nuisance to its neighbors, he will without hesitation suppress it. Interpreting his phrase, therefore, by the course of conduct he was at the same time following, we must regard it as a solemn pledge that we will not accept peace without complete victory over Germany and her allies, Austria and Turkey; inasmuch as Germany's mere existence under her present government makes the world unsafe for democracy, and inasmuch as the continued existence of Austria and Turkey in their present form necessarily means the crushing out of democracy and liberty in the nations subject to them. We do not intend that the German, Magyar and Turk shall be oppressed. We do mean that they shall be forbidden to oppress others. First and foremost we are to make the world safe for ourselves. This is our primary interest. This is our war, America's war. If we do not win it, we shall some day have to reckon with Germany single handed. Therefore, for our own sakes let us strike down Germany — and we cannot at this time make any distinction between the German people and the German rulers, for the German people stand solidly behind their rulers, and until they separate from their rulers they earn our enmity. Belgium must be restored and indemnified. France should receive back Alsace and Lorraine. England and Japan should keep the colonies they have conquered. Austria and Turkey should be broken up. Poland should be made independent, with Galicia and Posen included, and reaching to the Baltic. The Czechs and their Moravian and Slovak kinsmen should be made into a Greater Bohemia. The Jugoslavs should be united in one state. Greater

Roumania should take in Roumanian Hungary, and Italy Italian Austria. The Turks should be ousted from Europe ; Constantinople can be made a free commonwealth of the Straits, or given to democratic Russia as events may determine. Arabia should be an independent Moslem state; probably Armenia should be independent; provision for the full protection of the Syrians — Christians, Druses, and Mohammedans — should be made. Northern Schleswig should go back to the Danes ; and the victorious allies should themselves grant full autonomy to Lithuania and Finland; and, to Ireland, Home Rule within the Empire.

But I do not ask our fellow countrymen who fight this war to think merely of others. The future of America is at stake, and it is this for which our concern is deepest. We must for our own sakes now make our whole potential war strength as speedily effective as possible. And, if we have the smallest power to learn by experience, let us face the damage done by our lamentable failure to prepare in the past, so that we may learn the need of preparing for the future.

During the last seven months we have to our credit some things which give us just cause for pride. But the net achievement, when compared with what every other great nation in the war achieved during a similar period, is a cause for profound humility.

We have not yet so much as fired one rifle against the German armies. We have not a man in the trenches. We are now doing, so far as preparation is concerned, only those things which it was inexcusable for us not to begin doing in September, 1914. Yet the time we have thus occupied, seven months, is just the length of time Germany took in 1870-71, for the conquest of France. It is four times as long as it took for the conquest of Austria. And we are not yet ready to meet a single thoroughly equipped hostile army corps of any great military nation ! We owe our safety from conquest only to the fact that, to serve their own purposes, England and France have protected us and fought our battles for us. Nor have our governmental authorities given the slightest indication of any intention to provide permanently against the continuance of the fatuous policy which has produced these results; and yet to continue this fatuous policy will ultimately mean ruin to the nation.

The men who boast over what has been accomplished by us in this war during the last seven months — during which we have actually accomplished nothing, although along many lines we have begun to prepare to begin — will do well to remember the comments by Olaf's priest Thangbrand on the boasting of the Icelanders :

Quoth Priest Thangbrand : "What's the use Of all this bragging up and down, When three women and one goose Make a market in your town?"

Three women and one goose do not make a market. Nor do they win a war. And in neither case does boasting permanently supply the deficiency.

Chapter II

MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR BEFORE OUR FOLLY DEPART FROM US?

TT is useless to cry over spilt milk. But it is much worse than useless, it is mischievous, and may be ruinous, to pretend that the milk was not spilt, and therefore to invite a repetition of the conditions which caused the spilling. For the last three years our foremost duty, to ourselves and to the world, has been to prepare. This duty we have shamefully neglected, and our neglect is responsible for the dragging on of the war, and for the needless sacrifice of myriads of lives. Yet those highest in authority seem to read this lesson backwards, as medieval sorcerers read the Lord's Prayer.

The Secretaries of War and the Navy, of course, speak for President Wilson. They are his instruments in formulating and carrying out the entire military policy, temporary and permanent, of the Government. In the Official Bulletin of June 7th, the Secretary of War, Mr. Baker, is reported as saying that there is "difficulty . . . disorder and confusion ... in getting things started," and as adding: "But it is a happy confusion. I deHght in the fact that when we entered this war we were not, Hke our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for it and inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not ready." The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Daniels, is quoted in the pubHc press (of course less authentic authority than the Official Bulletin) as answering a query as to whether the Navy was preparing new weapons, by saying: "That cannot be determined until we know whether we are going to fight an offensive or a defensive war."

The importance of these statements is that they lay down the rule of conduct which we as a people are now officially supposed to accept for our future policy; therefore it is proposed that we continue the policy of unpreparedness which we have followed in such striking fashion in the last three years. We are so to act, on the ground that although our unpreparedness produced "difficulty, disorder and confusion," yet that it was a "happy confusion," and that our failure to prepare ought to give us "delight"; and that before we make ready the engines which alone can make our navy thoroughly effective and formidable in war, we must wait until some months after the war comes and then try to reach a cautious, provisional conclusion

MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR?

as to whether it is to be offensive or defensive! Apparently, it is proposed to continue our policy of unpreparedness in the future because it has not brought us to destruction in the past. The explanation of the latter fact is simple. For the last four years the international situation has been such that we could, and did, commit every species of blunder and yet escape punishment. Our task in foreign affairs was very easy; it was very badly performed; but the conditions were such that no formidable nation in the world dared take its eyes off the other formidable nations; and so, in spite of the really marvelous indecision and feebleness of our governmental policy, we were able to follow a devious, and often a retrograde, course through and among our difficulties with little loss of money — and seemingly loss of honor did not concern us, for we had grown to accept streams of adroit and irrelevant rhetoric as a worthy substitute for honorable action.

In Mexico the various insurgent leaders whom we alternately petted and opposed systematically slaughtered our own men, women and children, and those of the Spaniards, and Chinese, whom they despised as heartily as they did us; but they played no such antics with the nations they feared and respected, such as the Germans. English, French and Japanese ; accordingly none of the latter found it necessary to interfere at the moment; and therefore the mass of our people, who were not in Mexico, and who were taught by the Government to look with lethargic, indifference on the slaughter of their fellow citizens in Mexico, were able to eat the bread of humiliation in physical safety. How any people with an honorable past could submit to such shame as our Government inflicted on our people in connection with the Carrizal incident is literally inexplicable.

Then the great war occurred. It at once became a matter of incalculable consequence to each of the contending nations not to irritate us; and our safety for the time being seemed assured. Germany, however, gradually acquired such overweening contempt for our career of greedy and peaceable infamy, she so despised the merely conversational reply of our Government to her outrages, she regarded with such utter derision our tame submission to murder at the same time that we prattled of peace and duty, and our failure to prepare so thoroughly convinced her that our scabbard held nothing save either a pen or a wooden sword, that she literally kicked us into war — a war which our own lack of self-respect had rendered inevitable and for which we had not prepared in the smallest degree.

MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR?

On January 31st last Germany sent us a note which, after a couple of months' hesitation and uncertainty, was accepted by the President and Congress as a declaration of war — for we did not go to war in April, but merely stated that Germany was already at war with us. We sundered diplomatic relations with Germany a couple of days after the arrival of the note. For two months we announced that we were waiting for an "overt act'' of murder.

Our Government defined this term with meticulous precision. It decided, for example, that the murder of the two little American-born O'Donnell girls was not, so far as we were concerned, a murder, because their father had not been naturalized — apparently we did not regard the slaughter of the children of a non-naturalized parent as "making democracy unsafe." Some thirty American non-combatants were killed before a case occurred in which the Germans consented to commit murder in such fashion as to violate all, instead of merely some, of the rules, our Government had laid down as guides for the justifiable homicide of peaceful Americans going about their lawful business on the high seas.

We sluggishly drifted sternforemost into war. The reasons alleged were acts precisely like the acts which had been committed throughout the previous two years; there was more justification for going to war two years previously when the Lusitania was sunk than at that particular moment. After an interval of meditation we announced through our Government that we had discovered that it was our duty to wage the war because it was a fight for the perpetuation of democracy and for the rights of small nations and of humanity generally — all of which we had been strenuously denying, directly and indirectly, for the preceding two years and a half.

Then our people began to wake up to the actual situation. They had been taught to believe that easy — and slippery — rhetoric was a cheap substitute for action, and they now found it so cheap as to be worthless. They had been taught to trust for safety to boasts about our peaceful power and virtuous intentions, and to clamorous demands that everybody should love us because we were so harmless, and to quavering assertions that the way to avoid war was not to prepare for it. When the test came they found that all these devices in the aggregate amounted to absolutely nothing when once we were face to face with the "merciless old verities." We began, rather dimly, to realize that, as a national asset, a combination of glib sophistry with the feeble sham-amiability which obviously springs from fear, was of small value