Everybody's world, by Sherwood Eddy

Contents

Chapter Page

Foreword ix

I. Everybody's War 1

Foreword

The present volume is the result of a working tour around the world in 1919. I had previously spent fifteen years in India, several years working in other parts of Asia, and had visited Russia. During the closing months of the War I was with the soldiers on the British, French, and American fronts. After returning to America, in fulfilment of engagements in the East, I visited Japan and China, and then spent six months in some fifty of the principal centers of India and Ceylon, during the period of political unrest in connection with the passing of the Rowlatt Sedition Bills and the agitation for Home Rule. On the return journey, I visited Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and, going down over the Berlin to Bagdad Railway, entered Northern Mesopotamia. After crossing the Taurus Mountains, I passed through Adana, Konia, and the scenes of the Armenian massacres, across Turkey to Constantinople, returning through Italy and France to England and America.

One gains the impression across Asia, Europe, and America of a vast world movement which I have tried to describe in the following pages.

My thanks are due to many friends and nationals of the various countries visited for suggestions and criticisms regarding the manuscript.

ix x FOREWORD

The views expressed in this book are purely personal and not official. They have been submitted to no organization for approval. They do not represent the views of the Young Men's Christian Association or of any other official body.

Sherwood Eddy.

I

It has been everybody's war. And, as Lloyd George well says, "In the future it's going to be Everybody's World." To a labor deputation he said: "Don't always be thinking of getting back to where you were before the War. Get a really new World." That is our common task today. Millions have died for this new world. We must live for it. We must make a world worth their having died for. It is for us to see that these honored dead have not died in vain. The black night of war has passed and a new day has dawned — a day of stress and storm, dark with lowering portent, but radiant with the hope of a new world. Much of the old order that has not already been destroyed is doomed. The War has passed sentence upon our modern life. Rotten foundations that were built upon selfishness or injustice must be rebuilt upon the bed rock of eternal righteousness. Out of the ruins of the old world we must build the new.

But it will take new men to build this new and better world. For those who have caught the vision of the new world and who have seen the doom of the old, it is a great day in which to live. We need a creative dynamic, a fearless faith, power that draws upon inexhaustible Omnipotence itself, if we are to grapple with the titanic tasks that challenge us on every hand. As Mr. Britling well says: "This is the end and the beginning of an age. It is something far greater than the French Revolution . . . and we live in it." We stand at a creative moment in human history. Never before has the whole world had the chance to make all things new. Old customs and contentments, old rules and ruts, old traditions and enslavements have been broken for ever. We are living in the birth pangs of a world struggling to be reborn, and the issues of our time will reach into eternity.

We have been witnessing the greatest human event in history, the greatest in its magnitude and meaning, the most awful in its weight of agony, the most far-reaching in its possible results. Since that one far-off divine Sacrifice, which gives its meaning and promise to the vast outpouring of human life in this War, we have seen and had some part in the greatest thing that has happened in this world.

This War, we must believe, was a means to some great end. The final meaning of such a sacrifice was surely one vast offering of life, for some great end dearer than life, that shall affect all humanity in all the centuries to come. We can parrot off in speech, or tabulate in cold statistics the losses of the War, but none of us is great enough of soul to grasp their full significance. Seven millions killed! One wide sweep of the scythe of death, and 7,000,000 of our youngest and our best lie beneath those rows of white crosses in the ordered armies of the silent dead, or scattered in nameless graves under the fields of France and Flanders. Seven million homes bereaved! What scales can measure the dead weight of a world's sorrow, what arithmetic can compute it? Nearly 5,000,000 done to death by disease and starvation, and others fallen uncounted in the score of after-wars along the broken fronts, or among the mobs that have raged in the city streets! More than 20,000,000 wounded and 5,000,000 left maimed or partly crippled for life! Six millions shut up in dreary prisons, some emaciated in body and mind, and some never to return! Countless millions who have suffered the privations and sorrows of the War in the trenches at the front and in the lonely homes of the poor! Twenty million women in Europe who can have no home of their own after the War! Fifty billion dollars' worth of materials and property destroyed, $300,000,000,000 expended, or nearly one-third of the wealth of the belligerents, leaving a burden of $10,000,000,000 a year to be provided by the stricken nations to meet the cost of the War and the interest on its crushing debt. 1 Wide areas of destruction are left, with ruined cities and towns, churches and cathedrals, factories and farms, where every home destroyed has meant the tomb of the happiness of some family. All these are but a part

J The statistics of the war will be found in Appendix I.

J of the great sacrifice and all the world has had some share in it. Belgium and Poland, Serbia and Rumania were almost ruined. France was drained to her last man. Britain poured in the wealth of her whole empire and felt the strain to the limits of her last colony. Russia furnished by far the largest of the allied armies, and lies utterly impoverished by the War and its aftermath. All Europe has been shaken by the conflict.

During the last two years the writer's journeys have taken him through almost every part of France, along the British, French, and American fronts, through Belgium and England, across America, to Japan and China, through some fifty cities and centers in India and Ceylon, to Egypt, Turkey, and the Near East. He found every part of the world deeply affected by the War.

Japan has had to face the great issue raised between autocracy and democracy. It is affecting her whole social fabric and her colonies, especially Korea, which has been convulsed by a passionate uprising of unarmed passive resistance. China sent her labor battalions, which were in evidence everywhere in France from the coast to the front line trenches. India furnished more than a million men. We met them throughout the War in France. There is one section on the British front marked by 20,000 Indian graves. We found Indian soldiers holding Egypt and most of Nearer Asia. It was chiefly the

Indian troops who finished the conquest of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and East Africa. Among the best shock troops of France were the fierce fighting Moroccans. Men of twenty nationalities and countries were found in the French army alone. The greater part of the population of the world was represented in the fighting nations.

As we journeyed across Belgium and France, from Ypres over the Messines and Vimy ridges, through Arras, from Chateau Thierry, Rheims, and the Argonne to Verdun and other parts of the war zone, we passed in turn Americans, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, American Indians, Negroes, Moroccans, Senegalese, Malagasy, Basutos, Chinese, Japanese, Indian Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Mahrattas, Portuguese, Belgians, French, and British. More than twenty African tribes were represented in France and East Africa. More than a score of peoples in the islands of the Pacific were drawn upon and the principal countries of Europe were devastated. There was an almost universal conscription of suffering. It was indeed Everybody's War.

The World War seems to have gathered up in one final climax all the suffering and horror, all the cost and destruction of previous wars; and, on the other hand, all the idealism and heroism of all former wars combined in one. Such a vast sowing demands a commensurate reaping. Such a measureless sacrifice calls for an adequate result. Such a mighty means demands some mighty end. Unless one were driven to the despairing belief that we live in an irrational world of cruel chance and blind fate that mocks every high human endeavor, one must hold to the firm faith that the results of this War, after all the price that has been paid, will reach into vast opportunities for good far beyond our ken, in the coming centuries of a better world. Those who have vision may discern, even through all the strife and turmoil, the providence of God in our own day. Hegel declares in the closing words of his remarkable "Philosophy of History": "The history of the world is the process of development and the realization of the Spirit. This is the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world. What has happened and is happening every day is not only not ' without God/ but is essentially His work."

To appreciate the possible meaning of this sacrifice as a means to some great end, we must ask ourselves once more, What were we fighting for? What must we win for humanity from this War if it has not been fought in vain? What was its central lesson as we see it now in perspective? We must ask this even at the risk of a brief repetition, for already we are impatient to pass on though we have not yet learned, even superficially, the hard-won lessons of the War.

A pistol shot, the murder of a crown prince of

Austria, and the powder mine of Europe explodes. But behind this occasion lay the proximate cause of two contending forces, expanding Serbia and ambitious Austria. Behind these two colliding nationalities lay the conflict of two greater powers, Pan- Germanism and Pan-Slavism. What began as a war between two peoples soon became a war between two principles. While we do not claim that all the right was on one side and all the wrong on the other, nevertheless there gradually emerged one supreme and central issue, though it may be viewed from three standpoints, political, moral, and spiritual. Politically, there was the issue between autocracy and democracy, between the pretended divine right of kings and privileged classes, and the eternal and inalienable rights of peoples. Morally, the issue lay between the oppression of militarism and human liberty. Spiritually, the final issue of the War lay between the materialism of might and the spiritual power of right, between a material and a spiritual interpretation of the universe.

This, then, finally emerged as the central issue of the war: autocracy or democracy, militarism or liberty, might or right, the material or the spiritual, selfishness or sacrifice, mammon or God. However confused and hidden, there was an ultimate conflict of eternal principles in the War, which forced us to a choice of destiny. The Kaiser chose. Prussian militarism chose. The German people had to choose. And just as truly, you and I must choose; the whole American people must choose. We chose the better part for the winning of the War. Shall we choose it now for the winning of the world?

Let us pause at the end of the terrible conflict, and at the beginning of this period of reconstruction, to ask ourselves whether we have yet learned this central lesson of the War for the individual and the nation, that selfishness is suicidal and its wages is death; that sacrifice is divine, and the life that gives itself in service, even though it die, rises triumphant and eternal. The whole world was not drenched in blood merely to teach Germany or the Kaiser a lesson. If we gloat over their downfall with a cheap, flag-waving patriotism, and apply standards to our enemies which we shirk for ourselves, it is sheer pharisaic hypocrisy. Have we learned this central lesson of the War? Are we committed to the sacrificial life of service for human uplift and world brotherhood? If not, so far as we are concerned the War has been fought in vain.

If we choose the life of service, what men are we to serve? WTiat is to be the limit of our sympathy and responsibility? Does it include our family, our neighbor, the man across the street, the poor in the back alley? Does it take in our city, our state, our country, our allies, our world? Selfishness draws exclusive bounds. Love knows but one unbroken brotherhood. A man is as small as his selfishness, and as big as the world he serves. Selfishness divides humanity into Jew and Gentile, bond and free, privvileged and unprivileged, home and "foreign," our own people who count and others who do not. Love reigns in Everybody's World.

If you and I squarely adopt the principle of service, of sacrifice, and the law of love, it means that in our spirit we shall not be narrowly provincial and exclusively national, but our interests will be as wide as humanity. Selfishness will give, if it pays to do so, for its own class or clan, or creed, or people, but will exclude all others as "the masses," the poor, the heathen, as alien, outcast, foreign. Foreign to what, or to whom? Are they foreign to God? Are they foreign to humanity? Or are they foreign to our petty selves? You and I and all men, rich or poor, white or black, near or far, belong to Everybody's World.

Almost every rich and ruling nation in turn has counted itself the people, and excluded others as inferior. Assyria and Babylon, Egypt and Persia, Greece and Rome, the Chinese "Middle Kingdom," the Germans as "the salt of the earth" and the center and circumference of Kultur, the British, with their Empire on which the sun never sets, and the Americans in their "splendid isolation" and boasting self-confidence, all alike have been beset by the danger of self-centered provincialism. The measure of our strength, our wealth, our privilege is just the measure of our responsibility. The touchstone of our greatness will be the spirit of our service to the world. We are debtors to all — to all who have helped us and to all whom we can help. Our nation must live in Everybody's World, or turn its back upon humanity and live the pagan life of sordid selfishness — rich, fat, sleek, the national Dives with the beggared world at our gate, left, as Browning says,

"in God's contempt apart, With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize."

We emerge from the War as materially the strongest and most privileged nation of the world, with the largest wealth, the largest man power, the largest manufacturing output. We have suffered the least of all the great nations in the War. If we had striven and suffered in proportion to some that first entered the War, we would have had an army of 15,000,000 men, with more than 2,500,000 killed, or more than all the men we had in France. Instead, we stand as the wealthiest nation as we face this crucial period of world reconstruction. Here is our responsibility. Here is a permanent moral equivalent for war, in a task infinitely harder and grander, the winning of a new world. It may be a more difficult thing to win the world than it was to win the War, but the men who fought and died for us did not stop to count the cost, nor nicely to calculate their chances of success or the ease of victory.

What are the conditions of the making of a new world, and what principles are involved in it? Can we agree upon at least five such principles: a new faith in the common man, a new social justice at home and abroad, a new conception of the democracy of nations, a new belief in world brotherhood, and finally, as the foundation of all these, a new conviction that life is realized not in selfishness but in service and sacrifice? Let us pause to note these five principles involved in a new social order, and then apply them to the great territorial divisions of human need as left by the War.

First, a new faith in man. If every man, of every race, of every nation, however small or backward, has an inalienable birthright of liberty, if the moral order of the universe is written in his conscience, it means that under the divine Fatherhood, as a member of the human brotherhood, he is of independent and infinite worth. He is not, then, a mere means to an end, a tool for our convenience, a "hand" for our labor and the accumulation of our wealth, but a brother made in the image of God, in the divine right of his manhood. Has not the whole War reinforced this lesson? It has indeed been Everybody's War, a war of the millions of men in the ranks, who were "common soldiers" only, because heroism and bravery were so universal. It was not a war of special heroes, of generals, of Napoleons. Despite the splendid strategy of the unified command, the

War was won in the ranks and in the trenches. It was a war of the common man, and it is the world of the common man. Man as man is so infinitely and absolutely great in himself and his inborn potentialities, that no wealth, title, or privilege can add to his true greatness, and no poverty, oppression, or enslavement can detract from it.

The contending armies in Europe were the world's manhood at war. Contrast with these men the professional armies and paid adventurers of other days. Wellington complained that his army was "the scum of the earth." Our boys were the salt of the earth. They were our own sons and brothers.

The writer recalls a scene on Salisbury Plain during the second year of the War. A great army was passing in review before the King. There were generals, officers of every rank, civilians, statesmen, and notables, but the greatest man on the field that day was "Tommy Atkins." Time and again our eyes were misty as we watched those columns march past, men who, in a few days, were to fight and die in the mud of Flanders or in the shambles of the Somme. They paid the price. They won the War. They are the men who need our consideration as they return to the difficult economic conditions that follow the War. We need the same faith in the toilers of industry as in the men in the trenches, in the man behind the machine as in the man behind the gun. There may be more romance in the trenches, there is more need in the slums of our great cities.

Second, a new social justice at home and abroad. If these men are of infinite value, and of equal worth with ourselves, then unless we are to revert to the sordid level of class selfishness, there must be a new and better social order. The health and happiness of the world must not be for the privileged few but for all men, if this is to be Everybody's World. God must have meant it to be so if He is not a class God of special privilege for the Germans or ourselves. We can see clearly in distant Germany that it is not social justice if crushed masses of men must toil, subject to the "divine right" of a privileged Kaiser, who, while his people fight to keep soul and body together to avoid starvation, can have his own palaces filled with food and luxury. But can we see with equal clearness the social injustice of our own conditions at home? We have lived so long in a land of plenty, with relatively high wages, freedom of competition, and means for the swift amassing of large fortunes, that our national prosperity has obscured the vision of our own social injustice.

We have seen a privileged few in Prussia exploit the power of modern science, harnessed for destruction, for the selfish benefit of their dynastic ambitions. Have we eyes to see a like injustice if the privileged few in our own land hold for themselves the unearned increment of wealth, the enormous income from the possession of modern machinery, all the means of production, and the bulk of the nation's natural resources? We saw the Kaiser and the Prussian Junkers "stand pat" upon their inherited privileges. Do we also "stand pat" upon ours? Reader and writer, whether we will or no, we are alike members of the privileged class. This book will probably fall into no other hands. The vast majority of the toiling masses have neither the money, the education, the leisure, nor the opportunity to read our books, to attend our churches, to join our clubs.

We read, some time ago, in our daily papers of a vast fortune left without one penny to charity or human welfare, selfishly held in death as it had been held in life; while in another column of the same paper we read of the Stars and Stripes trampled upon to give place to the red flag of socialism. We read both, but do we see any connection between the two? Are we, any more than Prussian rnilitarists, able to read the signs of the time? In Russia, the swing of the pendulum from the perpendicular of equitable social justice to one extreme of the privileged class of Czarism, causes the reaction of its swing to the opposite extreme of Bolshevism, the selfish control of the unprivileged class. Bolshevism is only Czarism upside down. Both are the class rule of selfishness. Do we condemn the Kaiser and the Czar, < while we also cling fast to our own selfish privileges?

Do we realize that a selfish plutocracy may cause a selfish Bolshevism, as well as Czarism, Kaiserism, or militarism? Perhaps we do not realize that we have so many privileges that others lack. Is it social justice if, as Professor W. I. King maintains, two per cent of the people of our country hold sixty per cent of its wealth, while the sixty-five per cent of the people who are poor own only five per cent of the wealth? 2 If not, are we to seek a solution on the

2 According to Professor W. I. King, in "The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States," the "rich," two per cent of the people, own sixty per cent of the wealth. The "middle-class," thirty-three per cent of the people, own thirty-five per cent of the wealth. The "poor," sixty-five per cent of the people, own only five per cent of the wealth.

That is, 2,000,000 of the rich own twenty per cent more of the nation's wealth than all the other 100,000,000 together. According to the Immigration Commission of Congress in 1909, one-third of the American families were living on less than $500 for a family of five persons. One-fourth of the fathers were not earning enough to support their families.

The babies of the poor die at three times the rate of the wellto-do. One out of every twelve corpses in New York is buried in the "potter's field" at the expense of the city. From twelve to twenty per cent of the children in the large cities are underfed. Only one-third of them complete the grammar school and less than one-tenth the high school. Among the families of the workers thirty-seven per cent of the mothers are at work. Before the War one-fourth of the male workers earned less than $10 a week, over two-thirds of the women workers less than $8, and nearly one-half less than $6 a week. In the great basic industries the workers have been unemployed an average of one-fifth of the year. Approximately 35,000 persons a year are killed in American industry; at least half of these deaths, or 17,500, were preventable.

"Report of Commission on Industrial Relations" to Congress 1916, pp. 23-43.

basis of Christian principles, or leave it to Bolshevism to find a solution?

Is it social justice if, as Mr. Hunter 3 estimated before the War, 4,000,000 persons are dependent upon public relief in the United States, that another 4,000,000 are destitute, and that 10,000,000 have an income insufficient to keep them physically efficient for their work? As Oliver Cromwell wrote, "If there is anything that makes many poor, and makes a few rich, that suits not a commonwealth."

In one of the reconstruction meetings held by the allied soldiers in France, in an open debate, one of the soldiers in a camp where the writer was present voiced the sentiments of a small, unprivileged minority as follows: "What are we going to get after the War? We have learned the use of force and bombs, bayonets and rifles, for some purpose. Our real enemy is not Germany but capitalism. We are not going to fight for a shilling a day, and then go back to be taxed all our fives and toil, without a fair living wage, to support the privileged classes. We are going back to fight for our rights just as we fought against Germany." However ignorant or misguided, however wrong the means he advocated, the above speaker represents a class in every country, not only in Germany, Russia, and Britain, but in America as well. If we realize that we are in truth our brother's

3 Robert Hunter, "Poverty," quoted by Rauschenbusch in "Christianity and the Social Crisis." pp. 247, 263.

keeper, if we put ourselves in his place, can we honestly say that we would be satisfied if we had to live in his one-room tenement, to look daily in the faces of our own children stunted in their unhealthy surroundings, and to watch them grow up without those privileges in life which others so abundantly enjoy? If not, are we willing to do our part in securing a new social justice that will give every man his rights in Everybody's World?

Third, a new conception of the democracy of nations. We must believe not only in the inherent worth and rights of individuals but in those of nations as well. If we believe in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, if we hold that God has made of one blood all nations of men, then it must indeed be Everybody's World. Then there is no such thing as a permanently and essentially inferior race of men. There are backward and undeveloped races. There are immature races not yet come to their majority in self-government. There may be races which have deteriorated through an unfavorable environment. But the raw stuff of humanity is always great. 4 A

4 Prof. Franz Boas in "The Mind of Primitive Man" says: "We do not need to assume that ancient Europeans were more gifted than other races which have not become exposed to the influence of civilization until recent times . . . The data of anthropology teach a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, and that we should learn to look upon foreign races with greater sympathy, and with conviction, that, as all races have contributed in the past to the cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind, if given a fair opportunity." pp. 13, 17,288.

man or a nation possesses a divine inheritance, an inalienable birthright, a latent though often inarticulate longing for liberty, democracy, and righteousness. Treitschke's idea of nations, despised because they are small or weak, has been forever discredited by the War.

Henceforth the temporary government of one people by another must be regarded as a sacred trust for the welfare of the governed. In past times peoples were regarded as the spoil of war. Individuals and nations alike could be enslaved. The League of Nations proposes to give a mandate to certain powers which must render a strict account of their stewardship. But all other possessions are under a moral mandate from humanity. Colonies or possessions must be no longer fields for selfish exploitation, but for development toward self-determination. The searchlight of full publicity will be turned with all its fierce glare upon America's administration of the Philippines, upon Japan's responsibility in Korea, upon Britain's relation to India, Egypt, and Ireland, upon the colonies of France, the administration of Turkey and the Near East, the welfare and integrity of China. Neither America, Britain, nor Japan should be allowed to plunder or exploit China, because she is for the moment helpless. Fair protestations and platitudes will no longer hoodwink the public. The world is concerned for justice, not only in the former German colonies, but in all colonies. Has the War made us Pharisees and have we believed all our own propaganda? Can anyhonest man deny that there are other colonies and possessions governed more unjustly and selfishly than German colonies ever were? As Abraham Lincoln said, "You cannot fool all of the people all of the time." All the exploited peoples must henceforth have their place in Everybody's World.