Franklin Henry Giddings

“ Whatever fate has in store, you have risen to the pinnacle of earthly life, and borne your country with you. And you will be victorious. Your self-sacrifice, your courage, your whole-hearted faith in your sacred cause, and the unshaken certainty that, in defending your invaded country, you are defending the liberty of the world—all this assures me of your victory, young armies of the Marne and Meuse, whose names are graven henceforth in history by the side of your elders of the Great Republic. ”

“ French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a minority, a minority vitally interested in maintaining these hatreds; but our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty and that alone. The real tragedy, to one situated in the midst of the conflict and able to look down from the high plateaus of Switzerland into all the hostile camps, is the patent fact that actually each of the nations is being menaced in its dearest possessions—in its honor, its independence, its life. ”

“ If we have had to beat our plowshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilized garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.” ”

“ We must go further; we must throw open a peace which shall be other than a shadow of old wars and a prelude to new. We do more than plead with men to stay their hands from killing. We hail living men. As peace-lovers, we are charged with the sanctity of human life; as democrats and freemen we are charged with its sovereignty.
By the eight million natives of the warring States living among us without malice or assault one upon another, let us leave the occasions of fighting no longer for idle war boards to decide. ”

“ Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. ”

“ If Serbia is completely shut off from the sea, her wage-earners suffer as acutely as do her peasants. If Switzerland is surrounded by a wall of hostile tariffs, if Holland and England are deprived of their colonies, the loss is felt not only by great capitalists but by the man who works with a trowel or a lathe. The ultimate interests of German and British wage-earners are identical, but if their immediate interests conflict, there will grow up a spirit of nationalism in both countries, and wage-earners will clamor for a national policy which may lead to war. ”

“ Nothing shows this more clearly than the efforts of both parties engaged in war, of their ministers, chancellors, sovereigns, of the Kaiser himself turned journalist, to justify their own crimes, and denounce the crimes of their adversary at the invisible tribunal of humanity. Let this invisible tribunal be seen at last, let us venture to constitute it. Ye know not your moral power, O ye of little faith! If there be a risk, will you not take it for the honor of humanity? What is the value of life when you have saved it at the price of all that is worth living for?... ”

“ If they are capable of loving anything so abstract and complicated as the British Empire, or even the United States, they are not incapable of attaching themselves to a still larger State. For the moment it was evident that patriotism could embrace something more extensive and abstract than a village which a man might know personally, world organization ceased to be an idle dream. If men could be citizens of an empire scattered over all the seas, there was no longer anything inconceivable about their becoming citizens of a State which covered modern civilization. ”

“ In spite of this, these protests against war are destined to succeed; as once before in the history of the race, the sentiment of pity, of respect for human life, called a halt to senseless slaughter.
There came a time in the history of the Greek and Jewish people when a few set their faces against human sacrifice as a religious rite of their highest faith,—bound up, like our wars, with old fealties and solemn customs and with their most desperate fears. Humble men and women, out of sheer affection for their kind, revolted. ”

“ PACIFISM AND THE LEAGUE OF PEACE
Peace is not mere non-resistance.
In short, we have little faith in a pacifism which is mere laissez-faire, in the doctrine that peace is the vacuum created by the absence of war. Peace is something more original than that. It is a great construction, of infinite complexity, which will be aided but not consummated by good intentions. It involves dangers, failures, disappointments. The interests of the world are interwoven, and no nation can work for peace by adopting counsels of perfection in a policy of isolation. ”

“ From all these points of view, it is evidently the most horrible calamity that has ever befallen the human race, and the most crucial trial to which civilization has been exposed. It is, and is to be, the gigantic struggle of these times between the forces which make for liberty and righteousness and those which make for the subjection of the individual man, the exaltation of the State, and the enthronement of physical force directed by a ruthless collective will. It threatens a sweeping betrayal of the best hopes of mankind.
The real causes of the war. ”

“ By that tedium and monotony of life and labor for vast companies of people, which when war drums sound, goads the field worker to forsake his harvest and the wage-earner to leap from his bench, we hold that the ways of peace should be so cast as to make stirring appeal to the heroic qualities in men, and give common utterance to the rhythm and beauty of national feeling. ”

“ Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plow, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. ”

“ The English-speaking people of the world are together the largest body of human beings among whom a nearly complete intellectual and moral understanding is already achieved. They have reached high attainments in science and the arts, in education, in social order, in justice. They are highly organized, they cherish the traditions of their common history. To permit anything to endanger the moral solidarity of this nucleus of a perfected internationalism would be a crime unspeakable. To strengthen it, to make it one of the supreme forces working for peace and humanity is a supreme obligation. ”

“ Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport, in which the partners change about from century to century—no end, until the whole of humanity is exhausted thereby?
The cowardice of fatalism!
The rulers who are the criminal authors of these wars dare not accept the responsibility for them. Each one by underhand means seeks to lay the blame at the door of his adversary. The peoples who obey them submissively resign themselves with the thought that a power higher than mankind has ordered it thus. Again the venerable refrain is heard: “The fatality of war is stronger than our wills.” ”

“ Every nation to a greater or less extent has an imperialism of its own, and whether it be military, financial, feudal, republican, social, or intellectual, it is always the octopus sucking the best blood of Europe. Let the free men of all the countries of Europe when this war is over take up again the motto of Voltaire: “Ecrasons l’infâme!” ”

“ The economic organization of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and government—the economic man, with his far-sighted vision and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and peoples. No man can say how many generations must pass before the platitudes of the market and the exchange pass into the current language of politics. ”

“ The people want no conquest of land, they want peace. If the war is not to go on indefinitely until all the nations are completely exhausted, some one of the Powers involved must stretch out the hand of peace. Upon Germany, which has successfully defended itself against superior forces, and which has frustrated the plan to bring it to starvation, rests the duty of taking the first steps toward peace. In the name of humanity and civilization, and recognizing the favorable military position which our brave troops have won, we urge the Government to try to end the struggle. ”

“ Decent men in the belligerent countries feel a natural repugnance in time of war to any discussion of the economic bearings of the struggle. If nations are to fight with clear consciences and single hearts, they must fight on in the belief that any objects which concern their statesmen beyond the objects of defense and national security are purely idealistic. We are all pragmatists in wartime; we believe what will conduce to victory. Cool observers see clearly the widening out of an immense range of colonial, imperial, and economic issues which will confront us at the settlement and after it. ”

“ But let her not impose that life on unwilling Poles and Finns. The English, in history, have been as guilty as other nations of sacrificing nationality to the supposed exigencies of the State. But of late they have been learning their lesson. Let them learn it to the end. Let no community be coerced under British rule that wants to be self-governing. The British have had the courage, though late, to apply this principle to South Africa and Ireland. There remains their greatest act of courage and wisdom—to apply it to India. ”

“ Of all the nations taking part in the present war, Great Britain is the only one which does not maintain a conscript army; but, on the other hand, Great Britain is the earliest modern claimant of world-empire by force, with the single exception of Spain, which long since abandoned that quest. Every one of these nations except little Servia has yielded to the lust for empire. Every one has permitted its monarch or its Cabinet to carry on secret negotiations liable at any time to commit the nation to war, or to fail in maintaining the peace of Europe or of the Near East. ”

“ Lowes Dickinson attempts to point the moral of the war and to offer a way out. His theory is that wars are made by governments without the consent and against the interest of their subjects; they are made because the governmental mind is obsessed with the illusion that States are “natural enemies,” that they have always been so and always will be, that force is the only arbiter between them. This fantasy of the governing caste, says Mr. Dickinson, is what rules the State, and through control of foreign policy and the press drags the population to slaughter. ”

“ There can, indeed, be no security for future peace in Europe until every European nation recognizes the fact that there is to be no such thing in the world as one dominating nation—no such thing as world-empire for any single nation—Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, or China. ”

“ It will doubtless be objected that there is a world of difference between the occasional willingness of a group of Powers to take concerted action upon a particular occasion, for which each reserves full liberty of determination as to whether and to what extent it will cooperate, and the proposal before us. It is absurd, we shall be told, to expect that States bred in the sense of sovereignty and military pride will seriously entertain a proposal which may bring them into war in a quarrel not specifically theirs and compel them to furnish troops to serve under an international staff. ”

“ One cannot imagine saying to some foreign State, “Our troops are killing yours, they are invading your land, we are supplying them with recruits and munitions of war, but otherwise we are at peace with you. You must treat us as a neutral, and accord to our citizens, to their commerce and property, all the rights of neutrality.” In short the plan of an international police force involves all the consequences of the proposal of a league to enforce peace, with other complex provisions extremely hard to execute. ”

“ It is useless to fortify our new European organism by guarantees of the old order, because we cannot fortify such guarantees themselves against the sovereign national State. Whenever it chooses, the sovereign unit can shatter the international mechanism by war. We are powerless to prevent it: all we can do is to abandon our direct attack, and look for the causes which impel States to a choice as terrible for themselves as for their victims. ”

“ It was Britain, France and Germany that Jean Jaurès would have united in a League of Peace. At the parting of the ways the clear-sighted idealist has always understood that the choice is not between war and that sort of peace which is only a negation of war. The choice in both these crises lay between shattering war and constructive peace, between an open and destructive enmity and a peace based on a common will and an active partnership. ”