Battle of the Standard

“ You make me sick, Kurt, with your perpetual whine about 'standardization.' Don't you suppose any other nation is 'standardized?' Is anything more standardized than England, with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing prig in Harris tweeds saying 'Right you are!' to every other prosperous ass? ”

“ Of this nature are the problems of strategy—those which confront a general in command of an army or of a detached portion of an army, and which are worked out on the map. The problems of the battle-field are of a different order. The natural characteristics which, when fortified by experience, carry men through any dangerous enterprise, win the majority of victories. But men may win battles and be very poor generals. They may be born leaders of men, and yet absolutely unfitted for independent command. ”

“ It is essential, therefore, that the same system should pervade the whole; that the formation and discipline of the militia of the continent should be absolutely uniform, and that the same species of arms, accoutrements, and military apparatus, should be introduced in every part of the United States. No one, who has not learned it from experience, can conceive the difficulty, expense, and confusion, which result from a contrary system, or the vague arrangements which have hitherto prevailed. ”

“ By what principle of morality or common sense were they justified in declining a particular service as too iniquitous for them and yet in holding themselves bound to the larger iniquity of an aggressive war? What right has a machine to choose or decide between good and bad any more than between just and unjust? ”

“ Before the Revolution, the action of the law was narrower, being chiefly limited to members of one class. With the fall of ancient privilege the sphere of competition was opened to the entire nation; and, instead of nobles contending with nobles, churchmen with churchmen, tradesmen with tradesmen, there was an interpenetration of combatants over all the field of battle, or rather, the several smaller fields of battle became one large one. ”

“ The Reform of the Metric System The defence must be active; then the attack would cease, and the French people, seeing its failure, would demand a reform of the system imposed on them; the other nations suffering under it would follow their example, if indeed the Teutonic peoples did not begin the reaction. ”

“ The battle that remained to be fought, and at once commenced, was between the Commons and the nobles; that is, between people doomed to poverty by the operation of law, and people who were prosperous at their expense. And as there were men who would perish from want while the laws remained unchanged, and others who would be ruined by their repeal, the strife was deadly. ”

“ Thus has the army of Right lost the services of many valiant soldiers. A better policy, I have learned, is to temporize; to shut one's eyes sometimes. By so doing one gains in strength until one becomes a power and is in a position to order lines of right action—"
"A dangerous policy, Nick," I interrupted. "By that time you will have connived so often with wrong that you are able no longer to combat it. Your moral fibre will have deteriorated and there will be nothing left of you but that which you have sacrificed all for—power." ”

“ Yet this is the very policy which the socialists have announced in their declaration of war against present-day society--to capture the political machinery of society and by that machinery destroy present-day society. ”

“ Even the two-power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. ”

“ In fact, those Governments claim that they are not permitted under these circumstances to adapt their policy concerning their armaments to what may be their own wishes, or to what they might consider good for the welfare of their people. Their necessities in this respect are determined, not by themselves, but by the performances of their neighbors and rivals. And so the ruinous competition goes on and on without end in sight, the moloch of militarism being insatiable. ”

“ But whoever considers, that the design of government is the good of the people, and the great improbability there is, that a people, in general, should be against measures calculated for their good, and that such measures only ought to be enforced, will look upon this as the idlest pretence. For rulers to use a military power, to enforce measures of a contrary tendency, is one of the wickedest and most unjustifiable kinds of offensive war ”

“ This shows that our military system is still susceptible of great reforms in favor of economy; but we dare not make them, because we cannot pay the army. I also said, twenty thousand men would be as many as we should stand in need of. The enemy have now less than this number within the States; and cannot, in the future progress of the war, have more.
An equal force, with the occasional aid of the militia, will confine them within one or two capital points; and this will be their defeat. But we have a further resource in the troops of our allies. ”

“ The power of raising armies, by the most obvious construction of the Articles of the Confederation, is merely a power of making requisitions upon the States for quotas of men. This practice, in the course of the late war, was found replete with obstructions to a vigorous, and to an economical system of defence. It gave birth to a competition between the States, which created a kind of auction for men. In order to furnish the quotas required of them, they outbid each other, till bounties grew to an enormous and insupportable size. ”

“ The ultimate conquest of the Class-State and its transformation is rendered all the easier to us through the divisions in the ranks of its defenders, who, despite the oneness of their interests against the common enemy, are perpetually at war with one another in the strife for plunder. ”

“ With the economic development of our industrial rivals their aggressive powers will steadily grow, and their ambition will grow with it. The burden of maintaining the two-Power standard at sea, as against France and Russia, and keeping up an army sufficient for the policing of the Empire, has already proved heavy enough. At the present moment we pay something like seventy millions a year for Imperial Defence. ”

“ How seldom do we hear a knowledge of strategy referred to as an indispensable acquirement in those who aspire to high command? How often is it repeated, although in so doing the speakers betray their own shortcomings, that strategy is a mere matter of common-sense? Yet the plain truth is that strategy is not only the determining factor in civilised warfare, but that, in order to apply its principles, the soundest common-sense must be most carefully trained. Of all the sciences connected with war it is the most difficult. ”

“ That impression that awards us credit, and challenges not only competition as equals, but commands that respect which an array or force of arms, situated as we are, can never force upon this or any nation whose interests are immediately identified with the institution of slavery—and the safety of that depending to an extent upon the crushing despotism and deprivations visited upon those dangerous to its progress or stability—is what we want to make ourselves felt. ”

“ As a result of this careful planning and training by the leaders 400,000 workingmen responded to Socialist colors with the precision of a trained army. The strike is both a battle and military review. The Socialists now have a clear and adequate view of their strength and numbers. ”

“ You I propose to move against Johnston′s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy′s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources. I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign, but simply lay down the work it is desirable to have done and leave you free to execute it in your own way. ”

“ I have resigned my claim to arrears of pay, that my argument may not be weakened. Then a peace establishment. Fancy leaving our frontiers to the mercy of state militia! I shall urge that the general government have exclusive power over the sword, to establish certain corps of infantry, artillery, cavalry, dragoons, and engineers, a general system of land fortifications, establishment of arsenals and magazines, erection of founderies and manufactories for arms, of ports and maritime fortifications—with many details with which I will not bore you. ”

“ Another extraordinary moral consequence flows from this insufficiency of defence: “If the enemy fails to defend his country, we may rightfully appropriate what we want.” Here, now, is a nice question of martial law or casuistry, solved with the simplicity of an ancient Roman. In other words, when in the enemy’s country, the army shall be strictly careful not to seize, capture or appropriate to military or private uses, any property—that it cannot get.
“They (the Southern people) have lost all title to property, and can lose nothing not already forfeited.” ”

“ For the first of these, with the world full of standing armies, every boundary line of nations fixed and held by the sword, and the traditions of four thousand years behind its customs, the framers of the convention, however earnest and devoted, could scarcely hope to find an immediate, if indeed, a perceptible mitigation. Only time, prolonged effort, national economics, universal progress and the pressure of public opinion could ever hope to grapple with this monster evil of the ages. ”

“ For what was the competitive system but a pitiless, all-involving combat for the means of life, the whole zest of which depended on the fact that there was not enough to go round, and the losers must perish or purchase bare existence by becoming the bondmen of the successful? Between a fight for the necessary means of life like this and a fight for life itself with sword and gun, it is impossible to make any real distinction. However, let us give the objection a fair hearing. ”

“ Up to August 1914 the chief difficulties in the way of army reformers were how to overcome the firmly-rooted ideas that preparations for war upon a great scale were not really necessary to security, and that, on those rare occasions when fighting might be necessary, it should not be undertaken by the most virtuous class of citizens, but by others whose lives had a lower value. ”

“ Strategy in one respect resembles mesmerism—the object operated upon must remain perfectly quiet. Are we never to suppose that the Rebels have plans, and that their vigilance increases, and will increase, in proportion to the extremity of their case? Our theorists and routine men move armies as a student practises at chess, as if the whole field was under their control, and both armies at their disposal. With our immense resources, vigorous fighting and practical common sense would speedily suppress the Rebellion. ”

“ Common sense, with which he was liberally supplied, told him that the only excuse for fighting was to uphold principles which were vital to the national life and the only way to have those principles upheld was to defeat those who opposed them and to do this he determined to use all the resources at his command. ”

“ We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether from actual war or the competition in armaments. ”

“ And it is hard to imagine a study more improving, more agreeable, or better adapted to a liberal mind, than to learn how, from a mere military system, formed and created by the necessities of a barbarous people, for the preservation of their conquests, a more extensive and generous model of government, better adapted to the natural liberties of mankind, took place; how, by degrees, as the danger from the vanquished subsided, the feudal policy opened her arms, and gradually received the most eminent of the conquered nation to make one people with their conquerors ”

“ Can we purchase freedom and independence by the sacrifice of thousands of our unfortunate people, in belligerent opposition to those who have the prëeminence in position, power and influence; whose numerical strength is ten times that of our own? We may sell our lives dearly, carry havoc and destruction into the ranks of our enemies, but the numerical preponderance, the unlimited means at their control, must force us to succumb or cease to exist on this continent as a race. ”

“ What we now want is the new form of law by which common men may regain the positions of industry, so long disturbed by the war.
I now apprehend that the rebel armies will disperse; and, instead of dealing with six or seven States, we will have to deal with numberless bands of desperadoes, headed by such men as Mosby, Forrest, Red Jackson, and others, who know not and care not for danger and its consequences. ”

“ They intended that the mass of the people should at all times assert and enforce their will, over-riding all temporary powers and superseding all appointed agents. As they had to fight the world with a divided population, they required that all power should be concentrated in the hands of those who acted in conformity with the popular will, and that those who resisted at home, should be treated as enemies. ”