FEAR GOD AND TAKE YOUR OWN PART.*
Ma. ROOSEVELT has never carried war more hotly into the camp of the pacificists than in this volume of papers and addresses for which Pear dad and 7'ake roar 0 WIT Part. By Theodore Itoorey:11. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 17s. Gd. net.' he has taken as title some familiar words from Borrow. It is common form to talk of paeifieists as though they erred only through an excess of humanity, and to go on to a ssume that therefore their gospel, though futile and even dangerous, is in a high degree forgivable. The very word "pacificism" has an amiable sound, and one is tempted to feel a clumsy brute for ridiculing what it represents. But Mr. Roosevelt will have nothing to do with such tolerance. He finch in pacified= a grave mere' defect; on the one hand, an unwillingness to support the right by the only means by which criminal men will allow it to lie supported, and on the other hand a cowardly willingness t profit by the- protection which other men provide at their own bodily risk. If this is not wickedness as judged by the ordinary standard of conduct, asks Mr. Roosevelt in effect, what is ? We are bound to say. that we-ean see not the smallest flaw in his argument. We do not forget the Quakers and the respect which we still feel that we owe to them, but there are hundreds of thousands of pacificists who have not been born into a body of pacific religious opinion and been nurtured in it by those from whom they drew their earliest teaching, nor have they even sincerely acquired pacific convictions on religious grounds. There are pacificists who have reached their conclusions by a perverted political ratiocination, and it is towards these that we do not feel called upon to exercise more patience than towards other politicians who base their conduct on a cowardly denial of responsibility. The events of the past two years have proved that there are in this world nations which, while professing a mission of Kultur, are in fact assassins, rapers. and tyrants, and no one has even suggested a practical way of delivering the world from their depredations except by the use of force. In these circumstances those who develop a political theory that civilization need not be protected are traitors to the system under which they live, and in our opinion deserve all the hard words Mr. Roosevelt uses of them. The Great War is being fought not for such causes as most wars in history have been fought, but simply to police the world. What is one to say of those who, even on their own plea that they are citizens of the world, refuse to rally to the side of law and order and aid the hard-pressed p olice who are trying to suppress murder in the streets ? They are evil citizens. Indeed, citizenship could not be degraded to lower depths, and no form of fair words can disguise that plain fact from those who will face the issue There is another reflection which Mr. Rooaevelt's book arouses in us. If before the war we were too tolerant of a wholly irresponsible political creed, we wore also too gentle in dealing with those who, though not pacificists, were tinged with pacificism. One of the most disastrous doctrines in the world is that, though you may prepare to defend your- self, you must not let your preparations go so far as to make pee secure. According to some, it is proper to spend just enough to make your failure almost certain. Was there ever a madder doctrine ? You de not accomplish what you profess to have in view, and therefore you wantonly waste your money. If those who object to heavily under- insuring the national house when it is known that incendiaries are walking about in the garden, urge that the house should be insured for the full amount, they are said to be preaching panic. At least, such things have happened in the past. A distinguished economist wrote a book to show that whenever an attempt had been made to provide complete security against war, and war had not followed, the nation had been the victim of a " panic " and had thrown away ita money. That the preparations may have prevented war was nowhere admitted or suggested. As well might one say that when you have insured yourself against accidents, and no accident happens to you, you have thrown away your money. It is almost incredible that grave students should think it worth while to lay all their historical knowledge under con- tribution to produce hooka full of such rubbish, but these things, as we said, have happened. We hope that it may be much more difficult for them to }klippen in future. We shall cease, we trust, to be tolerant of the half-insurers. They always had an easy, and not unpopular. argument at. their service, when they said that we must not provoke. other countries—that we must avoid " militaristic " display and a threatening attitude. Well, let us compare the results of a "militar- istio" policy and a fairly " pacific " policy as seen in the management of American affairs. Let us compare the results of Mr. Roosevelt's policy and the results of Mr. Wilson'. Mr. Roosevelt draws the con- trast himself, and be perfectly entitled to do so. When Mr. Roosevelt was President, the American Navy was the second in the world, and he himself was said to be always brandishing a thick stick. But the fact was that no other country cared to attack him, or bully him, or even insult him. We do not say that the safety of the United States lay in the "militaristic "words which Mr. Roosevelt thought it right to use. Other men might have made such preparations as he did, and even much more, and have used milder language during the process. The language of one man, though he be head of a nation, will not often bring about war, for the causes of war lie deeper. The words Mr. Roosevelt some- times used to flutter the..dovecotea were indeed accidental, and almost a matter of indifference. His, secret was that he 'prepared. His preparations gave him safety. As President he never went to war, and was never in sorioua danger of going to war. He has had personal experience of war and hates it. He is a true lover of peace, and seeks peace and 011.5110.3 it in the only practical way. Mr. Wilson, on the other hand, allowed it for some time to be thought that he would do almost anything rather than fight. The result is that he has 'been in continual danger. of war. As Mr.- Roosevelt says, Mr. Wilson wont to
war with Mexico in order to :rapport a bandit chief of his choice against another bandit chief of whom he disapproved; but of course (though he went through the highly "militaristic)" proceeding of demanding that the Mexicans should salute the American flag) he did not call the expe- dition "war." Mr. Roosevelt considers that after that war—real war, admitted war—became inevitable because the Mexicans thought that they were free to do more or less as they pleased. We see the sequel to-day. A small American expeditionary force has marched into one of the most difficult and dangerous countries in the world, and we who are friends of America look on with intense anxiety. War was inevitable in any case, but it has come now in a worse form and at a much worse moment than need have been. So again in the rela- tions of the United States and Germany. Mr. Roosevelt points out that, while Mr. Wilson has talked of avoiding war with Germany, Germany has actually made war on Americans. She has caused their factories and bridges to be destroyed and their workers to riot, and she has murdered them on the high seas. Thus may the horrors of war be partly endured while the word " war " is banished from the polite conversation of statesmen.
Mr. Roosevelt states the number of non-combatants killed by the Germans at sea in a striking comparison which we must quote :— "Many hundreds of Americans were among the passengers, and a couple of hundred of these, including many women and childrn, 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 Ameri- can and on the British side. It is over double the number of lives lost by the British Navy in Nelson's throe great victories, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of the Nile, and the Battle of the Baltic, com- bined. 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 suffered 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 warnings with him ; for he dwells in a. land of sham and of make-believe."
As for the policy—fortunately defeated—of warning Americans not to travel in armed merchantmen, Mr. Roosevelt says :— " 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 scien- tific 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."
This volume is the most remarkable attack on pacificism yet pub- lished. It refines all moral questions down to a single and very simple question. In our judgment, there can be only one honest answer to that question—with the reservation as to genuinely religious scruples which we made above. We hope that Mr. Roosevelt's book will be widely read here. No work could be more vitally relevant to the Problems which arise out of the war. Let Englishmen read it and then ask themselves whether Mr. Roosevelt is less just to all pacificists than he is to those of his own country when he writes :—
" 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 went 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 phylacteries and uttered long prayers in public, but did not lift a finger to lighten the load of the oppressed." a • —
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