heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an
active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance
and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.

It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation
of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You
dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that
the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly
sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to
attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you.
The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are
compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the
effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for
the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the
communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of
the common cup--or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the
common basin. The second stage is denominated _microbophobia
alarmans_.

The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage,
but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful
resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the
interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is
known to science as _microbophobia parentum_; in popular parlance, the
baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first
thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The
Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of
Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club,
and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his
beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope--and he
_will_ kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the
water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in
before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the
baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the
child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the
risks you ran in _your_ childhood. Having read that mothers are
subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain
source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use
pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients
which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a
sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a
room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a
sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in
which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual
playthings--nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due
provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the
little mouth.

In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to
touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the
library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or
anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific
suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink
from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and
you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which
contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the
feet by which the juice was trodden out.

The fourth stage is known as _microbophobic moscophobia_, which is the
pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of
infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half
hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found,
cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement
pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your
interiors--that is, the interiors of your house--every six months. You
read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and
malaria in Italy--distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't
mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or
yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and
avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.

In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on
account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave
off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street
sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not
cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in
your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters
cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted
against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You
realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never
occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of
your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own
comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.

By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has
decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored,
unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to
yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say
they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two
hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"--and you don't
laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend
to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't
worry--there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"

In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually
uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey
to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency
of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the
difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the
money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you
entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you
continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions--and worry
more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into
_delirium microbophobicum_, which is as much more awful than
_delirium tremens_ as microbes are smaller and more insidious and
wiser than serpents.

The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were
alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity,
and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the
essayist on Man, and say:

      Lo, the poor professor, whose untutored mind
      Saw microbes in the clouds, and heard them in the wind.

But they were saved. One night the professor's wife dreamed that a
monster centipedal microbe slowly let himself down from the ceiling,
and enveloped her in his hundred long wriggling legs. She awoke
screaming, to find herself enmeshed in the mosquito bar.

The next day they called another doctor. Hitherto, their doctors
themselves had been infected, though neither they nor their patients
knew it. But this time they were more fortunate; Dr. Goodenough had
been attacked by the disease, had made a brilliant recovery, and
consequently was immune.

He listened to the history of their cases, gave them a thorough
examination, using his new instrument, the cranioscope--of course more
for the purpose of inspiring confidence in his patients than to find
out anything; for he well knew what ailed them.

"Don't be alarmed," he finally said. "You really _are_ in a bad state;
but I give you my word for it that you will recover. I find your
_sensus communis_ all but disappeared. A little more excitement like
that of last night, and you might have a hemorrhage--and there you
are! Now put yourself entirely in my hands, or I'll not answer for the
consequences."

He reached for his prescription blank, and after a few moments handed
them a bit of unintelligible writing--the sort that only doctors and
their druggist partners can interpret. As I happen to be in the
secret, I may tell you that the prescription called for three fluid
ounces of city water, not distilled, with two drops of aniline, a drop
of nux vomica, a lump of sugar, and a teaspoonful of whiskey, and
that the druggist charged them a dollar and seventy-five cents.

"Begin taking immediately," said the doctor impressively. "Take two
drops and a half in a half glass of boiled water every three hours
from six a. m. to nine p. m. And you must go into the country
to-morrow morning, and spend your whole vacation there.... Leave
orders for your magazines and journals of all kinds to be held here,
tell your friends they are to write you under no circumstances, and
don't dare to come back to town on any errand whatsoever. Cut loose
from everything! Delay is dangerous, and might be fatal."

The professor and his wife didn't dare to disobey. The doctor was a
vigorous and imposing personality, and he had terrified them. They
didn't know what a _sensus communis_ was, even though the professor
was a Latinist; the doctor had disguised the term by using the English
pronunciation, and imagination contributed the usual amount to the
impressiveness of his words.

So they packed up all their pasteurizers and sterilizers and
disinfectors and bottles and screens and other antiseptic
paraphernalia, and drove into the country to a farm fifteen miles away
from any car-line or railroad, where there was no telephone or other
connection with the scene of their unhappiness.

They hadn't got out of sight of the town before they began to feel
differently. No one but a college professor knows how big his
institution seems while he is within its precincts, and how small and
insignificant when he is out of sight of it. The tension left their
bodies and minds, and a balmy sense of repose and freedom succeeded.

But they felt a shock when, just as their carriage disappeared from
view over the hill on its return, they saw two dogs and a half dozen
cats on the porch of the farmhouse, noticed that the well was not more
than ninety feet from the pigpen, whereas all the journals said it
should be one hundred, and became sensible of the drowsy murmur of
swarms of flies about the kitchen door, attracted thither by a barrel
which was wide open--and smelled!

That was not all, however. Fortune seemed against them. It was bad
enough for themselves, though they could sterilize their drinking
water and pasteurize their milk, and exercise many other of their
wonted precautions; but when it came to the baby, they were almost
powerless. Watch him as they would, he was continually getting into
unhygienic predicaments of the most dreadful description. Before they
even entered the house, he had grasped one dog by the tail, and been
thrown down by the other, as a mere mark of welcome; and when he got
up, crying, in the instinctive effort to console himself of course he
resorted to the habit of sucking his fingers, and put into his mouth
two of those on the hand which had grasped the tail. The next moment,
too, he was licked all over the nose and mouth by the repentant dog
that had knocked him off his feet. Horrors!

And then the cats followed him into the house, and rubbed against his
legs and licked his fingers, while he gave little screams of delight
at the novel sensation. At supper, he toddled to the table in advance
of the rest, and before his mother realized his intentions, had an
unsterilized spoon in his mouth; and after supper he succeeded in
browbeating the baby of the house, who was a month or so younger, and
more timid than his experienced guest from the city, into giving up
his gum.

The professor and his wife were horrified, but helpless. He went on in
that way for a week. They simply could not keep track of him. He drank
out of the horse-trough, dabbled in the puddles, consorted with pigs
and chickens, shared his bread with the dogs and his milk with the
cats, picked up crumbs from the dining-room sweepings, looked upon
half rotten, muddy, and fly-specked apples found on the lawn as the
greatest of prizes, and reveled in delight with old scraps of rags and
hats and shoes which he, with the little country comrade under his
leadership, resurrected from the most unlikely and unsanitary places.

The frightened and powerless parents read up again on the periods of
incubation of all the microbes mentioned in the books. They could at
least be ready with plans to meet whatever came, and cope with it at
the earliest possible moment.

But it didn't come. At the end of two weeks nothing had happened. The
child slept well and ate all he could get, and was in the best of
spirits. At the end of three weeks he had gained four pounds. It was
in direct and flagrant violation of all reason and all science, and
thoroughly incomprehensible; but what could you do?

After much marvelling at the failure of science, however, they
concluded to make a virtue of what was plainly a necessity, and gave
the baby the freedom of the farm. And more than that; after a decent
period of worrying, they too began to tread the primrose path, and let
the little child lead them. They drank unsterilized milk and unboiled
water, threw all precaution to the winds, rough-and-tumbled with the
boys and dogs on the lawn, napped under the trees unprotected from
flies and mosquitoes, ate apples with the skins and all, and without
even washing them, went fishing in the creek a mile away up the marsh,
and when overcome by blazing thirst drank of the water in the stream,
played peg and got their mouths full of dirt, drew pictures for the
children on the slate and erased them in the old familiar way--and did
all the other reckless things they had done in their own childhood,
when the microbe had not yet made a stir in the world, when _delirium
tremens_ was still the worst example of pathological misfortune, and
nervous prostration had not yet spread to the masses.

When they returned to the city, clothed and in their right minds, they
brought with them the half emptied medicine bottle, and charged
smiling Dr. Goodenough with duplicity. He charged _them_--

Well, we shall not say what he charged them. Whatever it was, they
engaged him for the next baby, and were grateful to him ever
afterward. And as for microbes, before having to do with them in the
future, they resolved to let them come at least half way.

THE STANDING INCENTIVES TO WAR

Each civilized nation protects itself from war by being ready at any
moment to fight any other nation. Each other nation is supposed to be
charged with the spirit of aggression, and it is supposed that that
spirit can be allayed only by steadily increasing the risks involved
in attack.

The modern War System has grown up unconsciously, by way of using war
as a protection against war. The principle is that of fighting the
devil with fire. As each nation, Great Britain beginning it, has
increased its fighting material so as to assure its superiority over
all rivals, so has each rival doubled its own armament with the same
impossible ambition. All this has increased until the greatest
security against war lies in the absolutely ruinous cost with which
war is prosecuted.

The average man in England, France and Germany still believes, with
more or less insistence, that patriotism goes with armor plate. The
fact that there exists no enemy who wishes to attack, or cares to
attack, or hopes to attack, or could afford to attack, or would gain
anything whatever by attack, counts for little in this discussion. It
is always best to be on the safe side, and the money it costs is cheap
insurance against burning seaports and plundered banks. The enemy will
strike when he dares, but not against an odds of 2 to 1 or even 5 to
3. As the enemy swells his equipment to correspond, each nation is
therefore certainly in immediate and imminent danger; its safety lies
in more armed men and armored ships; and in each nation all resources
of borrowing, taxation, and conscription must be strained, that the
enemy may continue to realize that the odds are still against him.

To the observer on the outside, all this rests on a series of
chimeras, the product for the most part of men financially interested
in the war system itself. The war scares, the wars of talk but not of
action, which sweep over Europe, would be ridiculous but for their
baleful consequences.

And now we come to the secret springs of all this. The elements of the
War System are not only armies and navies, but also war traders,
armament builders, money lenders, the recipients of special
privileges, the corrupt portion of the press, and all others drawn
into its service by choice, by interest, or by necessity.

About war scares and war equipment, matters inherent in the War
System, centre the grossest exhibitions of human greed. Those who
scent from afar "the cadaverous odor of lucre" have for the most part
furnished war's dominant motive.

The cost of it all, the war and the War System, is spread over the
whole world. It is felt by you and by me and by everyone, in the
rising price of all articles of necessity. The world, to the degree in
which it is civilized, has become an economic unit. Whatever wastes
its substance here or there, robs your pocket and mine.

It is among officers of the army and navy, especially those retired
from active service, that we find the most ardent apologists for war.
To this end they are trained, and in Europe alone they find
justification for particular wars, as well as arguments for war in
general as a means of securing peace. They can be counted on for
scares or warnings in every case when petty differences arise.

Nowhere does the military class seem to have any thought or care for
ways or means. Economic preparations, the saving of money, or even the
ability to borrow it, counts for nothing with the militarist, to whom
the need to avert war by war outweighs all other considerations.

There have been in all countries many noble exceptions to this point
of view, great soldiers who have confessed with General Sherman, that
they are "sick and tired of war," its "moonshine" glories and its
cruel realities. There are in the service of every great nation
generals and admirals whom every lover of peace is proud to honor. But
the rank and file are creatures of the system, and as such their
influence is felt on the side of war and waste. The advocates of
"peace by preponderance," of peace through risk, of peace through
assured victory, must be counted on the side of war.

The character of the service journals in every nation shows this to be
true. Presumably these periodicals meet the demands made on them, and
each and every one, so far as I know, is a purveyor of war scares, an
advocate of expenditure, and an agency in behalf of the war system and
all of its ramifications.

But the central force of the War System does not lie with the war
makers but with the great war traders. We may never underrate a power
which has such "big money" behind it. The manufacturers of war
implements the world over form, through "interlocking directorates"
and through other means, a gigantic coöperating international trust,
perhaps the most powerful, because certainly the most profitable,
organization of its kind in the world. It is the more efficient and
the more dangerous because, alone among great trusts, it has a
privileged character as the exponent of the highest patriotism, of the
great fundamental duty of "National Defense."

The methods of organization of the syndicates for war, and of their
influence on national expenditures, have been lately set forth in
detail in two remarkable papers, the one by George Herbert Perris of
London, entitled "The War Traders," the other by Francis Delaisi of
Paris, entitled "Le Patriotisme des Plaques Blindées," (the
Patriotism of Armored Plates).

Mr. Perris tells us of the affairs of the great British companies--the
Armstrong-Whitworth Corporation, the Vickers, the John Brown, the
Cammell-Laird and the Coventry Arms Company, with their allies,
tentacles and satellites feeding the patriotism, under many flags, of
nearly half the globe. Delaisi's memoir tells of the Krupps and other
concerns in Germany, and of the Creusots and similar armament trusts
in France.

The capital invested in all the British firms amounts to about
$250,000,000, the dividends ranging each year from 7-1/2% to 15% of
the capital stock. In this industry, ten per cent. is a satisfactory
return, counting stockholders, employees, soldiers and pensioners. Mr.
Perris claims that "it is probable that 1,500,000 adult able-bodied
men, one in six of the occupied adult males in the United Kingdom,
shares to some extent in the 73,000,000 pounds ($365,000,000) a year
which 'National Defense' now costs us." Besides the minor outgoes
which form a sort of bribe money to the general public, the
distribution of dividends affects a smaller but most influential
class. In the share lists of the Armstrong-Whitworth company, Mr.
Perris finds the names of 60 noblemen or noble families, 15 baronets,
20 knights, 8 members of parliament, 20 officers of army or navy, and
8 journalists. Shareholding in the war syndicates and membership in
the naval league go together. But rich and poor are alike affected by
the large returns. "Militarism is strong in England because Lazarus
gets some poor pickings from the feast of Dives."

These great companies especially promote the patriotism of Great
Britain, but they are controlled by no narrow nativism. Under other
flags the same people develop the same noble sentiments. These British
corporations, individually or coöperating, maintain three ship
building companies in Canada: hence the recent movement for a Canadian
navy, to be built in Canadian Yards. They have five tentacles or
subsidiary companies in Italy, (Pozzuoli, Ansaldo, Odero, Terni, and
Orlando), one in Spain (Ferrol), one in Portugal, and one in Japan.
"Time was when Englishmen bled for Portugal; now our old-time ally
must bleed for us." The relations of these British trusts with similar
groups in other countries are most close and friendly. In the "Harvey
United Steel Company" (wound up in 1911), we find them in
international combination with the Bethlehem Steel Plant in
Pennsylvania, the Creusot company in France, and the Essen and
Dillingen concerns in Germany, with a similar international
combination of supporting banks. "In forty years," observes Perris,
"all the Peace Societies have not succeeded in effecting such a
Franco-German reconciliation as this. In the share list (of this
company) Mr. Newbold found the names of one British general and two
major generals, and behind these were the shadowy figures of a vast
host of princes, peers, ministers of the Crown, soldiers, sailors and
clerics. A veritable Brotherhood in Arms! I cannot believe that the
Harvey United Steel Company is really dead. Somewhere it surely has
had a glorious resurrection! Under some metamorphoses it lives and
works to prove the pettiness of national prejudice and the ease of
forgetting such sores as Alsace-Lorraine, when men have learned the
golden wisdom of 'good business.'"

A needed accessory of such good business is a series of commercial
agents, "the strong silent men," who frequent every court of Europe.
Incidental to their work of making sales, is to _create_ a market.
This is done by means of the recurrent war scares. A third element of
importance is the reiteration of the constant fact that only the
latest inventions can serve in war, and that all former purchases
should be "scrapped" as rapidly as possible. Were it not for the
scrapping process, the world's market for implements of destruction
would be speedily glutted. The machinery of war has reached such
marvelous perfection and such an acme of cost that the work of a day
may bankrupt a whole nation. The issue of a campaign may be decided by
the control of a single murderous invention. Thus science has been
called into the service of war, to a degree that inspires the hope
that, by carrying its risks to madness, it makes war virtually
impossible. But meanwhile the expenses go on.

And under such influences half the people of England, let us
say--professors, business men, manufacturers, workingmen, heads of
colleges, and dignitaries of the church, with nine-tenths of the army
and navy, are agents, conscious or unconscious, of the British
armament trust. The greater the stock of weapons, the newer and more
varied the instruments of physical defense, the more pitiful and more
persistent are the fears of invasion. A most striking example of the
collective cowardice of a great but over-armed nation, made up of men
individually brave, is found in the fear to open a tunnel under the
British Channel. Every need of commerce, of travel, of the
friendliness with France, demands the removal of a most unpleasant and
expensive obstacle. Nowhere in the world is there tolerated another
such stumbling block in the way of a gigantic traffic, as that of the
present system of crossing the English Channel. And yet half of
England cries out against the simple remedy, lest, having over-powered
Northern France, the German hordes should come pouring into Dover,
before the watchman at the portcullis should have time to drop the
gates.

The triumph of the war trades in Germany has been even more rapid and
complete than in Great Britain. By the system of interlocking
directorates, the house of Krupp is in alliance with all centres of
German finance. The army, the aristocracy, the ministry, the armament
syndicates, are all bound together in that mailed-fist coöperation in
which the power of Germany seems to lie. The King of Prussia himself
inherited from his august grandfather stock in the Krupp concern to
the amount of five million of thalers, an investment now estimated at
about $12,000,000.

The House of Krupp by various means has placed itself at the summit of
German war patriotism, and it has made most thrifty use of its
opportunities. It employs 250,000 persons, 60,000 of these on salary;
5,000 engineers. It maintains, according to Delaisi, a great hotel,
the Essenerhof, "l'Auberge de la Mort," in which are entertained most
royally all emissaries of all nations who come as purchasing agents of
tools of death. Its specialty is "National Defense," and "Defense not
Defiance" is said to be the "international code signal."

In France "armor plate patriotism" is sustained by the same methods,
and in part by the same money. The leading industries bear the names
of Creusot, Homicourt, and Châtillon-Commentry. A special feature of
the French system, not unknown to the others, is its free use of
representatives of the army and navy. Some twenty admirals and
generals have left the public service for the better paid work of
selling guns and ships. This transfer of allegiance is said to be
"perfectly legal," but it is also dangerous to the morale of the
public service. And it is to these men that we owe most of the
militant revival of French war patriotism, which had lain dormant from
the time of the "Affaire Dreyfus," to that of the "Affaire Agadir."

As to the war-syndicates in the United States, little that is definite
is on record. Like conditions produce like results. The Secretary of
the Navy, Mr. Daniels, reports the existence of a combination among
the three chief producers of armor plate in America, the Midvale,
Bethlehem, and Carnegie Companies. He is reported as saying: "When
this administration came into office, we found that the Navy was
apparently, or, so we were assured, hopelessly, at the mercy of the
three big steel corporations, who submitted practically identical bids
for armor forgings and other materials, and then divided the work
between them to suit themselves." As a result of this condition, the
Secretary rejected their bids, and by going outside, recorded a saving
of $500,000 on the battleship in question.

Behind the war traders, stand their allies, the finance houses who
lend money for the war system. These are not bankers, rather
pawnbrokers, dealing in the credit of nations for a certain per cent.,
according to the straits in which the borrower finds himself. The
banking system of London avoids this class of risks. Paris is now the
centre of the system, and it is usually stipulated with every foreign
war loan that the materials it covers should be bought in Paris. In
earlier times, before the great nations had borrowed to the limit, the
heads of these finance houses as "Masters of Europe" exerted great
personal influence, permitting or forbidding wars. Of recent years
this personal power has greatly dwindled, as joint stock companies of
greater capital and more or less impersonal management, have largely
taken their place. The present influence of the money-lenders is
against war, but in favor of the war system. Minor wars it permits or
even encourages, but these have their risks. The second Balkan war,
unforeseen and undesired, is said to have entailed a loss of some
$30,000,000 to the Paris backers of Bulgaria.

Interlocking with the finance houses are the great exploiting
corporations of the world, operating mostly in the backward nations of
the tropics. These "interests" are often all-powerful in foreign
affairs. They are frequently able to control the operations of the
foreign offices to such a degree that the foreign policy of a great
nation is often but the expression of their will. The desire for
colonial expansion, the "mirage of the map," is a reflection of these
interests, and most "imperial wars" have been undertaken for their
benefit. Abundant illustrations may be had from the recent history of
each of the leading nations. Civil wars in the tropics, as a rule,
have their origin in conflicting interests of people remote from the
field of battle.

Another factor supporting the war system is the hereditary
aristocracy, waning in influence, but still powerful through its
control of money, of the army, and of the Church. The profession of
arms is almost the only one not unworthy of the caste of nobleman. The
military constitutes the right arm of aristocracy; the state church,
the left; while the monarch stands as the visible head. The leaders of
official religion are, with many and honorable exceptions, upholders
of the war system, and apologists for the "God of Battles." The
dissenting churches, having no alliance with privilege, are almost as
unanimously on the side of peace.

With all this, and working toward the same end, is the false education
which the war system has unconsciously produced. For generations it
has obstructed sound teaching of history, of patriotism, of morals, of
religion. It is only after reaching manhood, if at all, that we
realize that Thackeray's "redcoat bully in his boots" has not been the
maker of England's greatness. In the schools of all nations, the man
of violence is the hero--the man on horse-back, the man who bears the
flag, even if in defiance of justice and order.

We have been taught that nations grow strong through war, and that
through war they achieve their destiny. Each man who falls in battle
on any side, in any cause, is a patriot hero, giving his life for
fatherland and for religion. Each boy learns that his own nation was
in the right in every quarrel, that in every battle it was victorious
against great odds, or else defeated through base treachery.

For the war system as it exists to-day, first and finally responsible
are the people who pay for it, the common man in the nations
concerned. The government belongs to him. It is his own fault if it
does not. It cannot go far ahead of him, and it never lags much
behind. When it is laggard, the fault still rests with him. He has
neglected to look after the machinery of government, and it has been
turned against him. This is the case in Germany and in Russia, where
the government represents only part of the people. In these nations,
the man belongs to the state. In the more democratic nations, the
state belongs to the man, who has therefore the more pressing
responsibility.

And this man on the street, the unit of the nation, whether noble or
commoner, whether educated or illiterate, overlooks one fundamental
fact. The other nations of Europe are made up of men about like
himself. What he thinks, they think; what he hopes, they hope. If he
has no designs of aggression, neither have they. If he is "hungry for
peace," so are they. If he finds his taxes distressing, so do they. If
he is one of a majority favoring more cordial relations between
states, they belong to a like majority. If he is one of a minority who
would do away with the war system, there is a similar minority which
will meet him half way. If he is a workman, his problems are those of
all other workmen; if he harbors no evil designs of a war of invasion,
neither do his fellow-workmen across the border. If he is swept off
his feet by a burst of martial music and resounding patriotism, so are
they, and it is just as easy for them to recover as it is for him. If
he is scared by the reckless talk of pangermanists across the channel,
or of chauvinists on the Paris Boulevards, or of panslavists in St.
Petersburg, or of jingoes in London or New York, let him remember that
he finds just such people at home, wherever his home may be--just as
many, just as noisy, and possessed of just as little permanent
influence. The force of mere noise grows less and less, year by year,
in each of the "settled nations." If you are convinced that other
nations need have no fear of your jingoes, by the same token you need
not fear theirs.

The War System is making this great, rich, resourceful world a
bankrupt concern in the hands of its creditors. The nations of the
earth still owe some 40 billions of dollars in gold for the wars of
the last 100 years, from Waterloo to Adrianople. But one nation of all
the number (our own) has made any progress whatever in paying its
share of this debt. The tendency is ever to borrow more, up to and
beyond the limit of credit. The interest is paid, perhaps by
borrowing, but there is no haste about the principal. Except for war,
no nation on earth would ever need to borrow a dollar.

And this interest money of a billion and a quarter every year is only
an incident in the cost of the War System--about a fourth of its
annual expense, even in what we call times of peace. Under the armed
peace of the War System, a kind of frustrate war goes on, an
antagonism the more repulsive because no one has the slightest idea
what it is all about. This antagonism is simply part of the system,
and the system itself is only organized cowardice, for it is perfectly
well known that not one of the great nations has any design to attack
any other. Only the poor crude Balkan people have taken the War System
seriously. Because they have done so, and interfered with trade, they
are now under the ban of Europe, as they lie supine on the floor of
the arena.

The War System has exhausted its own resources. The great nations have
no money with which to fight, and no stomach for fighting. The concert
of Europe is content with the suppression of discords among its own
players. And the reason for this is clearly indicated in the words of
Mr. H. Bell of Lloyds Bank in London. He calls the attention of
bankers to "the great spectre which will rise up in future before the
monied classes when they are invited to lend their money for warlike
purposes. There is going to be very clearly written in the handwriting
on the wall the word 'REPUDIATION.' The peoples of Europe will say:
'We know we ought to pay our interest. We know we ought to pay our
debt, but we cannot. We are human beings, we must live; we are
overtaxed; we cannot get enough to clothe ourselves; we cannot get
enough to eat. We can get no profit from our work!' The men who find
money for purposes of war will not get their money back again."--(H.
Bell. Remarks before the Institute of Bankers, Jan. 17, 1912.)

War cripples the nation physically by cutting off without posterity
its strongest and boldest men. The key of national strength in the
future is found in the good parentage of to-day. The basis of national
greatness is indicated in the principles of Eugenics. To be well born
is the first step to an effective life. "Like the seed is the
harvest." This is the law of heredity. It applies to races of men as
well as to breeds of horses or of sheep. No nation has ever fallen
from leadership, intellectual or physical, save through breeding from
inferior stock. The causes of all decline may be sought among these
three factors, emigration, immigration, war. Rome fell when her
streets swarmed with the sons of slaves, scullions, sutlers,
adventurers, men who were not Romans. When, after her wars, internal
and external, "Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forth
the new generations." The culture of Greece passed away when war had
obliterated the Greeks. "Send forth the best ye breed" and you will
breed from the second best. First best, second best, third best and
fourth among the yeomanry of Europe have been swallowed up in war in
the "Obscene seas of slaughter" over which Europe has gloried and
gloated through all these deluded ages.

The decline in the physique of the average man in France has been
usually cited in evidence of this tendency. But the same causes have
produced like effects in every warlike nation, and the decline in
stature is one of the least important of the results of reversal of
selection. These changes are just as marked in England and Scotland,
as in France, and they are not wanting in Germany. The loss of dash
and initiative is one of these results. Havelock Ellis observes: "The
reckless Englishmen who boldly sailed out from their little island to
fight the Spanish Armada were long ago exterminated; an admirably
prudent and cautious race has been left alive." Better men would make
better history. Braver men would not cower at the war scares of
to-day. Men of character and initiative would not wallow in the London
slums. The sons of those war could not use, swell the records of
pauperism. It is not the strength of the strong but the weakness of
the weak that invites and perpetuates paternalism and tyranny, two
names for the same thing. "Slaves may have wrongs, but only free men
have rights."

Another count against the War System, not unrelated to this, is its
pollution of the blood of the race. The "White Slave Traffic" goes
with the "Conscription Act," both outgrowths of the War System. Army
movement and barrack life have been leading, though not exclusive,
causes of the widespread diffusion of infectious diseases, one of the
most alarming features of civilization to-day.

Another count against war, as yet scarcely realized, is found in the
vandalisms by which it has destroyed so much of worth as well as of
intellectual importance in the art and the architecture of the past.
War respects nothing. It was German bombs which burned the library at
Strassburg. The devastation of the art world is chargeable to war. As
I write this there rise before me the paintings in the gallery at
Munich, of the twenty-one cities of Greece, from Sparta to Corinth,
from Eleusis to Salamis, not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets
by the blue Ægean Sea, not as they were in the days of the glory of
Greece--but as ruined arches and broken columns, half buried in the
ashes of war, the war which blotted out Greece from the world history.

It is plain that sooner or later such a system must come to an end.
The influences that have abolished cannibalism, slavery, and religious
persecution must in the end do away with international war. It seems
also clear that this result will not be obtained primarily in any
direct way by official action. The administrators of nations must
follow public opinion rather than create it. Where public opinion
demanded the burning of witches, the officials had only to see that it
was done decently and in order. At the most, they could only limit
the number to be consumed on any one occasion.

What is our line of attack on the War System?

For the suppression of war we must have a public opinion. And this
opinion must not rest only on the fact that war is brutal and hideous.
That is only half the struggle. There are many good men to whom the
brutal is also the heroic, and still others to whom evil methods are
condoned by success. We must further convince the world, that is, the
common man, the man on the street, that modern war attacks his pocket.

The modern phases of the Peace Movement differ from the earlier ones
in being educational rather than emotional. The early workers were
convinced that war was wicked and unholy, and with this they were
usually content to rest their case.

With the same conviction as to the immorality of war, in the bottom of
his heart, the modern worker tries to find the facts. What is the
historical evolution of war? What are its effects, economic,
biological, moral? What can be found as a national substitute? And
side by side with the study of war and war problems, rises the fabric
of international law. We may not say that the modern method is more
righteous than the earlier, or even more effective. But the treatment
of the subject from all its various points of view, and not mainly
from that of morals and religion, reaches a much wider audience and
has a more immediate effect upon public opinion.

It is an immediate purpose of the Peace Movement to make war a last
resort, not the first one, in times of international differences. To
this and every agency which tends to postpone action and give the
blood time to cool, must contribute.

In civil life, there has been through the ages, a steady movement from
violence to law, from the ordeal of private combat to the arbitration
of the courts. In like fashion, we would extend and strengthen the
parallel tendency among nations. Already arbitration is everywhere
welcomed as a means of composing differences. Conciliation goes
before arbitration and is a factor of equal importance. The very
existence of an Arbitral Tribunal before which differences may be
brought, itself insures that most differences will be adjusted without
its agency. If war is really the last resort, very few nations will
ever come to it, and the War System will decline through neglect, as
of obvious uselessness.

But so long as the War System is in full force, there is always danger
of war. So great an agency can never be fully under control. Its
existence insures the presence of a powerful group of men, anxious to
test its powerful machinery and impatient of civil authority. The War
System is designed for war, defensive of course, but it is a maxim of
war, as of football, that the best defense is to be the first to
score.

As to the Arbitration treaties and the hundreds of disputes which have
been settled for all time by the tribunals at The Hague, no verdict
thus obtained has yet been rejected or opposed, and none is likely to
be. The public opinion of the world would be as wholly opposed to the
repudiation of an adverse verdict as it would be to the repudiation of
a national debt. The verdict and the debt involve the same sanction of
national honor.

The discussion as to the need of an international police to enforce
decisions made at The Hague, is therefore wide of the mark as there
can be no occasion for the use of force in such a connection.

It is becoming more and more evident in Europe that the greatest
single asset of the Peace Movement is the success of the republic of
America.

America is opposed to the War System. There is a much larger
percentage of pacifists in the United States than in any other of the
larger nations. For one thing, it is relatively easy to be a peace man
in a republic. No criticism or obloquy attaches to it. But in Europe,
the direction of least resistance is to follow the wake of the War
System.

In spite of the unhallowed sums we have carelessly spent to build up a
War System, we have none. We shall never have any. Should we pass
under its yoke we should cease to be America. Even our admirals and
generals do not belong to the War System. They are civilians in
spirit, sometimes in disguise, but permeated with ideas of law and
justice, a condition far removed from that of the professional war
maker of the continent of Europe.

The impression of America as a great factor in international
conciliation receives impetus with the celebration of the hundred
years of Anglo-Saxon peace, with its lesson of the unguarded and
therefore perfectly defended 4,000 miles of Canadian frontier. This
impression has been strongly emphasized by the admirable skill by
which President Wilson has up to the time of this writing, honorably
avoided war with Mexico, a war which was considered inevitable in most
political circles in Europe. While on the one hand the United States
cannot have the secret treaty, the cherished tool of the War System
since the days of Machiavelli, and while Democracy is a form of
government fitted for minding one's own business, and for nothing
else, it is recognized that the United States must and should take the
lead in conciliation and in arbitration, as she is now taking the lead
in furnishing means for a world-wide survey of the War System, and for
the resultant propaganda for its abrogation.

THE MACHINERY FOR PEACE

It is understandable that Germany and Great Britain should consider
their armies, their battleships, dreadnoughts, super-dreadnoughts, and
invincibles as constituting the chief machinery for peace. In
celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the
imperial throne the Kaiser was hailed as "the true and central factor
of the past peaceful policy of Germany." These were Lord Blyth's
words, in recognizing the avowed policy of the Emperor to preserve
peace through the utmost practicable preparation for war; and
ex-President Taft, who would refer to arbitrators even questions of
national honor, spoke of this apologist of arming for conflict between
nations as the "greatest single individual force in the practical
maintenance of the peace of the world." The Kaiser's silver jubilee
was the signal for unstinted acknowledgment by the leading men of the
world that His Majesty's policy had preserved the peace of the German
Empire for a generation. In its exterior relations Germany had looked
too terrible to encounter, and the romantic, warlike spirit that
distinguishes the Teuton had found vent in the service of preparation.
The young Germans, both aristocratic and bourgeois, were encouraged by
every means to train, to show, to be martial, but not to fight. And it
will be recalled that Germany refused to discuss the limiting of
armaments at The Hague only because the Conference was not empowered
to deal finally with it.

In response to the Czar's call, delegations of twenty-six Powers
attended in 1899 the First Hague Conference; forty-three Powers were
represented at the Second Conference in 1909. These gatherings
formulated the world's opinion against many of the evils of war. Their
agreements expressly forbade international bloodshed except between
the actual fighting forces. They made it unlawful to sack cities, to
take or destroy private property on land, or to menace the peace and
safety of non-combatants. Those who observe that the nations have not
yet agreed to do away with war overlook the fact that the
non-combatant millions within belligerent nations may not be molested
in lives or property, save that they must bear the war's financial
burdens. With respect to most of the civilized dwellers of earth the
sword is forever sheathed. Among the fighters, too, wounds are quickly
bound, and quarter is expected and given.

The machinery of peace governing this world society is not complete.
It provides a way of peaceful settlement of disputes by arbitration.
It lacks a court such as that whose decisions, backed by police and
the more potent sentiment of the people, guard the king's peace in
civilized communities. But arbitration has done much to keep the peace
of nations. The experience of the United States is in point. Up to the
time of the Second Hague Conference Mr. John Bassett Moore finds
records of more than sixty arbitrations, the tribunals sitting with
overlapping terms of years that aggregate a hundred and
twenty-five--exceeding in number the years of this nation's life. The
total cost of these tribunals was doubtless much more than would have
been the expense of an actual court kept always in session.

Before The Hague Conferences, the American Government had already been
participating in what was tantamount to a permanent tribunal of
arbitration. The questions adjusted were of every class, not merely
pecuniary claims, but questions affecting what are called "vital
interests and national honor." The case of the Creole, for instance,
brought the United States and Great Britain close to war, and later,
in 1842, nearly caused a rupture of the conferences between Daniel
Webster and Lord Ashburton--a rupture which would almost inevitably
have led to hostilities. The case came before a tribunal of
arbitration in 1853, and was so quietly disposed of that the public
paid no attention to the award. Then there was the negotiation of the
Alabama Claims by Hamilton Fish. Lord John Russell answered our
proposal to Great Britain, that it involved the honor of Her Majesty's
Government, of which it alone was guardian, and the claims were not
subject to arbitration. After being examined and critically
formulated, they were eight years later submitted to the tribunal at
Geneva, and settled. Mr. Roosevelt, opposing President Taft's treaties
of arbitration with Great Britain and France, objected that they would
embrace "questions of vital interest and honor." Perhaps he had not
studied the cases of the Creole and the Alabama.

The values involved in American arbitral proceedings have been
enormous. More than a thousand claims were adjusted in cases of the
United States against Mexico in 1868, and a thousand more
counterclaims of Mexico were disposed of under one commission, the
total amount involved being well over half a billion dollars. And the
arbitral awards of the tribunals in which America participated have in
every case been final. Not one of the awards to which the United
States has been a party but was carried into effect by both
Governments concurrently. In rare cases new facts discovered have
reopened the proceedings, but on such occasions the parties proceeded
to end them in a spirit of justice and equity.

It was to nations trained in self-restraint that the Russian Emperor
addressed his rescript of August 24, 1898, recognizing the fact that
the preservation of peace had been put forward as the object of
international policy. More terrible engines of destruction were being
wrought, and the intellectual and physical strength of the nations,
with their labor and capital, were diverted from their natural uses
and wasted. Economic crises threatened the world because of war
preparations, the while sentiment against war's devastation found
concrete embodiment in arbitrated disputes. A conference was proposed
to limit armaments, to prevent armed conflicts, and to mitigate the
atrocities of war. The twenty-six nations that met at The Hague on May
18, following, codified the international laws of war and peace
already existing. Delegates of the forty-three nations that met in the
Second Conference on June 15, 1907, amended and strengthened these
codes, added to them, and appointed the meeting of the Third
Conference, to be held in 1915.

In the first two Conferences the rights and duties of neutrals were
defined, the employment of force for the recovery of contract debts
was renounced, and it was laid down that the "right of belligerents to
adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited." The bombardment
of undefended towns was prohibited, together with the discharge of
projectiles from balloons, the use of bullets that expand or flatten
in the human body, the poisoning of wells, pillage, violation of
"family honor," confiscation of private property, the laying of
automatic contact mines that do not become speedily harmless, the
seizing of submarine cables, destruction of monuments and works of
art, and interference with religious customs. The killing
treacherously of individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army
or of those who have surrendered was outlawed and it was forbidden to
make improper use of a flag of truce, or of the national or military
colors of the enemy, or of the Red Cross badges.

The progress in these agreements reached by the Second Conference is
notable, in that it forbade that the rights and acts of a member of
the hostile nation be abolished, suspended, or regarded as
inadmissible in a court of law; that a belligerent compel a man to
fight against his own country, even though he were in the
belligerent's service before the war broke out, or to force the
inhabitants of seized territory to give information about the army of
the other belligerent, or about its means of defense. While all
appliances for transmission of news and for transport, whether by
land, sea, or air, may be seized, together with depots of arms and all
munitions of war--even if belonging to private individuals--they must
be restored when peace is made, with due award of damages. The
inhabitants of a territory are to be regarded as belligerents only if
they "carry arms openly," and that is to be the test of their
belligerency. Besides all this, the rights of prisoners of war are
sedulously guarded.

This code, relating to the laws and customs of war, received what many
critics of the Conferences regard as an undue amount of attention; it
was even charged that, in effect, it legitimatized war. It did quite
the contrary. Francis Lieber drew up for President Lincoln in the
second year of the American civil war rules, which Lincoln ratified
and promulgated in the famous General Orders No. 100--the first code
regulating the conduct of armies in the field. The international
convention drawn by the Brussels Conference of 1874, had its origin,
as acknowledged by its President, Baron Jomini, in these rules of
Lieber and of President Lincoln. To the United States honor is due,
not for legitimatizing war between nations, but for beginning to
restrict its operations to the actual fighters and their works of
attack and defense. At The Hague the work of the Brussels Conference
became in turn a basis for reaffirming this principle, and for
restricting more closely the field of combat.

Moreover, the principles of the Geneva Red Cross Convention were
adapted to naval war. Machinery for rescue and treatment of the sick,
wounded, and shipwrecked men of the world's navies was provided.

An International Prize Court was established, which, in the opinion of
Elihu Root, should later develop into the court of justice for the
nations. The only obstacle to ratifying the convention for this court
was swept away by the code of laws of naval war embodied in the
Declaration of London, and drawn in February, 1909, by delegates of
the European Powers and the United States. The liability to capture of
the merchant ships of belligerents throws their commerce largely into
the hands of neutrals. Efforts to prevent neutrals from trading with
the enemy follow. Then blockades, searches, and seizure of contraband
goods stir up strife with other nations, and give occasion for general
war. The American war of 1812 with Great Britain resulted from such
causes, the effects of which, again, the two nations barely escaped
during our Civil War; and the sinking of British merchantmen by Russia
during its war with Japan provoked strong resentment. Excepting two
questions, those respecting the conversion of merchant ships into
warships on the high seas, and as to whether the nationality or the
domicile of the owner shall be considered in determining "enemy
property," the London declaration embodies clear and definite rules
on which the International Court of Prize may render just decisions.

The measures for restricting the field of actual war were accompanied
at The Hague by the erection of machinery for the pacific settlement
of international disputes. That was work of prevention, and it was in
four parts.

In the first part the contracting Powers agree to "use their best
efforts to insure the pacific settlement of international
differences."

The second provides that proffers of good offices and mediation by a
third State, never shall be regarded as unfriendly. Throughout the
Turko-Italian and Turko-Balkan Wars, and during the Inter-Balkan
conflict, the European Powers acted as mediators under this provision,
and smoothed the way to peace.

The third part provided for international commissions of inquiry, such
as were comprehended in President Taft's proposed treaties of
arbitration with Great Britain and France, and Secretary Bryan's
proposed treaties with the Central American republics and with the
Powers of Europe and Asia. The intent of these commissions is to
investigate the causes of complaint and publish them, trusting to
international public opinion to accomplish a just settlement. This
machinery worked to bring about the voluntary payment by Russia of
$300,000 damages for the destruction of British fishing boats, fired
on mistakenly by Admiral Rozhdestvensky in his ill-fated expedition
against Japan. Again, the report of a commission on the French steamer
Tavignano, seized by the Italian torpedo boat Fulmine during the
Turko-Italian War, and concerning the attack on the Tunisian mahones
Kamouna and Gaulois, was accepted July 23, 1912, and referred for the
final solution of equities to The Hague Court of Arbitration.

This court--the fourth instrumentality--is composed of three distinct
bodies; namely, the Permanent Administrative Council, the
International Bureau, and the Court of Arbitration proper. The
Permanent Council is made up of the diplomatic envoys of the signatory
Powers accredited to the Netherlands, besides the Dutch Minister for
Foreign Affairs, and was constituted after its ratification by nine of
the Powers. The Council is permanent in the sense that its members are
always at The Hague; it controls the International Bureau, appointing
its staff and methods of administration, and reporting the proceedings
of the court to the signatory Powers.

The International Bureau receives all the documents and stipulations
in disputed cases, where arbitration is agreed upon and referred to
The Hague, acting as a board of registry. It places its staff at the
disposal of tribunals of arbitration, and occasionally of those not
constituted at The Hague, and its expenses are paid by the Powers.

The Court of Arbitration proper is really an "eligible list" of
individuals, "of recognized competence in questions of international
law, enjoying the highest moral reputation," designated by the
forty-four Powers signatory to the convention. Their terms are six
years, renewable, not over four members appointed by a Power. Their
jurisdiction extends over all cases submitted to them, but sometimes
the parties agree to a special tribunal not selected from the list.
Two names may be selected from the list of arbitrators by each of the
Powers in dispute, and the amended convention of 1907 provides that
only one of these can be its envoy or chosen from its nominees to the
Court of Arbitration. The four arbitrators thus selected themselves
choose a fifth as umpire, or, if the votes of the four are equally
divided, the choice of umpire is intrusted to a third Power to be
agreed upon. If there is failure to agree upon a third Power, each
party to the controversy makes a separate choice of a Power, and the
two thus selected will try to appoint the umpire. But if they, in
turn, fail to agree, each shall within two months' time present two
candidates from the general list, excluding those selected by the
disputants or of their nations; by lot among these, the umpire is
finally elected.

The work of the Third Conference, besides adding to the statute law of
war, will largely concern the regulations governing the Court of
Arbitration. Since it was constituted in April, 1901, this court has
passed judgment in fourteen important cases without having established
needed rules of practice. It is not decided whether the cases and
counter-cases shall be presented with argument, or merely with
statements of the facts, the conclusions sought, and the proofs. The
practice is both ways. The thirty-five articles relating to "arbitral
procedure" fail to prescribe rules, leaving this task to the tribunal
in each case. As a result the terms of procedure in the Casablanca
dispute, for instance, which were decided hastily to avert a
threatened war, were brief and vague, and they left the discretion of
the tribunal uncontrolled. The order of oral debate is not determined
chiefly because a disputant is touchy about being classed as plaintiff
or defendant. Clear rulings on points of practice are not made when
presented, although the agents and counsel are entitled by the rules
to "present orally to the tribunal all the arguments they may consider
expedient in defense of their case." Yet opportunity to argue a motion
is sometimes not afforded when the motion is made, and an argument
presented later would be out of place. It would aid procedure to have
arguments presented and rulings made as the points come up. Finally,
the informal discussions between court and counsel frequently hinder
the straightforward presentation of a case.

But the chief defect of these arbitral tribunals, as in all
others--for practice has not reached the perfection of choosing
disinterested judges belonging to nations not concerned in the
controversy--lies in their temptation to compromise. Gallatin, in the
Northeastern Boundary case with Great Britain, remarked that the
arbitrator "has always a bias to split the difference." The Casablanca
case, the decision of which really did avert war, and more than any,
so far, justifies the establishment of the world court, depended on
law and fact, but was compromised. Dr. Heinrich Lammasch, a
distinguished member of several Hague tribunals, speaks of the
"preponderatingly diplomatic character" of this decision. Other
decisions have been criticised for the same reason, notably those of
the North Atlantic Fisheries and the Orinoco Steamship. Compromise,
while of value, is the function of diplomacy or mediation, and the
cases referred to The Hague are admittedly those which diplomacy
cannot adjust. The remedy is by direct agreement to exclude from the
tribunal judges who sit as diplomatic agents of their governments. A
beginning in this direction is in Secretary Bryan's plan for
commissions of inquiry, consisting of five members, three of whom
should be chosen from other countries than those in dispute. But these
would be merely committees. The defect of Mr. Bryan's plan, and the
great lack of the Hague Court of Arbitration, is that the agreements
to refer cases in dispute are purely voluntary; the one thing for
friends of peace to work for, of course, is to make it as easy for
differing nations as for differing men to hale each other into court,
and as impossible to refer their differences to force.

The International Court of Prize has already come nearer to this ideal
than the Court of Arbitration. It is a regular court of justice. Its
judges are not arbitrators, they receive a fixed compensation, their
jurisdiction in cases of appeal from the national prize courts
relating to captured merchant ships and cargoes, is compulsory. In
absence of treaty provisions between the states in dispute, the
convention adopted by the Second Hague Conference reads, "the court
shall apply the rules of international law; if no generally recognized
rule exists, the court shall give judgment in accordance with the
general principles of justice and equity." Before ratifying the
convention, Great Britain in 1908 called a conference in London of the
chief naval Powers, which codified the laws of naval war, covering
blockades, contraband, service ill-becoming neutrals, destruction of
neutral prizes, transfer to a neutral flag, hostile character, convoy,
resistance to search, and compensation. Here a whole category of cases
is at once removed from the judgment of biased minds.

The existing Court of Arbitration may be resorted to increasingly as a
means of diplomatic conciliation; but by its side and above it should
rise, in the opinion of all authorities on international law, a
Supreme Court of Arbitral Justice, not diplomatic but judicial, that
will render its decisions rigorously according to the declared law
and the evidence. The Second Conference at The Hague approved a
convention for the establishment of such a court. The United States
has proposed to the Powers that the Prize Court be invested with the
functions and jurisdiction of a Court of Arbitral Justice. The
practical difficulty met at The Hague was in the appointing of
permanent Judges. Forty-four, one for each state including The
Netherlands, would be too many. A court of but fifteen Judges was
recognized as desirable. Such a court could not be chosen from
forty-four nations, and the delegates were in a quandary. The
arguments were irrefragable, of course, that a small, independent body
of magistrates selected in advance is needed to settle controversies
between nations as they arise, and as a court of appeal from the
decisions of temporary tribunals. Such a tribunal might well become a
court of first as well as of last resort, because of the difficulties
and delays usually experienced in making up the mixed arbitral
commissions from the eligible list of the Court of Arbitration. The
alternative recourse is especially needed when the imminence of war
requires a speedy reference, as in the Casablanca case. For these
reasons the convention was drawn and approved, leaving to the Third
Conference the task of constituting the court. Ernest Nys, a member of
the Permanent Court of Arbitration and Counselor of the Court of
Appeals of Brussels, urging the necessity of such a tribunal, makes
the point that its members should not be chosen to represent any
countries, as such, but rather in a way to assure that the different
systems of law and procedure, as well as the principal languages of
the world, might be represented. By this means the world peace may be
permanently established. Organized justice will succeed arbitration,
guaranteeing to individuals and states the security of their rights
and institutions, precisely as the "king's peace" had come to
guarantee them within the limits of each sovereignty.

In this review of the instruments making for peace by conciliation and
law, the arguments for war have not been ignored. If at The Hague in
1915 the Powers should decide to nationalize the private industries
that supply armaments and engines of war, the artificial stimulus
given to those industries and the exploitation of new appliances for
war would cease; manufacturers would no longer oppose the limitation
of armaments, which every nation desires. Complete preparation for war
did not prevent the Balkan States and Turkey, not yet emerged from the
civilization of the Middle Ages, from coming to the death grip with
each other. It was different with those nations whose Council of
Ambassadors, sitting in London, and watching the kaleidoscopic changes
in the Balkans, became by the statesmanlike influence of Earl Grey, a
clearing house, through which the affairs of the six chief Powers were
adjusted to a harmonious ending. It is noteworthy that in the more
than forty years of Europe following the close of the Franco-Prussian
war--perhaps as good as a cycle of Cathay--those six Powers, though
armed for provocation, have by such careful negotiations remained at
peace. But making the allowance due to this remarkable abstention from
war, to which must be added the hundred years of peace between the
United States and Great Britain, the inherent appeal of war to the
imagination and emotions of mankind must still be recognized.

War's mutilations have never roused aught but horror, its waste of men
and treasure are deplored. But the spirit of strife, of daring, and of
heroism remains in human breasts. If war is outworn, if bloodshed and
sacrifice of lives are to cease between civilized states, as they have
long ceased within those states, it must be that better means have
been found to satisfy the profound human need of expression and of
conquest. The German Emperor, while keeping up the medieval pageantry
of arms, has welded his nation into a militant power of industry and
science. Their arts are not ignoble, their industries are not
monotonous, but have taken on the aspect of imperial enterprise and
daring. Their scientists are rescuing mankind from disease and freeing
it from menial labors, while their merchants and traders are
modernizing the orient, setting examples of method and discipline,
incidentally, to their rivals in the civilized nations. It is by such
means that civilization need no longer rear itself on human slavery;
the very beasts of burden have been freed, and man has seized control
of nature's forces. By them he is borne through cities, manners,
climates, councils, governments, more swiftly than Ulysses went, and
beyond the paths of all the western stars.

More distant horizons of science have been opened. The transmutation
of the elements, but recently announced, is expected to realize more
than the dreams of the alchemist. If we are to believe Professor
Soddy, who with Sir William Ramsay obtained in 1903 the first direct
proof that radioactive processes are veritable transmutations, this
discovery in its consequences should "absolutely revolutionize the
whole condition of existence." For of all processes, this alone
accounts for the wealth of energy dissipated so prodigally throughout
the universe over apparently endless periods of time. Once means are
found to accelerate the transmuting rate of radioactive atoms,
Professor Soddy believes the same means will suffice to break up the
other elements now unchanging, releasing energy which man may harness
a "million times greater than any at present utilized." In his
masterly address in 1908 before the American Society of International
Law, Elihu Root traced the development of the international spirit by
the use of human inventions conquering space and time. Clans,
communities, nationalities have lost their early function, and
frontiers and territorial possessions are changing their political
significance. Terrestrial pioneering is not ended, the continents are
rediscovering each other in new relations.

Much has been done to open new channels for the play of men's energies
away from war. War has had its uses to break up the old order, to let
loose new and unknown forces in society, to set men free from
tradition. That was the great work of the Crusades. Chivalry and
knighthood are still needed, but of a new order. The martyrs for
aerial navigation are the type. The machinery for peace that has been
set up in the new palace at The Hague will not confine the adventurous
spirit of mankind.

EN CASSEROLE

_Tobacco and Alcohol_

As to tobacco, since reading the article on it in this number, this
Review has really thought more seriously than ever before about (not
_of_) giving up smoking. But many doctors here and in Europe have told
us to keep on, and but one has told us to stop. How is it with you? We
wonder whether life with tobacco _can_ seem to those who know only
life without it, as bad as life without it seems to those who have
known life with it! Perhaps each class should experiment in the
other's field.

As to the outlay for mere pleasure, and the destruction of life
involved, we wonder how those caused by tobacco would compare with
those caused by travel--short trips as well as long, by carriage,
automobile, vessel--and aeroplane? Our contributor has seen these
paragraphs, and he says, very much to our edification and
entertainment:

"It is a relief to know that the tobacco article is not going to
interfere with the pleasure which 'This Review' derives from smoking.
But the writer confesses to a little surprise at the precocity of an
infant which in its first year has acquired the nicotine habit to such
an extent as to lead it to consult several physicians on the subject."

[It is many years since, but we remember that in at least two cases,
the prescription was _volunteered_. Ed.]

"As for the expense caused by driving for pleasure, our statistics do
not give us a conclusive answer, but they at least supply us with an
outside figure, for Uncle Sam in counting his horses at the time of
the last census distinguished between those on farms and those
elsewhere. It is fair to assume that the great bulk of the horses used
for pleasure are in the second class, and that they constitute a
comparatively small fraction of that class. Now horses not on farms
numbered 3,182,789 in 1910, and were valued at $422,204,393. In other
words, a third of what smokers spend for tobacco would enable them to
buy up all of the horses in a big class, only a fraction of which is
used for pleasure, and an equal amount would probably suffice for
their keep.

"In the case of automobiles, it is still more difficult to distinguish
between those used for pleasure and those used for directly productive
or public purposes. However, the object of the article was to call
attention not so much to gross figures of expenditure, as to the
indirect burden imposed by smokers upon the community at large. The
automobilist who is willing to run down innocent wayfarers rather than
curb his craze for speed is in the same class with the smoker who so
smokes as to destroy property and life. Indeed the two are often
identical, and it was no mere accident that led the Massachusetts
Forestry Association to depict upon its poster designed to stop forest
fires, a party of smoking automobilists bowling along and leaving a
trail of fire behind them. If the 'Review' can devise some painless
way of eliminating both the reckless smoker and the reckless joy-rider
from the landscape, it will kill two undesirable birds with one
stone."

And as to alcohol. Well! There's Horace and Schiller and the feast of
Cana, and the whiskey Lincoln wanted for his other generals, and lots
of other people and facts.

But as to bar-maids, we are bound to say that since the graceful
tribute to them on earlier pages was in type, there has been placed in
our hands evidence of a crusade against their employment in England,
and of its abolition by law in South Australia. See the Memoir of
Margaret Ethel Macdonald. London, 1913.

For all we know, the preponderance of argument may be against the
substitution of women for men as barkeepers; but we suspect that at
least it would diminish the shooting at and by barkeepers, in New
York.

And another thing we think we do know--that in these progressive days,
it would be hard to find any pursuit in which women are engaged, where
there is not agitation to improve it off the face of the earth. Their
old-fashioned pursuits of wife and mother have lately been specially
honored by such agitation.

_Answering Big Questions_

A contemporary that we have always very highly "esteemed" (we believe
that is the correct term, but we are new in the profession) is now
proceeding to fill us with awe. It announces that it is going to
circulate privately among its friends, a series of brochures that
"will answer big questions." We wish we could do that; but our
cotemporary has already engaged the only editor we know of who can.
For our poor part, we are apt to encounter in any country grocery some
question too big for us to answer. But the answers our esteemed
cotemporary is going to send out may occasionally help us in telling
how a big question that we don't profess to be able to answer, looks
to us. We have already had some help of this kind from the editor in
question: on many subjects his glowing imagination has thrown such
high lights that we have found places of shadow before unsuspected.

The matter reminds us of Horace Greeley's proposition to issue "for
the people," a series of pamphlets for five cents each, to contain
only "the pure truth." He did not say where he was going to get it.

_Decency and the Stage_

In the present agitation regarding decency on the stage, it is
probably safe to assume that the proponents for license or liberty or
freedom or whatever they call it, admit that there are _some_
necessary acts and places which should not be represented on the
stage. Now would it not clarify discussion if the said proponents were
to draw the line between such inadmissible matters and those that
should be admitted? We have never happened to see such a line drawn.

_What Is the Matter with the American Colleges_

Everybody in every one of them seems to know that something is the
matter, but nobody in any seems to know just what, much less, then, a
remedy for whatever it is.

Some say it is the suppression of the individual, the glorification of
the average. Others say it is college yelling and athletics. Yet
others, that it is vocationalizing and the deadly practical. Still
others call it the proletariat of the doctorate, the fad of the
faculties for immature or imitation research.

Can it be that it is all these things and several more, particularly
all those that exist in contrasted pairs, such as discipline and
required work according to the standard of the mean, and at the same
time, elective studies and the freedom of the city? Or simultaneous
college yells and doctor's dissertations. And can it be that all these
grow out of a single actual condition which is common to all American
higher education, and which compels it to be "lower" at the same time
that it is "higher"? For in the present organization of practically
every American college and university that condition actually does
exist.

It exists by virtue of the fact of the housing in the same dormitories
and fraternity houses, and mixing in the same class rooms and
laboratories, and providing with the same teachers and deans, and
ruling by the same regulations and gum-shoe committees, of dependent
preparatory students and independent advanced students.

Our high schools stop short of finishing the preparation of students
for University work. Our universities assume part of the high school
function along with their own. The German _Gymnasium_ and French
_lycée_ include the equivalents of the American college Freshmen and
part of the Sophomores. They finish up the drill and discipline stage
of education. The Continental university begins and carries on the
stage of intelligent and self-chosen and independent work. But in the
American universities there must be discipline, college yells, drill
in routine and elementary work, classes handled on the basis of
averages, and teachers of the _Gymnasium_ and _lycée_ type, existing
side by side with recognition and encouragement of the individual
freedom of bent, disregard of credit hours and assigned tasks, and
scholarly professors and investigators of real university type.

The outcome is that the drill teachers are made pseudo-investigators;
the investigators made unwilling drill teachers. The students are
invited to soar, and at the same time ordered to march in ranks.
Preparatory school rules are made for the sake of the Freshmen, which
the Seniors have to obey. Freedom of choice in study is offered
because of the Seniors and graduates, to the utter demoralization of
the Freshmen.

Because of this impossible juxtaposition of discipline and freedom,
drill and inspiration, the American university feels sick. It knows
very well that something is the matter with it. It has to be all
things to all students, and is, in fact, too little of a real thing to
any of them.

_Wanted: Proportionate News_

The most noteworthy difference between European and American
Journalism, as regards news, is the prominence we give to what is
technically called the news of the day. Let a great liner be sunk or
saved and all the newspapers, even the most conservative, print page
on page of repetitious story or comment, playing on the emotions from
every point of view. No European paper would feature even the most
affecting news on any such scale. Doubtless our American practice is a
natural enough tribute from the editors to the mobility of our
sympathies, not to say the flightiness of our minds. What the
enthralled reader does not realize is that to provide him with the
completely modulated thrill of the day scores of important items of
routine news have been curtailed to meaningless epitome or wholly
suppressed. For several days that duty of daily chronicle which a good
newspaper ordinarily performs is intermitted. The most important
debates of a congressional year will receive bare notice so long as a
heroic Marconi operator is in the public eye. The greatest of foreign
statesmen or authors might die in the glorious interim and receive the
barest notice; a revolution in Persia would yield to a factory fire on
the East Side.

Now something of this disproportion is necessary. No paper could live
in America which scrupulously treated news according to its abstract
importance regardless of the reader's cravings. Yet a journal that
respects itself has a function of daily chronicle that should under no
circumstances be suspended. A really good newspaper ought to be
valuable material for the historian, and our best newspaper will
several times in every twelvemonth leave him badly in the lurch. For a
week he will find admirable reports of say the discussion of a very
important measure like the currency bill, and then suddenly the
_Volturno und kein Ende_. Just about the time when mail letters were
beginning to tell a certain amount of truth about the Messina
earthquake, the telegraphic reports of which were egregious inventions
of distant improvisers, _The Republic_ was saved through the
intrepidity of Jack Binns. A correspondent who had been on the ground
at Messina and remained in close touch with the rescuers and refugees
received the sufficient answer with regard to additional earthquake
facts "Jack Binns has killed Messina." Here is obviously both a good
and a bad reason. There was every reason for celebrating at length the
pluck and loyalty of Jack Binns, and no reason for curtailing the
record of one of the greatest disasters registered in history.

The first duty of a good newspaper is to the more important routine
news. It is a duty that every American journal neglects at times quite
scandalously. The old fashion of relegating striking news of the day
to an extra had much to commend it. Abuse of the extra by the yellow
press has pretty well killed the practice among the conservative
papers. Possibly a discreet revival of the legitimate extra might help
matters. But what is really needed is a juster sense of proportion and
a clearer conception of duty among editors. With a little insight and
much courage a managing editor might make himself the controller of
the "news of the day," rather than its mere conduit. In the long run
his paper would more than gain in steady prestige what it lost in
occasional flurries of sensational success.

_Simplified Spelling_

Rather than bother our readers and distract their attention from what
we have to say, we print in the orthographic forms we are all
accustomed to. But we realize that many of these forms are
inconsistent and irrational--more so in English than in any other
civilized language--and that the difficulty of learning them wastes
the time and tissue of our children, and obstructs among foreigners
the spread of English to its natural position of a world language,
with the blessings that its attaining that position would bring in
peace and commerce.

Our orthography is, of course, an evolution. It began with picture
symbols, and some of these were gradually changed into the letters of
our alphabet. But the signs have always been later than the sounds,
and we never had enough of the former to express the niceties of the
latter. Therefore imperfections and inconsistencies in any new system
proposed should not be fatal against it, if it is enough of an advance
on the existing system, and a better advance than any other proposed.
The orthography of the future will undoubtedly be eclectic from many
proposals, and probably, like the present orthography, from many
involuntary and unreasoned practices.

The English Simplified Spelling Society, which contains the leading
British authorities, has gone on the principle that it is not worth
while to recommend any changes short of a comprehensive scheme for the
whole language, and has recommended an approximate one. Nothing more
than approximation is possible.

The American Simplified Spelling Board, sustained by Mr. Carnegie,
which corresponds in authority with the English society, has not
attempted a comprehensive system, but for the worst extravagances and
inconsistencies has simply recommended a number of remedies,
especially such forms as _tho_, _thru_, and the following changes in
final syllables--saving all silent _e's_, including the one in _ed_;
the _me_ in _gramme_, and programme; the _ue_ in final _gue_; the _te_
in final _ette_; also the substitution of _t_ for _d_ final, when so
pronounced.

As is well known, several of the remedial forms are already in
considerable use, especially in advertising and other writing where no
appreciable demands are made on the understanding or emotions.

From here until we giv notis on a later page, we wil uze som of those
forms and a few more--all of which may be not too radical for present
use in informal riting, as abuv mentioned, and may be regarded as
transitional toward an ideal system. It woud undoutedly be easier to
teach children a comprehensiv and consistent sistem than the existing
caos minus varius uncorrected partial remedies, as illustrated in the
present riting. The authoritys ar agreed that children woud lern a
consistent sistem years qicker than the present lac of sistem, and
having lernd the consistent sistem, woud pic up the forms they find in
newspapers and existing bouks without conscius effort. Then of course
a generation familiar with a goud sistem woud soon be suppleid with
literature in it. But a rising generation cannot be taut such a sistem
before the elders ar convinst of its utility.

We wish to promote such a conviction as far as we can, but no won
without experience can begin to realize the difficultys, in fact the
impossibility, of presenting new forms with absolute consistency.
Words really sound differently in som connections than in others; and
habit asserts itself in spite of reson. In half a dozen revisions of
these paragrafs, inconsistencys hav bin found every time, and som
undoutedly remain. But such inconsistencys ar not permanently inherent
in the reform, and shoud not prejudis it. Habits of pronunciation
disagree, and even if they did not, perfect discrimination coud not be
attaind even with an alfabet twice as large as our present one; and if
absolute discrimination wer attaind, it woud sune be nullified by an
accent in som new popular song, or from som new popular orator. The
only way to keep spelling abrest of language is for lexicografers to
cut luse from precedent, and closely follo the actual pronunciation
of their own times. William D. Whitney used to say that if they had
always don that, filological sience woud be much farther advanst.

A special cause of inconsistency is the tendency to preserv what is
not very bad, and to make changes as slight as reson wil permit, but
when no slight change wil do the tric, to make the change as goud as
possibl. But see what somtimes coms. The _w_ in _write_ is utterly
useless. Take it off, and we have a fairly good word _rite_. But the
_gh_ in _right_ is also useless--not pronounst, as is the _ch_ in the
cognate German _recht_. If we get rid of it, however, we have _rit_,
which rimes with _fit_. Now take it all in all, the best way to
lengthen that _i_ is to dubl it, just as in silabls closed with a
consonant we alreddy somtimes dubl the vowel--the _e_ in _seen_, the
_o_ in _door_. _This is not necessary in open silabls._ The S. S. S.
proposes we shal dubl the _a_ in _faather_, and the _u_ in _tuun_
(_tune_). Then if we dubl the _i_, we hav a uniform sistem with the
long vowels. This givs us _riit_. But then the processes we hav just
been thru land us with _rite_ and _riit_ for the same sound.

Of course to represent a sound in more than won way brings perplexity
to spellers. Yet several ways are resonabl to let stand until a new
generation can be educated to the best. This is a not unresonabl
concession to habit, and is not nearly so bad as to let a simbol
represent more than one sound, as in the two sounds for _tear_, and
the vowel sounds in _door_ and _poor_.

But we must also take into account what Skeat rightly says--that the
simbol for a sound should not be distributed in two places; and
therefore _rite_ is not so good as _riit_. But the _e_ at the end of a
closed silabl to lengthen the vowel, is so intrencht in the language
that it woud be doutful policy to attack it yet in words fairly fit to
stand, e. g., _fate_, _mate_, _bite_, _mote_, _lute_. So the
transition policy we recommend is to let all fairly goud forms stand,
but where a form is to bad to stand, change it into the best possibl,
as _right_ into _riit_, even at the price of such an inconsistency as
leaving _rite_ from _write_, because _rite_ is more workabl, tho
_riit_ woud be theoretically better. Som such inconsistencys ar
inevitabl, as we cannot start fresh, but must evolv from an existing
inconsistent--very inconsistent--orthografy.

In spelling, as in matters perhaps more important (tho the importance
of rational spelling is vastly grater than generally realized), it is
wel to recognize the ideal, but to try to advocate at any time only
what is workabl at that time.

Now we proceed tu a much clooser approximashon tu an ideal for owr
children, so far az it appeerz practicabl with the prezzent alfabet.
It wil at first seem a very funny ideal. All such approximashonz wil
differ, and wil hav tu fiit it owt, and this wun wil seem at first tu
be caos and oold niit, but allmoost enny wun ov them, tu a miind
withowt an alien training--tu a chiild's miind, woud be moor orderly
and luminus than owr prezzent sistem, or rathther lac ov sistem.

The rezonz for the niu formz which ar not obvius wil be explaind
alfabetically after the text.

Moost ov the formz we giv ar recommended by the S. S. B. and the S. S.
S. But thair ar itemz on which theze bodyz ar not yet agreed, even
among themselvz; yet thair laborz hav reecht the point whair
individualz shoud taak hoold and subject the formz thay beleev in tu
the strugl for existens and the survival ov the fittest.

The grait difficultyz ar in indicating the vowelz with owr prezzent
alfabet, which givz, for instans, oonly the wun simbol _a_ for at
leest ait sowndz, and probably moor not generaly discriminated, and
the wun simbol _e_ for at leest fiiv, _i_ for three, _o_ for foor, and
dubld for foor moor, and _u_ for fiiv.

The short vowelz ar dispoozd ov with comparativ eez: for in a silabl
cloozd with a consonant, the vowel iz uzualy short, e. g., _bad_,
_bed_, _did_, _cod_, _cub_, but unfortunaitly not all short vowelz hav
thair silablz cloozd. In Saxon dissilablz, owr ancestorz generaly did
clooz the first silabl when it woz short, by repeeting the vowel
beginning the folloing silabl, e. g., _gabble_, _filling_, _fizzle_.
But the practis ov cloozing in this way woz generaly _restricted tu
dissilabls_, az the pronunsiashon ov polisilabls iz apt tu indicait
itself, and economy iz wurth considering. In wurdz directly from the
Latin, az thair iz les differens ov axent between the silabls, the
clozing ov the first silabl az abuv descriibd, iz not yuzual. It woud
probably be wel tu introduus it, however. If, for instans, the first
silabl wer cloozd in _viggor_, we shoud not hav such contradicshonz az
_vigor_ and _vizor_ siid by siid.

Az tu the long sowndz, the oonly way tu reprezent them, _whair thay ar
not determind by pozishon at the end ov an oopen silabl_, iz (az
allreddy illustrated) by combining the letrz with different letrz, az
we now combiin in _gain_, _real_, _mine_, _soar_, _rule_: evidently
_gan_, _rel_, _min_, _sor_, _rul_, woud not anser the purpus. We hav
tu maik theez combinashonz becawz the genius ov owr rais duz not seem
tu favor adding letrz tu owr alfabet, inazmuch az we hav allreddy
dropt tu valuabl wunz reprezenting respectivly _th_ and _dh_.

It certanly woud be best, az allreddy propoozd, tu dubl eech vowel for
its long sownd, az we allreddy du in _deem_ and _door_. But we hav no
exampl ov dubl _a_, _i_, or _u_ (except in tu or three forren wurdz
liik _bazaar_, and ov coors, owr utterly exentric _w_), but the S. S.
S. recommendz _uu_ insted ov the _oo_ in _coon_, and dubl _a_ in
_faather_, which we accept. We do not need to dubl the _a_ befoor _r_
final in monosilabls becawz it haz the _ah_ sownd befoor _r_ exept
when the _a_ follooz a _w_ sownd, iither in _w_ itself or in _cw_
exprest az _q_, e. g. in _war_ (_wawr_) or _quart_ (_qawrt_). The
foorgoing givz dubl vowelz for all but _i_, and we propooz them thair.
This iz a compleet sistem baasd on a principl.

Now for sum explanashonz.

     abuv = above. The e final propperly maiks the _o_ long, and iz
     entirely owt ov plais heer and in _love_, _shove_, _etc._ The
     sownd ov the _o_ iz propperly a _u_ sownd, az in _but_, and iz
     wun ov several cases whair we absurdly yuuz _o_ tu express _u_
     sowndz.

     allreddy = already. The silabl _al_ propperly riims with _gal_,
     _Hal_, _pal_, _Sal_--rather a riotus set ov silabls, but thay ar
     whot running down the alfabet givz. And the silabl _read_
     propperly riims with _bead_, and shoud be spelt here _red_, but
     _redy_ shoud riim with _needy_, so we proviid an addishonal
     consonant, in the mood ov owr ancestorz, az allreddy explaind.
     This iz at the sacrifis ov economy, but the reformd sistemz hav
     uthther economyz, espeshally in the terminal _ed_, tu compensait.
     See allso _prezzent_ and _confiuzd_.

     allso = also. See _allreddy_.

     allwaiz = always. The S. S. S. recommendz _ai_ for the long _a_
     sownd az in _pair_. See _allreddy_.

     bin = been, which propperly riimz with _seen_.

     confiuuzd = confused. Withowt the _i_, propperly pronownst
     _confoozd_. Moorover we wawnt tu get rid ov the apparent silabl
     at the end ov such wurdz, not oonly tu economiiz the yuusles _e_,
     but allso becawz forrenerz tend to pronowns the _ed_ az a silabl.

     coors = course and coarse. _oo_ az in _door_ iz the best simbol
     for long _o_, az _ee_ iz the best simbol for long _e_. The _ou_
     simbol we reserv for such wurdz az _coud_, _shoud_, _woud_. The
     temptashon tu maik coors riim with Boors, iz ov the devvil: for
     Boors iz abominably spelt. It shoud be Buurz; and furze shoud be
     spelt withowt the _e_. Thair iz no serius objecshon tu making
     _coors_ serv for both _course_ and _coarse_: thair ar allreddy
     menny cases whaar wun wurd meenz several thingz.

     determind = determined. _Mined_ can propperly be pronownst oonly
     with a long _i_, and the silabl or wurd _mind_, with a short _i_.
     Allso see _confiuuzd_.

     devvil = devil, which with dubl propriety riimz with _evil_.

     duz = does, which propperly riimz with _goes_.

     grait = great, which propperly riimz with _beat_.

     havving = having, which propperly riimz with _saving_.

     impruuvd = improved. Tu reprezent a _u_ sownd with _o_ iz absurd.
     Allso see _confiuuzd_.

     litl = little. Thair iz so litl vowel sownd in the last silabl ov
     this and menny uthther wurdz as tu be hardly wurth expressing,
     and thair ar menny difficultyz in duing it.

     maid = made. Thair iz no objecshun to this from owr allreddy
     havving a wurd _maid_. See _allwaiz_, also _coors_.

     menny = many, which propperly and suggestivly riimz with _zany_.

     no = know: the S. S. B. touk off the _w_, but after chainging
     _knock_ into _noc_, bawkt at this _k_. We ar a litl moor
     venchursum. _The o iz long by pozishon at the end ov an oopen
     silabl._

     nu = knew. See _no_.

     oonly = only, which woud propperly riim with _sonly_ if thair wer
     such a wurd for filial. The S. S. S. recommendz _oe_ for the long
     _o_ sownd, but _oo_ iz betr, and we rigl it in az an inishal
     after the manner of _eels_.

     owr = our, which propperly riimz with iither _pour_ or _tour_.
     The vowel sownd in _our_ iz that in _owl_.

     practis = practice. In _practiced_ we pronowns the _ed_ az _t_,
     and thairfor shoud spel it so. But if we maid it _practict_, the
     _c_ woud be hard. Chainging the _c_ to _s_ in the parent wurd
     givs us _practist_, which iz wel simboliizd.

     prezzent = present, which propperly riimz with _decent_.

     pronowns = pronounce. See _practis_.

     pronownst = pronounced. See _practis_.

     propper = proper, which propperly riimz with _toper_. See
     _allreddy_, allso _litl_.

     purpus = purpose. _Pose_ propperly riimz with _nose_.

     reecht = reached. See _practis_.

     riit = right. The _gh_ wurdz hav that simbol cognait with the
     German guttural _ch_ az in _recht_, tho we du not pronowns it.
     But _rit_ woud riim with _bit_.

     scollar = scholar. Booth Societyz omit the _h_ in _ch_ hard. But
     that woud leev _scolar_, riiming with _molar_. See _allreddy_,
     allso _litl_.

     scuul = school. Dubl _o_ iz abiuuzd in being maid tu reprezent a
     _u_ sownd. See _oonly_.

     silabl = syllable. We du not keep the dubl l, becawz this iz a
     polisilabl: see p. 221 neer bottom. In spelling, children and
     forrenerz, and not thay aloon, ar puzzld between _i_ and _y_. The
     S. S. B. haz wiizly reservd _y_ for terminals, and we beleev in
     it for inishals allso whair thay ar combiind with uthther vowelz.
     See yuse and yuzed. Also see _litl_.

     simbol = symbol. See _silabl_.

     simboliizd = symbolized. See _silabl_. Moorover, if we wer tu
     drop the _e_ from _simbolized_ tu prevent forrenerz pronownsing
     the apparent last silabl, thay woud be in dainger of maiking the
     ending riim with whot we hav spelt az _fizzed_ and woud now spel
     az _fizd_. For this rezon we need the _iizd_ simbols. See
     _simplifiid_.

     simplifiid = simplified. The _ie_ freequently in English and
     allwaiz in German haz the long _e_ sownd, and in English iz
     alwaiz confiuuzd with the long _e_ sownd in _receiv_, etc.
     Rezerving _ii_ for the long _i_ duz away with that confiuzhon. Tu
     du away with the confiuzhon between such wurdz az _believe_ and
     _receive_, the S. S. B. allreddy reservz _ie_, and the S. S. S.,
     _ee_, which we follo.

     sownd = sound. See _coors_ and _owr_.

     thair = their, see _allwaiz_.

     thay = they. Not _thai_ becawz _y_ iz betr than _i_ booth az
     inishal and terminal.

     tu = too, to and two. The absurdity of reprezenting a _u_ sownd
     by _o_ is obvius. _We don't need tu dubl the u, becauz the silabl
     iz oopen._

     uthther = other. This iz a stumper. The inishal sownd iz the _u_
     in _but_. The _th_ propperly reprezents a singl consonant sownd.
     Owr Saxon ancestorz had a singl letr for it which we did badly in
     throing away. That letr the Anglo-Saxons freqently yuuzd tu clooz
     a silabl (see p. 221) az in siððan, _since_, and after thay began
     tu yuuz _th_ insted ov the ð, thay freqently yuuzd _th_ for the
     saam purpus, until its cumbrusnes thru it owt. We stil yuuz the ð
     in filological publicashonz, tho often allso the Greek [Greek:
     th]. If we must yuuz _th_, for consistency's saak it shoud be
     repeeted in _uthther_, _bruthther_, _muthther_, etc.

     Fortunaitly thair ar oonly a scoor ov such wurdz. We riit of
     thair spelling partly az a curiosity that may be interesting, and
     partly tu sho the dezirability ov getting bac owr oold letrz.
     Macaulay's scuulboy nu, if owrz duzn't, that the Greeks wer ahed
     ov us over tu thowzand yeerz ago, in havving not oonly a singl
     simbol for _th_, but a long _e_ and a short _e_, and a long _o_
     and a short _o_.

     whot = what, which propperly riimz with _bat_.

     woz or wuz = was, which propperly riimz with _gas_.

     wun = one, which propperly riimz with _tone_.

     wurd = word, which propperly riimz with _cord_. Its vowel is
     pronownst with a _u_ sownd, which it iz absurd tu reprezent by
     _o_.

     wurs = worse, which propperly riimz with _horse_. We woud hardly
     pronowns _horse_ az we pronowns _hearse_, tho the latter iz allso
     abominabl: for _ea_ propperly reprezents the sownd in _dear_. The
     riit way tu spel _hearse_ iz _hurs_, and the riit way tu spel
     _her's_ iz _hur'z_.

     wuz or woz = was, which propperly riimz with _gas_.

     yuus or yuuz = use. See _confiuuzd_. _Use_ iz pronownst both
     _uze_ and _use_. _Uze_ iz a betr way to spel the wurd which we
     rongly spel _ooze_. Tu yuuz an _o_ for a _u_ sownd iz bad enuf,
     and tu yuuz tu ov them iz wurs--dubly fit for _fools_.

We may venture upon another (annuthther?) spelling lesson in the next
number, especially if owr reederz giv enny siin ov wawnting it; and it
may anser sum qeschonz raazd in this lesson. And we may even go so far
az tu prezent a fiu miild innovashonz in owr text, az haz bin
heroically don by the _Educational Review_, _The Independent_ and sum
uthther periodicalz ov standing.

We woud liik to hieer from owr reedrz on the subject.

Press of T. MOREY & SON, Greenfield, Mass.

  The Unpopular Review

  VOL. 1     APRIL-JUNE, 1914     NO. 2

THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM

There is no such thing as capitalism, say the conservatives. It is an
empty sound, a curse in the name of a false god, directed by the
revolutionaries against the world of things as they are, as they
always have been and always shall be. Capitalism is a reality, say the
radicals. It is the appropriate designation of the current system--a
vulgar, hideous system, a brute mechanism set in motion by the energy
of blind greed, a mechanism through which human values and human lives
are thrust, to emerge smudged and flat and dead. The soul of
capitalism? Pernicious paradox!

Capitalism is no less a reality than was feudalism. The capitalist
employer is the most prominent figure in the modern state, just as the
knight was the most prominent figure in the mediæval. But the order of
knights did not of itself constitute feudalism: equally characteristic
was the class of serfs. In a fundamental sense the system consisted in
the mutual relation between knight and serf. Capitalism, in like
manner, implies a class of employers and a reciprocal and conditioning
class of workers, but as a system it consists in the mutual relation
of these classes. The conscious existence of the members of both
classes is shaped, or at least colored, by the capitalistic relation.
Not in the same way, however; for capitalism induces one set of
reactions in the minds of the employing class, and another set of
reactions in the minds of the employed. But these diverse reactions
are equally the product of capitalism, its inevitable concomitants,
its psychical essence.

Capitalism is, to be sure, not the whole of modern life; nor was
feudalism the whole of the life of the Middle Ages. In the feudal
state there were classes that were not, strictly speaking, under
feudal law. Such were the clergy, the merchants and artisans of the
towns, the freemen of the villages. Moreover, there were individuals
who rose superior to the system, such as the great feudatories, who
often assumed a regal freedom from the narrow feudal rules. There were
also elements that proved incapable of assimilation, aliens, outlaws,
mendicants. But the popular mind, with its inveterate bent towards
order and uniformity, generalized the relation beyond the range of its
proper application. To the worldly bishop, even the Pope was a great
feudatory; to the beggar's apprentice, his master was a species of
knight. So at the present time there are numerous elements that are
incongruous with capitalism. The independent worker and the small
merchant, the professional classes, the artists and the politicians,
are not properly governed by capitalistic rules. The great magnates of
the industrial world have won for themselves a measure of
immunity from the laws that govern the conduct of the typical
capitalist-employer. But the predominance of the capitalistic system
is evidenced by the fact that all these non-assimilable forms are
being translated into capitalistic terms. A farm is no longer a
"holding," it is an "investment" or a "job." A political magnate is a
"boss" and his supporters are "workers"; the political machine itself
is "invested capital." The buildings of church or school are, with
increasing frequency, described as "plant." We are beginning to hear
of "efficiency control" of college curricula; of the "unit costs" of
saving souls. Our most exalted dignitary is "the people's hired man";
and the late King Humbert of Italy was wont to speak of assassination
as a "trade risk."

With due allowance for the whimsical quality of some of the instances
cited above, we must yet admit that they indicate a general tendency
to translate all current experience into capitalistic terms. Such
instances are but indications of the collective conviction that
capitalism is the most significant fact in modern life. Why then do
our conservatives insist upon rejecting the term, upon denying the
very content of the concept? Chiefly because those who have depicted
capitalism have sketched it in black crayon, instead of painting it in
the rosy hues of romance.

To speak of capitalism as endowed with a soul, is indeed a paradox.
But the conception of soul is itself paradoxical. The man of science
dispenses with it in so far as he can. All that compels us rationally
to posit the existence of soul, is its works, good and evil. The
hypothesis of a human soul has been forced upon us by the fact that
there is in the action of man an element that transcends the needs and
purposes of the body, an element that we often see growing into such
commanding importance that it reduces the body to the rank of mere
instrument. Capitalism, too, appears to subserve purposes that
transcend its proper ends. To what end, in profit-making, is the
destruction of personality, the corruption of the sentiment of
humanity, that the Socialists attribute to capitalism? To the
Socialists themselves capitalism appears endowed with a soul, to whose
purposes capital's immediate processes are merely instrumental. Only,
the soul is one of unmixed evil.

II

Capitalism, like every other social system, implies a class that rules
and a class that is controlled. The ruling class--_pace_ those
political theorists who refuse to know that a ruling class exists--is
composed of the capitalist employers. And how do the capitalist
employers differ from any others of the masters that the world has
known? Not merely in that they possess accumulations and pay wages in
money. These are incidental facts. What is essential is that the
capitalist employers, in so far as they are truly such, are controlled
in all their active dealings by the principle of commercialization.

And commercialization is a psychical phenomenon. It is the
substitution, in economic conduct, of a process of calculation for a
process of feeling and will. The antithesis between the two processes
has long been recognized by practical men, under the form of the
contrast between "business" and "sentiment." That much maligned
abstraction of the economists, "the economic man," is nothing but the
capitalistic entrepreneur, reacting as he must to a competitive
situation. What the orthodox economists failed to observe is that
so-called "economic conduct" is class conduct. It is confined to the
merchants and manufacturers of a competitive régime, whose daily life
consists in the manipulation of exchange values. Employers who enjoy a
monopoly, independent laborers, and even the typical wage earners of
capitalism, may--indeed, must--permit their actions to be governed by
other motives, as well as by that of profit. But the capitalist
employer in a competitive trade is quickly taught by bitter experience
that it is not his function to judge and choose. His business is to
calculate; and the less non-economic principles of action interfere
with his decisions, the more certain he is of success. All elements
essential to his business present themselves in the guise of exchange
values. All magnitudes, thus, are commensurate: you compare one with
the other and choose the greater. Intelligence is required for the
ascertaining of relative magnitudes. But the calculation once made,
action is determined. Whether you are a man of strong will or weak
will, of active feelings or passive, you do not hesitate when, in
effect, a dollar is offered you in exchange for fifty cents.

It is cool intelligence, not dominant personality, that, under a
purely capitalistic system, determines the distribution of the seats
of power. The capitalist employers are our ruling class, but of all
classes that have ever held power, they least resemble personal
rulers. They calculate, but conditions beyond their control determine.
And, to be most successful, they must divest their calculations of all
elements that are irrelevant to profit making. If I am a capitalist
employer, operating under conditions of keen competition, I buy no
more readily from an honest man than from a rogue, provided the rogue
can give good title to the things he sells. I hire men, Teutons or
Slavs or Latins, white, black or yellow, with a sole view to their
effectiveness for purposes of profit. I may have private opinions on
religion or politics or morals; on the use of alcohol or opium or
tobacco. But unless I can relate such manifestations of virtues or
vices to the point of profit, I must suppress these opinions, in my
active dealings with men. It follows, then, that in all that concerns
the capitalist employer, in all that concerns his essential rulership,
he is a respecter of the liberties of men.

No one, it is true, is a capitalist employer, pure and simple. In his
social life, every one is likely to retain some of his age-old
prejudices, and to seek to enforce age-old oppressions. As a business
man, no one would be so foolish as to refuse to sit in the same board
of directors with any other capable business man, Hellene or [Greek:
barbaros]. In his club life, on the other hand, many a business man
affects a patrician exclusiveness. The most Christian business man
does not refuse to deal freely with atheists, but very likely he
refuses to admit them to his house. As a mine operator I should employ
negroes as skilled or unskilled laborers, as foremen or bosses, if
such employment were favorable to financial results. I might none the
less, as a citizen, attempt to exclude them from public office. In
business hours, the exercise of personal, political or religious
oppression is penalized by technical inefficiency and pecuniary loss.
Out of business hours, however, every man tends still to revert to the
aboriginal state of manhood, narrow, illiberal, obstinate, oppressive.

Capitalism, furthermore, is far from having attained complete
dominance, even in business affairs. Personal whim, as a
co-determinant of action, is not obsolete, but merely obsolescent. The
president of a great manufacturing corporation of the Middle West
detests cigarettes, and has promulgated the rule that no men whose
fingers are cigarette stained shall be added to his staff. Mr. Henry
Ford intends to confine the benefits of employment in his mills to men
who are "worthy," that is, to men who conform to certain standards of
conduct that are good in their employer's eyes. There are employers
who will not tolerate in their shops the presence of Socialists;
others who have engaged in a crusade to exterminate "knockers." In all
such cases of essentially personal discrimination an attempt is made,
however, to justify it on abstract grounds of efficiency. Cigarette
smokers, loose livers, Socialists and "knockers" are poor workmen,
assert these employers. The assertion, we all know, is far from being
universally true. In so far as it is false, however, it is a gracious
falsehood in the light of the spirit of capitalism. It is a concession
to the principle that pecuniary considerations alone justify an
invasion of personal liberty.

Discrimination on personal grounds is, moreover, so exceptional as to
count as amiable eccentricity. It is recognized as a handicap, which
can be overcome only by striking superiority in other directions. Mr.
Ford may watch over the private conduct of his employees, because he
is able to pay much higher wages than anyone else. The manufacturing
concern to which reference has been made may discriminate against able
workmen with cigarette stained fingers, because it is efficiently
organized, and enjoys a monopoly position. Such instances are
necessarily rare, and are interesting only as a contrast to the
businesses controlled strictly by the spirit of capitalism.

Personal oppression may still be exercised within business hours: but
it represents an added cost, readily determined by scientific
management. The machinery for its suppression is in motion; it cannot
forever survive. There is no equally effective machinery for the
elimination of the personal oppression that emerges out of business
hours. In one's business calculations, one regards a social prejudice,
even if it is directed against oneself, as irrelevant to practical
action, so long as it finds expression only beyond the realm of
business. A persistent slanderer of alien races finds no difficulty in
raising a loan from a foreign banker, provided that the security he
offers is good. No element of revenge in the relations between
Parisian banks and German customers has appeared since the Zabern
incident. Indirectly, however, the social influence of capitalistic
toleration is very considerable. One who has an alien partner may
continue to cherish the heroic myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority, but it
will be through desire for consistency, not out of conviction.
International financial forays upon weak nations, like the late Six
Power loan, have the effect of weakening many a national prejudice.
National, racial and religious prejudices retain their pristine
vitality only where capitalism has not yet reached a high state of
development. It is in Russia and Rumania, economically backward
states, not in England and America, the most capitalistic of all, that
the policy of expelling heterogeneous elements flourishes. It is in
the Old South, still in a precapitalistic stage, that the social gulf
between the races is widest. It is on the Pacific Coast, whose whole
volume of capitalistic industry could be overmatched by that of a city
like Newark, that detestation of an alien race rises to the rank of a
political issue.

Toleration and its counterpart, personal liberty, these are the first
constituents of the soul of capitalism. Capitalistic toleration, it is
true, originates in interest, and is limited by interest. If
capitalism admonishes me to tolerate atheism in my foreman, so long as
it does not interfere with his efficiency, it equally admonishes me to
extirpate excessive piety in his person, if, for example, intervals of
ecstatic contemplation divert his attention from my interests. Morally
such toleration is vastly inferior to that which is founded upon a
broad sentiment of humanity and a recognition of the presumption
involved in the prescribing of rules to one's fellow man. But ethical
toleration can find lodgment only in the breasts of the chosen few.
"Neither do I condemn thee." Of all the miracles, is not this
expression of toleration the greatest? Millions upon millions have
repeated the sentiment devoutly; but to how few has it become a rule
of life!

Capitalistic toleration, on the other hand, is a sentiment not too
refined for the most vulgar souls. Indeed, its appeal is probably
strongest to the very most vulgar; certainly, to the most selfish. A
high-minded employer may seek to bring up his working-folk in the way
they should go--that is, his own conception of the Way. It is the
greedy materialist who says: "What do I care how my workmen eat and
drink and play, what they read, how they vote, worship and marry? It's
all one to me, so they deliver the goods." Ethical toleration selects
for its votaries the few and the unselfish; capitalistic toleration
selects the many and the selfish. And it is for this reason that the
liberty based upon capitalistic toleration is the broadest and most
substantial of all. "City air makes free," says the proverb. Not
because the city is the abode of choice souls, but because the city is
capitalistic.

The struggle for religious liberty, it may be said, antedates
capitalism. This is not wholly true; the hot beds of religious
liberalism in early modern times were the cities, already becoming
capitalistic. The Independents and Quakers of England, the Huguenots
of France, the Calvinists of Holland, the Lutherans of Germany,
represented a germinating capitalism. If the spirit of capitalism was
not yet highly evolved, neither were the liberties sought broadly
conceived. The Charter and their own valiant spirits won for the
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay freedom to worship God. But there was no
freedom, in Massachusetts Bay, to go forth from the Puritan settlement
and dance around a maypole. Precapitalistic freedom meant only the
removal of specific oppressions, sometimes grave, sometimes trivial,
imposed by the constituted authorities. From the natural human
disposition to interfere in one another's affairs, to standardize
humanity, to excise variations above and below the normal, there never
was any freedom, except upon the lawless frontier, until capitalism
appeared upon the earth.

A class freedom! say the Socialists, and a hollow one! That the
Socialists are permitted to go up and down upon the earth, teaching
doctrines that they themselves proclaim to be subversive of the
interests of those whom they designate as the ruling class, is
sufficient evidence that the freedom is not properly described as
hollow. If Karl Marx had appeared in the days of Charles the Great to
teach doctrines equally subversive of the existing order, he would
have found short shrift indeed. That it is a class freedom is,
however, true, in a sense. The capitalist employer, who deals with
many men in the course of his business, must learn to tolerate many
personal idiosyncracies, and must in turn be met with toleration by
many. The forced repetition of acts of toleration tends to mold the
temperament of the capitalist employers as a class, and to establish
among them a large measure of personal freedom. This repetition is
lacking in the experience of the worker. Dealing with one employer
alone, or with only a few employers in infrequent succession, the
laborer is less likely to appreciate the significance of the
toleration he enjoys, or to learn from the business process itself the
need of toleration towards others.

Nevertheless, under capitalism the laborer does undoubtedly make gains
in personal liberty which he could not have made under earlier
systems. We know what the Spartans did with the Helots who varied
above the type of servile manhood. They assassinated them. We know
what the Romans did with slaves who thought too manfully. They
crucified them. In the long ages of serfdom in Western Europe, what
was the natural fate of the serf who held his head too high? The
commonplace facts of his torturings were seldom regarded worthy of
mention in the Chronicles. Within the last century, however, men have
been beaten to death in Europe for daring to maintain their
preferences in mating against the wishes of their lords.

Class liberty? Does it mean nothing to the Republican mechanic in
Birmingham, Alabama, that a Democratic employer would be universally
regarded as a fool for concerning himself with the politics of his
men? Does it mean nothing to the Roman Catholic workman that he may
live for years in a Protestant community without once encountering
discrimination against him on account of religion? Those who affirm
that the liberty of capitalism, even in its overflow to the working
class, is hollow and meaningless, can never have permitted their study
or their imagination to sound very thoroughly the depths of human
injury and wretchedness.

So much, however, must be granted: that the liberty afforded the
worker by capitalism has its offsets. If the employer no longer
regards himself as justified in ordering the private life of his
workman, neither does he feel responsible for protecting the workman
against the distress accompanying sickness or superannuation, or even
commercial disorder. The worker has paid for his freedom with
increased insecurity of his lot. But that the freedom has been bought
too dear, would be hard to maintain. Let us suppose that a landowner
organizes his possessions upon a feudal plan, and invites working
families to come and serve him, yielding implicit obedience to him in
all personal matters as well as in matters pertaining to the technique
of production. In return for their ungrudging services, let him
guarantee them a sufficiency of food, rough clothing, and rude
housing, together with rights to maintenance in disability and old
age. How many workers will make haste to attach themselves to him?
Where workers have tasted of capitalistic freedom, it is safe to say
that none would accept the offered privileges.

IV

If capitalism had offered the working class nothing but the crumbs of
middle class liberty, the diatribes of the revolutionaries would be
not without justification. For admittedly, liberty has been gained in
far greater measure by the capitalist employer than by the workman.
But capitalism has done vastly more for labor than this. It has given
rise to that most interesting and important of all modern social
phenomena, the solidarity of labor. As an active, working concept, the
fraternity of labor is just as certainly a product of capitalism as is
social toleration. The latter is the soul of capitalism, as it
manifests itself in the class of employers, the former, as it
manifests itself in the class of employees.

To this statement a Socialist will at once take exception. The
sentiment of brotherhood, the Socialists claim, originates in the
common experiences of poverty and hard labor. But the men at the
passages of the Jordan who slew one another over the pronunciation of
Shibboleth were doubtless manual workers, and were certainly poor. The
merciless strife between Saxon and Celt in England was primarily
between men who were all poor and workers. The participants in the
Sicilian vendettas, in the Scottish clan struggles, in the Kentucky
feuds, might well be honored with the title proletariat, by virtue of
poverty and laboriousness of life. Fraternity is too luxurious a plant
to bloom upon a barren soil of universal labor and poverty. Every one
who reads the documents of middle nineteenth century America is aware
of the uncompromising hostility of the American workingman toward the
distressed Irish seeking an escape from famine. Later, there is
abundant evidence of working class contempt and hostility directed
toward the immigrating workmen from Germany and Scandinavia. Twenty
years ago it was the Dago that experienced the inhospitality of the
workingmen toward their alien brothers; today it is the Wapp--the
collectivity of unfortunates of uncouth ways and unimaginable speech
that seek refuge here from the poverty and oppression of southeastern
Europe. No middle class worshipper of a family tree rooted in the old
colonies can hold the Wapp in more profound detestation than do many
of our recent arrivals. "Zese tam fools [the Wapps], zey ruins zis tam
counthry."

It is the attitude of the unions, we are told, that in the North
represents the chief obstacle to the progress of the negro away from
the menial services and the unskilled employments. It was the working
class that forced, first Chinese, and later Japanese exclusion. It is
working class politics that demands a white Australia, and vexes the
British Empire over the question of emigration from India. "Workingmen
are brothers," say the Socialists. Not by birth and native instincts.
Not by virtue of community in labor and poverty. If there is such a
thing as a fraternity of labor, it is begotten of capitalism.

An active sentiment of brotherhood, does, unquestionably, spring up
under capitalism. Differences of race and religion dwindled to
insignificance among the coal miners in the great strike of 1904. The
Lawrence and Paterson strikes, and the strike in the copper country,
have offered abundant evidence of the growing strength of the feeling
of working class solidarity. It would be difficult to cite a single
recent strike in which men and women of traditionally hostile races
and creeds have not coöperated with the utmost harmony and good will.

No one will deny that the more conscious the workers are of the
pressure of capitalism, the more rapidly does the feeling of
solidarity develop. This is the moral gain that is afforded by labor
disputes. It is a gain which is not to be had without its cost, in the
disorganization of industry, the impoverishment of multitudes of
working families, the destruction of life and property, and the
loosing upon society of evil passions. Is the gain worth its cost? In
the opinion of many observers of our social movement, the cost is
tremendous, but few of these observers attempt to strike a balance
between cost and gain. This is because they have failed to recognize
working class solidarity as a significant step in moral progress.

The development of solidarity among American workingmen is proceeding
rapidly; in other countries its progress is not less manifest. This is
true despite the fact that the problem of creating harmony between
hostile races and religions is more serious where uninterrupted
continuity on the same soil renders easy the survival of ancient
prejudices. The hostility between Czech and German, between Magyar and
Slav, is mitigated when the representatives of these warring races
work side by side in the same factory, oppressed by the same factory
regulations, impoverished by the same crises. Evidence is
accumulating, to prove that the internationalism of labor is becoming
a reality. It may not be true that French workingmen are already so
utterly averse to the idea of shooting down their German brethren as
the Socialistic literature and the spokesmen of Socialist and Labor
parties would have us believe. But there is very much more than a
fervent hope in working class anti-militarism. If French and German
workmen might at present fail to refuse to kill one another in war,
the time is perhaps not far distant when the outcome of an
international war may be rendered problematical through the extension
of working class solidarity.

For the working class, solidarity is producing results quite analogous
to those produced in the class of capitalistic employers by the