MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
Page Four
I firmly believe our people are convinced that now is the time for America to achieve another great and generous thing. Already the world gives credit to America for having originated nearly all of the great advancements of modem times. And it will look to our President and to our delegates in Washington to give free and courageous expression to the always generous spirit of the American people.
It has always seemed to me that the curse of human nature which has provoked war, fostered war, and prolonged the institution of war, is the tendency of peace to develop greed and selfishness, while we leave it to the dangers of war to prompt us to setting aside of self. Is this not time at last to demonstrate the capacity of peace to be unselfish? I believe the whole world answers a “Yes” to that question, and that it will look, as if by habit, to America for the initial move in that direction.
The Stand for America to Take
We are not expecting the millennium. Our people know that the world is still populated with frail human beings. And yet I believe that our own people are now swept into an exaltation of spirit such that, if the other delegates to this conference should refuse to meet our delegates on terms of even generosity and liberality of purpose, and if our President should declare, as I have said before: “Then America, to the utmost limit within the bounds of safety, will disarm alone!” the sound opinion of the country, the opinion that makes America what it is, would back President Harding to a unit. And I do not think it is too much to predict that, with one or two exceptions, the other delegates to the conference would go home to face a tremendously serious situation among their peoples, who would be outraged, I am sure, at having been left so far behind in such a noble and courageous example.
In France I saw the veritable maiming of a whole race. Here at home in our own country those who suffered physical disaster are more scattered, so that we have been less powerfully impressed by the numbers of these men left wrecked by war. And we have needed none of these ghastly destructions of war to fill us with the abhorrence of war. But if we did need such demonstrations, if we did need to be stirred from any indifference, our people would need only to listen as I have listened to the disabled veterans we are rebuilding and training here at our own Mooseheart.
We have needed no such pitiful object lessons in reaching this towering conviction that has gripped the entire country—the conviction that, now and for all time, something decisive, something effective, some finishing stroke must be achieved that will release humanity from the crushing cost that war exacts from the bodies of men, from the profits and product of peace and, most of all, from the human spirit.
Surely the civilization that has given us so much pride until now, is nothing compared with the civilization we shall know when the spirits of men are released as we now want them released, so that we shall be freed at last from the fears and the suspicions and the hatreds that have kept us as idle as we have been ignoble. No man knows what life may become when the energies of humanity shall be released at last and when men shall be permitted to realize the good that has been so long stifled within them. The vision of such a future is almost blinding. But we in America have come to a mighty resolve, and the whole world shares that resolve, that this new day of untrammeled endeavor, the day of spirits released, shall dawn and dawn now.
believe that this passion for a nobler, or at least a more sensible, way of adjusting conflicts of interest is ablaze all over the world. It may not be openly and definitely expressed, but it is there. An expectancy so earnest, so alert, so world-wide, it is impossible to deceive, and it will be dangerous to disappoint. Some reasonable answer must be given, openly and fairly, to this great question. “Is there no way of settlement except by shooting?” or the representatives who attend this conference may well hesitate to return to their countries.
In taking this attitude, we all know that our people are not moved by any weakness for pacifism, there is no slackening in their patriotism, there is no lull in their feeling for country. In every war we have waged, our sons have fought with a fury that has become historic. In our every war they have died for country, they have died in droves, and with a flourish as gallant as any in the history of romance. But the point is, our people are done with dying. They have a desire to live for country, and a conviction that the desire is reasonable at last.
For how many years have we talked of the day when the millions that are rusted or shot away in every battleship shall be so many millions more for schools, for museums, for libraries, for all the things that elevate and sweeten life? Now our people have finished with talk. They want it done. It has stunned us all to think of the ninety-three cents in every dollar of revenue that go to meeting the cost of past and future wars. Now our people want this stopped.
I personally saw every hideous thing that war can be, on every Allied front, in the recent conflict. From submarine sinkings at sea, from air raids in London and Paris and Padua in Italy, to the slaughter of the front line trenches in Belgium and southward, I saw it all, and fortunately escaped it all. But I find I have nothing new to tell our people who have seen the shooting and are sick of the shooting. The four hundred mangled things that once were American men, suffering out the rest of their tortured lives at the Soldiers’ Home in Marion, Indiana, and in other places that I recently visited, knew more than I. So did the mothers of sons asleep on the fields of Flanders and France and Italy.
These people have turned their faces to the Washington conference with an expectancy that would be terrible except for one thing. That is their abiding faith in their President, and their confidence in his Secretary of State.
The "President’s Great Opportunity
Our people know that their backs and their spirits must surely break if some part of this burden of limitless armament is not now lifted. Surely “it must not be again.” Our President has said so and the country is trusting him to see it through. The people of the entire world want the utmost measure of disarmament. The people of America will stand for nothing less. They are filled with the conviction that the Washington conference on the reduction of armament represents the greatest opportunity that has ever fallen to American statesmen, and particularly to a President of the United States. The people of America believe that the desire of their President’s heart, and of the hearts of the men he has chosen to represent us at this conference, is for absolute success in this final grapple with abuse of power. They know that America’s delegates at the conference will battle for reason, that they will set their faces against quibbling, that they will enforce the President’s will and their own. Our people know that if the President comes from this great occasion with any substantial measure of achievement, his service will rank with the service of Washington and Lincoln, and his name will live forever with theirs. Our people know that this is not simply a great occasion in the world. It is one of the greatest, and we must meet it greatly.
feeling is cut into with analysis it drops apart into countless arguments, every one of them founded on logic and fact, every separate one of them separately unanswerable. If any master of political expediency should attempt to defend, in the presence of these typical people of the Middle West, the practice of making and maintaining any longer the boundaries of nations or the ambitions of nations by the simple means of killing or maiming their sons or husbands, their brothers or lovers, the winners of their daily bread and the makers of their homes, he would find himself in a losing contest, with weapons of logic in his hands as antiquated as the weapons of war.
Our people know now that the world is the poorer by waste of the humblest lives and talent and that at some time or other the mind of man must make itself master of his passions. Our people are settled in the belief that no question of expediency or policy is sufficiently important to stand in the way of a method of settling the disputes of the world better than this way of everlasting drilling and killing.
To my mind this is not old fogyism but opinion in a stage of advancement that can not be safely ignored. It is these people, these typical Americans, who are the formidably modern. The men who regard themselves as experts and masters of polity and diplomacy will do well to keep up with them.
Since my return from this typical Middle West, I have tried to put in order some of the impressions received there. The first impression is of the intelligent conception our people have of the plan and scope of the Washington conference. They notice that the world has been ransacked to furnish the conference with political wisdom. They note that no limit has been set to the breadth of its vision or the rank of its powers. They concede that the conference will have on its hands problems of immense importance. Yet through all this they feel that however grave these problems of national and international interest, no matter how skillfully or brilliantly these conflicting interests may be shifted and reshifted into some satisfactory pattern, these things only superficially surface over a deeper fact that is fundamental to everything else.
The fact is this, that if civilization has got anywhere at all it has got to the point where a supremely important thing is consideration for the little miracle of individual human existence everywhere, and to the right of that individual human existence to security.
After all, to every man, this world which statesmen ponder over so profoundly is only himself a countless number of times repeated. The individual knows that the peace of the world is nothing more than the sum of myriad individual opinions and wills like his own, and their yearning for safety and happiness and continuance, and for friendship with others. Surrounding the Washington conference and every day beating upon it will be simply a world of such individual yearning for safety, and for progress in safety. And the great minds constituting the conference will do well to pay heed to the voices of these humbler folk everywhere about them on the outside. The humblest of these may send the greatest home unbearably at odds with conscience, if he asks and finds unanswered at the conference one simple, final, finishing question, reducible to this:
“Is it possible that at this stage of human progress you can find no means of composing our aims better than this idiot means of shooting us?” The Might of Public Opinion
It is my firm conviction that this one question is in the minds of the whole of our people, I further