Home > Authors Index > Robert Herrick > World Decision > This page
The World Decision, a non-fiction book by Robert Herrick |
||
Part 3. America - Chapter 2. The Choice |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ Part Three. America Chapter II. The Choice "We have all sinned, your people as well as mine, the English, the French, the Germans, all, all of us,--but Germany has sinned most." When M. Hanotaux spoke these words with a Hebraic fervor of conviction, I did not have to be told what he meant. The people of our time have sinned through their hot desire for material possession of the earth and its riches--through commercialism, capitalism, call it what you will. Each great nation has made its selfish race for economic advancement at the expense of other peoples: commercial rivalry has largely begotten this bloody war, which is essentially a predatory raid by one barbarous tribe against the riches of its neighbors. Whether England or Russia under similar circumstances would have dared a similar attack on the liberties of the world is open to speculation. To Germany alone, however, has been reserved the distinction of elevating greed and the lust of power to the dignity of a philosophic system, a creed with the religious sanction of that "old German god" to smite the rivals of the Fatherland and take away their wealth. It is because Germany has made a consistent monster out of her materialistic interpretation of modern science that she is now held up before the nations of the world as a spectacle and a warning. "We have all sinned" in believing that the body is more than the spirit, that food and pleasure and power are the primary ends of all living; but Germany alone has had the effrontery to justify her cynicism by conscious theory and to teach it systematically to all her people. She has endowed with life a philosophical idea, given it the personality of her people, created a national Frankenstein to be feared and loathed. More, she is coming perilously nigh to imposing her god upon the world! We have all worshiped at the shrine of material achievement--in America with the riot of young strength. England, like old King Amfortas, is now bleeding from the sins of her youth and calling in vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from their penalty. She has built her rich civilization on a morass of exploited millions, and her Nemesis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions strike and drink and feel no imperative urge to give their lives for an England that sucked her prosperity from their veins. In the race for commercial supremacy the Latin nations--Italy, Spain, and France--have been deemed inferior to Germany, England, and the United States, because they were less tainted with the lust of possession, less materialistic in their reading of life, less powerful in their grasp upon economic opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin countries industry yet remains largely on the small scale, which is economically wasteful, but which does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense of the individual worker. The great corporation designed for the rapid creation of wealth has not found that congenial home on Latin soil which it has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact accounts for the touch of handicraft lingering in the product of Latin industry, for the strength and health individually of their working classes, for their fervor of devotion to the national tradition. The Latin has never forgotten the claims of the individual life: democracy to him is more than the right to vote. Therefore, pure art, pure science, pure literature--also the world of ideas--has a larger part in the life of Latin peoples than with us in the eternal struggle with the materialistic forces of life. To the Latin living is not solely the gratification of the body. He reckons on the intelligence and the spirit of man as well. * * * * * It may seem to some that throughout these pages I have spoken paradoxically of the world war as primarily a struggle between the Latin and the Germanic ideal, ignoring the significance of Russia and of England. In spite of the heroic resistance of the French and the pertinacious thrust of the Italians against the steel wall in which Austria has bound them, the Latin forces engaged are obviously less than half of the Allied Powers. On the sea England is virtually alone. Nevertheless, I see the struggle as a Latin-German one, the great decision as essentially a decision between these two types of ideals. All else is relative and accidental. Apart from the surprising vitality developed by the two Latin peoples, their astonishing force in the brutal struggle for survival,--which has disagreeably put wrong the calculations of their enemy,--it is the mental and spiritual leadership of the world which is being fought for rather than the physical. The ideas and the ideals under which the Allies are fighting, which can be simply summed up however divergent their manifestations, are French, are Latin ideas and ideals, not English, not Russian. The spirit of the cause to which England has lent her imperial supremacy and Russia her undeveloped strength is Latin, and since the war began the English have widely borne testimony to this fact. The right of peoples, little as well as strong nations, to live their own lives, to preserve their own political autonomy, to develop their own traditions, is part of the Latin lesson learned in the throes of the great Revolution. It is expressed passionately, wistfully in that universal cry of the French people: "We must end this thing--it must never happen again--we must win the right to live as we see fit, not under the dictation of another!" To the Latin mind the world is peopled by individuals who cannot and should not be pressed in the same political or economic mould, who must win their individual salvation by an individual struggle and evolution. This is the ideal of liberty the world over, which prompted France to send us help in our struggle with England. It is a wasteful, an uneconomic ideal, as we Americans have proved in our slovenly administration of our great inheritance. Yet we would not have a machine-made, autocratic organization, no matter how clean and thrifty and efficient it might make our cities. We prefer the slow process of conversion to the machine process of coercion. And that is one source of our sympathy with French civilization. Let us have all liberty to its possible limit short of license: the Latin intelligence has known how to preserve liberty from becoming license. The result in the human being of the principle of liberty is individual intelligence and spiritual power; those are the high ideals toward which democracy aims. The cost of them is efficiency, organization--immediate results which German discipline obtains. But the cost of the German ideal is the humanity of life, and that is too big a price to pay. That there should be found many among us who are willing to exchange the spiritual flower of our civilization for the sake of a more efficient social organization is evidence of the extent to which the cancer of a materialistic commercialism has already eaten into our life. * * * * * The Latin vision of life includes chivalry, as has been abundantly revealed by the spirit of the French, sorely tried in their struggle with the new barbarian. Chivalry means beauty of conduct, an uneconomic, a sentimental ideal, but without which the life of man on this earth would be forlorn, lacking in dignity, in meaning. Take from mankind the shadowy dream of himself implied in his desire for a chivalrous world, and you leave him a naked animal from the jungle, more despicable the more skillful he becomes in gratifying his lusts. The Latin vision of life includes also beauty of art, man's radiation of his inner spiritual world, and closely woven with the love of art is respect for tradition--reverence for the past which has been bequeathed to him by his ancestors, which is incorporated in his blood. We in America have striven for these beauties of chivalry, art, and tradition. We have striven to put them into our lives often blindly, crudely. We have borrowed and bought what we could not create; instinctively we pay homage to what is beyond our industrial power to make, confessing the inadequacy of our materialism to satisfy our souls. We, too, demand a world in which beauty of conduct, beauty of manners, and beauty of art shall be cultivated to give meaning to our lives. The bombardment of Rheims, the murder of Edith Cavell are as shameful to the American mind as to the French, and as incomprehensible. These are not matters of reason, but of instinct--commands of the soul. * * * * * The Latin ideal is not predatory. Whatever they may have done in their past, the Latin peoples to-day are not greedy of conquest. If the Allies win, France will gain little territory. Both Italy and France have limited their territorial ambitions to securing their future safety by establishing frontiers on natural barriers. France also expects indemnity for her huge losses and for outraged Belgium. She must rebuild her home and be freed for generations to come from the inhibiting fear of invasion. One does not feel so confident of England: in the past she has had the pilfering hand. But from prudence if not from shame England may content herself with a reestablished prestige and a tranquil Europe. Russia has already reconciled herself to relinquishing Poland, and except for her natural ambition to enter the Mediterranean she seems without predatory desires. Russia, it should not be forgotten, took up arms to protect her own kin from the Austrians. The Slav and the Latin have a spiritual sympathy that cannot exist between the Latin and the Teuton, which gives their present union more than an accidental significance. Whatever secret ambitions may be brewing in the chancelleries of Europe, France has put herself on record against conquest too emphatically to countenance at the peace conference any predatory rearrangement of the map of Europe. She has made the great war a struggle of principle--the principle of national liberty against the principle of military conquest. It is this great principle which gives significance to her cause and justifies the awful slaughter and waste of bleeding Europe. If the pretensions of physical might, no matter with what excuses, can be thoroughly defeated, proved to be an impossible theory of life, so that never again in the history of the world will a nation attempt to take with the sword what does not belong to it, the bloody sacrifice will have been well worth making. The issues of the great conflict have been obscured, especially in America, but to the humblest soldier of France they are as clear as blazing sunlight. "Never again!" Never the monstrous pretension that power alone makes right, that the will to eat gives free license to the eater, however great his appetite or his belief in himself. That is the cause of all the world, for which the French are willing to give all that they have. And I know no cause more important to be settled for the future of the human race. * * * * * Are we not interested in the right decision of this cause? A peaceable people, loving our own way, jealous of interference, we should assuredly present a lamentable spectacle were we called upon to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy. Possibly a more lamentable spectacle of inefficiency combined with corruption than England has given the world the past year! And at last we are becoming aware that our policy of selfish isolation does not mean immunity from attack. We are realizing that those "three thousand miles of cool sea-water" no longer make an effectual barrier against the ingenuity of modern men. But I would not put the matter on the selfish basis of our own security. It is vastly larger than that. It is, vitally, what manner of world we wish to have for ourselves and our children. At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with splendid unanimity the response: Americans did not want the German world! Since then, alas, it would seem that the clear moral reaction of our people to the demonstration of the world struggle has been gradually weakening: we are becoming confused, permitting insidious reasoners to cloud the issue, listening to the prompting of the beast in our own bellies, hesitating, dividing, excusing, evading the great question--"seeing both sides." As if there were two sides to such a plain issue stripped of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color of German ideals? Do we prefer the "old German god" to the culture and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... "We, too, have sinned." In our blood is all the crude materialism of a triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We, too, are ready to enter the fierce war of commercial rivalry with England and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of economic expansion, though dubious about our own imperialism. Surely no people that ever lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the crossroads as America at this hour. Prudence has prevented us as a nation from pronouncing that moral verdict on the cause which might have had decisive weight in hastening the world decision. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent us individually from realizing the immense importance to us of the decision that is being ground out in the tears and blood of Europe. And no ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Americans who care for anything but their own selfish well-being from doing all in their power to make ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world. Every soldier who dies in the trenches of France, who bears a maimed and disfigured body through life, is giving himself for us, so that we may live in a world where individual rights and liberties are respected, where beauty of conduct and beauty of art may endure, where life means more than the satisfaction of bodily appetites. _ |
||