LECTURE III
THE NEW AGE: ITS VALUES
LECTURE III
THE NEW AGE: ITS VALUES
REAL and great as are the perils which confront us in the new age, and imperative as it is squarely to face them, they constitute, after all, only one side of the world situation. For there are also great values to be counted upon, and to be used to the full. And we may include under these values of the new age all the forces which may help to that great advance, that ought to follow from the war: the values involved in the outstanding characteristics of the present world-order; the moral demonstrations of the war, as they bear on the continued progress of the race; and the most significant ideal achievements of the war.
I
The Values Involved in the Characteristics of the Present World-Order
We are first to consider the helpful trends involved in the outstanding characteristics of the present world-order. Of these characteristic world phenomena, two—the war's destructive use of modern science, and the relatively new relentless immoral philosophy of the State and of national life—are utterly hostile to a truly Christian civilization, and have been already dealt with.
Three others—world solidarity; the prodigiously increased resources of power and wealth and knowledge made possible through modern science; and the forced cooperation—are ambiguous in their character. For, as the war has shown, they may be used for good or evil. They are problems for the ideal interests to solve, powerful forces to be mastered. And yet they are all so readily usable for good that they may be unhesitatingly classed among the great helpful trends of the age.
The four others named—the world-wide trend toward democracy and universal education; the establishment of a League of Nations to enforce peace, even granting its limitations; the steadily growing internationalism; and the deepening sense of the necessity of a larger and more significant goal for social progress—we may believe will positively help to a more Christian civilization, to a new epoch for humanity.
1. First of all, there is a constantly intensifying world solidarity. Men are called to live a world-life as never before, for the world is increasingly one. Improved methods of transportation and communication—no one of them more than one hundred years old—have insured it. We are habituated to migrations, compared to which great historic racial migrations were insignificant. The races are mingled in a way that intensifies all race problems. The spread of Western civilization all over the world has forced in no small degree both a commercial and an intellectual solidarity, bringing everywhere the challenge of the scientific spirit and of some measure of the social consciousness. The press is making men at remote distances think and feel together. Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony give promise of the day when all men shall be in touch with one another the world over. Life has a complexity of relations not to be escaped.
The war so demonstrated this solidarity of the world as to have compelled America to abandon its settled policy of isolated neutrality, and to champion the cause of the Allies in its larger aspects as unmistakably its own cause.
This growing solidarity, too, and the sense of it have been greatly intensified by the events of the war. The war has proved the oneness of the earth's life. We cannot escape it, try as we will. Henceforth, nothing significant can occur anywhere and not affect the whole world. From now on all peoples are visibly members one of another.
While this gives immense possible power to the forces of evil, it gives a like power to the forces of good, and the consciousness of solidarity can hardly help sobering the passion of selfishness, and the closer fellowship involved can hardly help creating a better understanding among the nations. Now, if this solidarity of the world is mastered by the forces of righteousness, then we may look forward to a life larger, more complex, richer, more significant than men have ever yet known,—a life to which all races and nations shall contribute their best. For, of that new City of God, it could then be truly said: "They shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it." For such a mastered and glorified world-solidarity we may hope: for it we must be ready.
2. In the second place, through the growth of modern science, there has been in the last century a prodigious increase in the world's resources of power and wealth and knowledge, constituting again a great challenge to the moral and religious forces. That these resources were far greater than men thought, and that they can be used for the most hideous wrong, this war clearly demonstrated. And it was not less a demonstration, that unless civilization itself is to come to an end the world must learn to bring these resources under moral control. The very power of these resources both for good and evil forced the war upon the race, and its issues will not be finally settled except through a reassertion of the moral mastery of all resources and forces. To be true to that requirement will demand stern self-judgment on the part of all the nations.
Yet modern science has enormous help to offer to the forces of righteousness through the wealth and power made available by its progressive conquest over nature, and especially through the application of the scientific spirit and method in both world-wide and intensified and concentrated surveys for the sake of the social, moral and religious progress of the race. For good intention, moral indignation and social passion, imperative as they are, in themselves solve nothing. In complex and difficult times like these we need a conscience enlightened as well as sensitive; a will that not only means well but is willing patiently to study and obey the laws of the universe of God in which we are called to realize our righteous purposes.
3. In the third place, forced scientific cooperation operation and organization, already becoming characteristic of the world-order before the war, were during the war carried out on a scale and to a degree never before seen. The very solidarity of the world implies it. The exigencies of the war forced cooperation to a far greater extent, both on the individual belligerents and on groups of belligerents. The degree to which we must cooperate, whether we will or no, was to be seen, too, in the way in which the belligerents even in war applied the results of the scientific work of their enemies. And the lessons of the war are certain to compel on the part of individual nations, in the stern conditions following the war, rational co-working on a scale never before prevailing in times of peace.
There has even occurred what Mr. Wells has called "a demilitarization of war." The dependence in the war upon engineers of every sort, upon railroad operators and commercial organizers and food directors and providers is all evidence of this demilitarization. This seems to promise for the future "not so much the conversion of men into soldiers as the socialization of the economic organization of the country with a view to both national and international necessities. We do not want to turn a chemist or a photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national organization is called upon to fight. We have discovered that the modern economic organization is in itself a fighting machine." This has a real element of encouragement in it, for it suggests that where the needs of peace are completely provided for there is already comparative preparedness for the necessities of war.
4. A fourth characteristic of this changing world-order is the unmistakable almost worldwide trend toward democracy and universal education. Every nation, even in Asia, except Afghanistan, is living under some form of constitution. China, with its immense territory and population, has become republican, even if unstably so. The Russian revolution, in spite of the grave anxieties it now stirs, was a prodigious achievement in itself and prophetic of great changes elsewhere. Even Japan, which followed so closely the Prussian model in her government, has made real progress toward a more democratic policy. Of the general democratic gains of the war Mr. Hoover has this to say:
We went into the war to destroy autocracy as a menace to our own and all other democracies. If we had not come into the war every inch of European soil to-day would be under autocratic government. . . . Out of this victory has come the destruction of the four great autocracies in Germany, Russia, Turkey and Austria and the little autocracy in Greece. New democracies have sprung into being in Poland, Finland, Letvia, Lithuania, Esthonia, Czecho-Slovakia, Greater Serbia, Greece, Siberia, and even Germany and Austria have established democratic governments. Beyond these a host of small republics, such as Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and others, have sprung up, and again as a result of this great world movement the constitutions of Spain, Rumania, and even England, have made a final ascent to complete franchise and democracy, although they still maintain a symbol of royalty. . . . The world to-day, except for a comparatively few reactionary and communistic autocracies, is democratic.
Everywhere the war still bids fair, with simple justice, to extend the suffrage and the recognition of the rights of the common people among all the belligerents. Situations inconsistent with an essentially democratic viewpoint men more and more feel are not to be defended, even where permitted.
Now this democratic trend has certainly been greatly strengthened by the war, for the war has brought both a new sense of power to the common man himself, and a new faith in him. Both facts inevitably mean a more thoroughgoing democracy if ultimate revolution is to be avoided. Involved in this trend toward democracy, too, it is plain, is a growing emphasis on equality, the deep significance of which it is folly to deny or to ignore. In words already quoted, "the growing power of the working class is beyond dispute the outstanding fact in human relationships."
5. The definite establishment of a League of Nations, with a Covenant—whatever its limitations—conceived in a spirit unmatched in any similar political document, constitutes another evidence of a new age. For unless humanity is going insane, it will find some way—in spite of America's present opposition—to an effective league of nations, to lift the intolerable burden of ever increasing armaments, and to put a stop to suicidal world conflicts. There has been, it seems to me, an unpardonable cynicism respecting the League of Nations on the part of party politicians, and some idealists. And the company in which the idealists find themselves ought to make them suspect their premises.
In the first place, as William James reminds us, "all goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this workaday world; but woe to him who can recognize them only when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form." Too many were demanding from the start a degree of perfection in the League not to be expected. No doubt the treaty knit up with the Covenant of the League of Nations was not perfect. I have already spoken of the disillusionment arising from the selfish scramble of the nations. But there is another side to the matter. The treaty-makers for the Allies faced a very difficult situation. For all future world peace, the treaty must be such that it should be plain both to Germany and to the world that Germany had not profited by the war. And yet Germany had deliberately started the war, had had no war on her own soil except in East Prussia, had invaded at once territory it had covenanted to respect, had carried through the war its fearful doctrine of f rightfulness, had viciously waged a war intended to crush Belgium and France economically, and had shown little or no penitence for any of these things. These and similar facts need to be borne in mind, when men criticize the treaty.
Moreover, the calling of the Peace Conference itself was no small achievement, and the Conference was at its best in the consideration of the Covenant of the League. Let one read again that Covenant and compare it with any previous similar document growing out of other wars. The essential thing was to get the League started. It was capable of amendment as men went on in its practical use. If America had come in with any reasonable reservations, a great achievement would have been possible. With America's prompt cooperation the League was capable of becoming the one greatest gain of the war, aside from the simple military defeat of the Germans. What practicable substitute do the partisan and idealist opponents of the League propose? What promise is there in simply washing our hands of Europe? The spirit of cooperation, of mutual sacrifice, of passionate desire for permanent peace, could all be carried to their legitimate fulfillment only in such a League. America, it is to be feared, will have much to answer for, in its dire maiming of the League of Nations.
We may hope, however, that America will still find some way to share in the great possibilities of an effective League of Nations, in line with the forecast of the Manchester Guardian:
What matters far more than that America should take an active part in settling the terms of peace for Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey is that she should become an effective member of the League of Nations whose task will be the pacification of the world hereafter. For this her cooperation, if not absolutely essential, is of the deepest importance, not so much because of her wealth and power as because of her comparative disinterestedness and singleness of aim. Nothing is more certain than that the arrangements now made or about to be made in Europe and the Near East cannot stand. They have about them no element of permanence, because they are based on no large and humane principle. They are mainly the compromises of national interest and ambition. It follows that in no long time the whole of these arrangements will have to be largely revised and the treaties rewritten. It is here that the cooperation of America would be invaluable, and there is nothing in her present attitude of aloofness which need prevent her from then playing a free and powerful part.
As to the League itself, we may well remind ourselves of Lord Grey's words: "The success of the League rests with the people, who can make their Governments what they will." Even in its present lessened power, we may still share Dr. Clifford's joy: "The League is a fact, the greatest fact of the hour, and the greatest fact history records. The Tribunal is created. This is the victory for brotherhood!" 6. But independently of a League of Nations to Enforce Peace, a steadily growing internationalism is both manifest and inevitable, as developing out of all the characteristics of the age already mentioned. It is vain to attempt in selfish isolation to withstand it. One of the ablest of British Divines thus sums up this growing internationalism:
The international is the dominating conception of the relations of men to men. A new consciousness,a new mind, has entered the soul of the world. . . . The domestic prepares for the civic and the civic for the national; and the national is on the way to the international and realizes itself in and through the international. Brotherhood is like the air, universal and unescapable. It besets us behind and before, and lays its quickening and uplifting hand upon us. The world is being made "all clear" for its march. "Labour" has long been international. "Peace" movements are world-wide. The Temperance Crusade assails all barriers and will beat them down. The legislators of different countries meet in conference to harmonize laws. Even the churches are developing international relations and preparing for world congresses; and I cannot doubt that the movements for unity will slough the obsolete accretions of the past and unite the religions of the world so that Humanity shall become one flock under one Shepherd. Bertrand Russell thus emphasizes one particular incentive to internationalism:
The war has made it clear that it is impossible to produce a secure integration of the life of a single community while the relations between civilized countries are governed by aggressiveness and suspicion. For this reason any really powerful movement of reform will have to be international.
7. But the most noteworthy evidence of a genuinely new age, among these characteristics of the changing world-order, is the growing sense that the new age cannot mean simply a little better distribution of things among men, but the taking on of a larger and more significant goal than organized humanity have ever before cherished. Labour and social programs, preeminently the British Labour Program,—in the very midst of economic demands—bear witness to this growing sense, that life is more than meat. Not only individuals here and there but whole groups and classes are making this larger claim on life. Two typical men—Bertrand Russell and Harry F. Ward—getting at their problem from quite different points of view, may be instanced, as still both voicing the instinctive longings of multitudes, in their insistence on larger and more significant goals for organized human life.
Russell puts the matter thus:
It is not only more material goods that men need, but more freedom, more self-direction, more outlet for creativeness, more opportunity for the joy of life, more voluntary cooperation, and less involuntary subservience to purposes not their own. All these things the institutions of the future must help to produce, if our increase of knowledge and power over Nature is to bear its full fruit in bringing about a good life.
And he strikes a still deeper note, when he writes:
Life devoted only to life is animal, without any real human value, incapable of preserving men permanently from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty.
Professor Ward almost summarizes his whole treatment of The New Social Order, in his similar expression of the goal of social activity:
It is becoming manifest that the development of personality is to supersede the acquisition of goods as the goal of social activity, and that the fullest development of personality is to be found in the effort to realize the solidarity of the human family.
These statements of both men—we shall later see—are fundamentally in harmony with that basic and supreme principle of reverence for personality which is both psychologically and religiously grounded and a natural guiding principle in our inquiry.
II
The Help of the Moral Demonstrations of the War
From these values involved in the outstanding characteristics of the present world-order, we turn to the help that may come from the moral demonstrations of the war as they bear on the continued progress of the race. After a war of so extraordinary a character, in the midst of days of such significance as these after-the-war days, no thoughtful man can help asking: "What has this most terrible of wars taught us?" Some things have been demonstrated as by the finger of God Himself.
First of all, the war has demonstrated that we must get rid of shallow views of progress, of creed, and of morals.
We must get rid of shallow views of progress. If anything has been made plain in the anguish of this world experience, it is that progress will not take care of itself. The Victorian generation, in its enthusiasm over the new outlook upon the universe afforded by the theory of evolution, not unnaturally and more or less unconsciously assumed that evolution carried progress necessarily with it.
But when one makes clear to himself how nearly Germany came to, at least, an immediate success; and how terrible was the strain upon the whole of Western civilization in meeting through these years the German onset, he does not need to be told that progress is not a thing to be left to the inevitable course of events; that the very meaning of human history is that the attitude of men themselves is the decisive factor in all worth-while progress; that progress worthy of the race requires the steady loyalty of truth-loving, freedom-loving men and women, who forever and forever are "staying on the job."
Any progress worthy of the name, we may never forget, involves great moral conditions, and there is no evading of these laws of the universe. The man or the nation who will not fulfill these great moral conditions will find himself fighting against the universe of God. "He that falleth on this stone shall be broken to pieces; but on whomsoever it shall fall it will scatter him as dust." First of all, therefore, let every thoughtful man and nation carry out of this war a deep conviction that progress will not take care of itself.
And the war has been proving not less certainly that we must get rid of, shallow views of creed as well. For if we have been saying to ourselves, that it does not make much difference what a man or a nation thinks, what their theory of society is, what philosophy of life they hold, that view surely should be no longer possible for this generation. For this war may well be said to be in its entirety the logical result of the German philosophy of the State. Primarily, indeed, we were not fighting the German Government, even the German military power; but, as we have seen, the German philosophy of the State—that holds that the State is superior to all moral obligations, that upon it lies no duty of any kind except to seek its own selfish interests. Belgium, Serbia, Armenia and Russia demonstrate for all time the terrible possibilities of this false philosophy.
It thus mightily concerns the human race what a nation's creed is, what theory of society it holds, what philosophy of life it is practising.
In the process of this war, too, God has been burning into the consciousness of this generation some elementary and basic lessons in morals. We must get rid of shallow views of morals. This generation ought to know, as no generation has ever known, the true meaning of three things in morals—selfishness, arrogance, and falseness.
For, first of all, if we have been saying to ourselves that it does not make much difference whether a man or a nation is selfish or not, that delusion should surely now have vanished. If one wants to know to what his own selfishness, or that of his own nation, is akin; if he wishes to know what selfishness—pure, unadulterated, unashamed, and unlimited—truly means; if he would see once for all the meanness, the treachery, the sordidness, the hideousness, the devilishness of selfishness; he might have read it revealed to every sense and faculty of man on the very face of desolated Belgium, Northern France, and Armenia. For there were written the natural and inevitable consequences of a national selfishness that had no scruple and no thought or care for any other interests than its own, and that gloried in its shame. So that von Tirpitz could say: "It must be stated that it is not wrong but right that has been done in Belgium." So terrible a thing is selfishness.
So, too, if it had seemed to any of us a matter of small consequence that a man or a nation should be conceited and arrogant, this world-war should forever be a demonstration of the infinite power for evil which arrogance possesses. For it was a terrible and insensate pride which made it possible for Germany to persuade herself that it was quite proper and right that her domination should be absolute, and the interests of all others sacrificed to her. Desolated Belgium is the logical result of such pride. How characteristic of the arrogance, in which, as Harrison said, the German people have been schooled, is this statement of Haeckel, and how fiendish its applications: "One single highly-cultured German warrior represents a higher intellectual and moral life-value than hundreds of the raw children of nature whom England and France, Russia, and Italy uphold to-day."
The German treatment of Belgium, and later of distracted Russia, was, once more, a moral demonstration not only of the falseness and utter untrustworthiness of the German Government, but also of the inevitable logical consequences of such falseness in its effect on the relations of men to each other. The long unbroken record of unexampled cruelty in Belgium is the direct result of the refusal of a great nation to count its plighted word as of any value. No decent civilization is possible without truth and trust between men and between nations.
Let all men and all nations take it to heart that German selfishness, German arrogance, and German falseness bore their inevitable fruit in this hell let loose upon earth, not because they were German, but because they were exactly what they were—selfishness, arrogance, and falseness. It was precisely against these that Christ set Himself. No sound life in any nation or group of nations can be built upon that foundation. "The healing of the nations" can lie only in unselfish good-will, in willingness to learn and to serve, in utter truth. This has been demonstrated.
2. The grip of the laws of God upon Nations.
This necessity for getting rid of shallow views of progress, of creed, and of morals has only given illustrations of another of the outstanding demonstrations of the war—the inescapable grip of the laws of God upon the life of nations as well as of individuals. For in all the inevitable connections of progress, of creed, and of morals, is to be seen the grip of God's laws.
If it seemed to us at any time in this world-strife that God had forgotten the world, and left the powers of evil to conquer, we might have laid aside all such fears. For God, we may be sure, is in the very laws of His universe, and constantly working through them to the accomplishment of His great aims. Wherever there has been violation of the fundamental laws of the universe, there penalty has fallen and will still fall. No man, no nation can finally evade or trick the laws of the universe. As surely as the farmer cannot cheat the soil, so surely every man, every class, every nation will reap according to the sowing. And if it seemed to any of us in the war that Germany was too often having it all her own way, we may be perfectly certain that Germany's own record in this war is, on the contrary, an unmistakable demonstration of the grip of the laws of God upon the life of nations.
Twenty-five years ago, in spite of factors in her life, which men could not approve, and partly misled by the German propaganda itself, thousands of men of all nations were turning to Germany for education, and were giving to Germany an admiration and even an affection beyond her real desert. Men were ready to recognize in her the educational, scientific, and musical leader of the world. Is it a good thing for her that in this war, and in the long preparation for it, she put her admirers and lovers to shame, and did all that the most fiendish ingenuity could devise to drive out of their hearts every last bit of admiration and love?
Well might one, whose lines show that he has both known and loved his Germany, and must hope that she will return to sanity and to her own best self, write in Punch of "A Lost Land"—
A childhood land of mountain ways, Where earthy gnomes and forest fays, Kind, foolish giants, gentle bears, Sport with the peasant as he fares Affrighted through the forest glades, And lead sweet, wistful little maids Lost in the woods, forlorn, alone, To princely lovers and a throne.
Dear haunted land of gorge and glen, Ah, me! the dreams, the dreams of men!
A learned land of wise old books And men with meditative looks, Who move in quaint red-gabled towns And sit in gravely folded gowns, Divining in deep-laden speech The world's supreme arcana—each A homely god to listening Youth Eager to tear the veil of Truth; Mild votaries of book and pen—Alas, the dreams, the dreams of men I A music land, whose life is wrought In movements of melodious thought; In symphony, great wave on wave—Or fugue, elusive, swift, and grave; A singing land, whose lyric rimes Float on the air like village chimes; Music and verse—the deepest part Of a whole nation's thinking heart!
Oh land of Now, oh land of then!
Dear God! the dreams, the dreams of men!
Slave nation in a land of hate, Where are the things that made you great? Child-hearted once—oh, deep defiled, Dare you look now upon a child? Your lore—a hideous mask wherein Self-worship hides its monstrous sin; Music and verse, divinely wed—How can these live where love is dead? Oh, depths beneath sweet human ken, God help the dreams, the dreams of men!
How dire is Germany's loss at this point is vividly suggested by the words of Mr. Otto Kahn, the well-known Jewish banker of New York, to German-born citizens in the United States—
We men of German descent have a special reckoning to make with Kaiserism. The world has been wronged and hurt by Prussianized Germany as it was never wronged and hurt before. But the deepest hurt of all is that which has been done to us. Our spiritual inheritance has been stolen, wrenched from us by impious hands and thrown in the gutter. The ideals and traditions we cherished have been foully besmirched; our blood has been dishonoured; we have been bitterly shamed by our kith and kin. The land to which we were linked by fond memories has become an outcast among the nations, convicted of high treason against civilization and of unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Has ever nation known such moral isolation as is now hers? The completeness of her collapse and of her present disintegration is the inevitable penalty of violation of eternal moral laws.
III
The Greatest Ideal Achievements of the War
When one is thinking of the moral demonstrations of the war, and of the great values, which must be carried on into the new age, he certainly may not leave out of account its greatest ideal achievements which may be said, I think, to be these—the rare idealism with which America came into the war; men's deepening conviction of the supremacy of the intangible values; voluntary cooperation in a great cause on an unheard-of scale; the largest measure of the spirit of sacrifice the world has ever seen; and the resulting new revelation of common men.
1. I have already spoken of the rare idealism with which America came into the war as one of the causes of the disillusionment that later befell. But here I remind you of it as the highest accomplishment of our national history and a perpetual challenge to us for the years to come to be true to our own best vision.
It is no jingoist but a sober American historical scholar who wrote;
After all did a nation ever before in the world's history enter a conflict only because it loathed the principles and despised the conduct of another nation—solely because of moral indignation?
And Mr. Balfour called our entry into the war, "the most magnanimous and generous act in history." Bergson bore personal testimony to the spirit shown in America at that time:
Yes, I was a witness of this spectacle unique in history, a people of nearly a hundred millions of souls throwing themselves into the war with all their forces, all their resources, consenting in advance to every sacrifice, doing this, be it understood, entirely without any impulsion of self-defense, for there were hardly a thousand persons in the United States, five hundred, even, who would admit that Germany might be a danger for the United States. Moreover, this was done entirely without the impulse due to material advantage, for from the outset the Americans refused all compensation, and one of their generals said to me last year, "We will return with empty hands, taking with us only our dead." They came with no designing aim, stirred neither by interest nor fear, but by a principle, by an idea, by the thought of the mission they were called upon to fulfill in the world. I was there, and I saw the rising of that great tide of almost religious emotion which bore away the American people. [Henri Bergson,"French Ideals in Education and the American Student" in The Living Age, Dec. 27, 1919.]
So fine, so united and so unselfish was our national spirit in that high day that one of our poets seemed to us to be accurately reflecting that spirit when she wrote:
A nation goes adventuring,
With heart that will not quail;
A nation goes adventuring, To seek the Holy Grail.
A nation leaves its money-bags,
Its firesides, safe and warm, To ride about the windy world,
And keep the weak from harm. A nation goes adventuring, With heart that will not quail,
God grant it, on some hard-won dawn, Sight of the Holy Grail.
["America, 1917-1918," by Mary Carolyn Davies.]
If these lines seem to us now a bit exaggerated, let us make sure that it is not because we ourselves have fallen away from the high spirit of which we found ourselves then capable. The glory of that idealism we must not fail to carry over into the new age.
2. A second of these great ideal achievements of the war was this, that, in an age we have called materialistic, the world has disclosed a new and steadily deepening conviction, on the part of men in all parts of the earth, of the supremacy of the intangible values. It should mean much to all believers in the ideal that more millions of men than ever before, under the tutelage of the German menace, came clearly to see that force and machinery and organization and wealth and even science—all put together—are not enough; that a man or a nation may have all these and still have no life worth living; but, on the contrary, may be a curse to the race.
Something like three-fourths of the population of the globe have been knit up in some fashion with the cause of the Allies, not for territorial gains, not for commercial aggrandizement, not for purposes of political domination, but because they came to see as never before that all possible material advances without essential liberty do but furnish forth a barren life. This is the significance of the fact that little Central American countries like Guatemala, and Governments like Cuba and Liberia, declared themselves for the Allies. It became finally clear to them that no material gains—such as Germany counted as alone vital—can ever make good the heritage of free men: freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, freedom of thought, freedom of investigation; political, economic, social freedom—the emancipation of all the powers of men. They awakened, thus, to the supremacy of the intangible values. They caught the vision of the things that, though they be not seen, are yet eternal—the supreme and everlasting values of faith, of hope, of love.
This is a great racial achievement, and a great possible spiritual asset, for which men should be endlessly grateful. In the degree in which that achievement can be maintained, a new day for the world will have dawned.
3. The third great achievement of the war was that, under its pressure, the peoples who were really seeking a free society of self-respecting and mutually-respecting nations were driven to such far-reaching cooperation and companionship in a great unselfish cause as the world had never before seen. The resources of credit, of food, of shipping, of man-power of three-fourths of the world were in large measure pooled to establish the great aims of the Allies. Something like a unified Council of all these peoples was made possible—an actual and potent internationalism, a "super-nationalism" indeed, that holds the one great promise for the world's future peace and progress.
To paraphrase the New Republic's statement at an earlier period of the war; We witnessed the creation of a super-national control of the world's necessities. The men who were charged with conducting the war were compelled to think as international statesmen. The old notions of sovereignty no longer governed the facts. Three of the unifying forces of mankind were at work—hunger, danger, and a great hope. They swept into the scrap heap the separatist theories that nations should be self-sufficing economically, and absolutely independent politically. A new and more powerful machinery of internationalism was created. And it was a true internationalism, because it dealt not with dynastic and diplomatic alliances, but with the cooperative control of those vital supplies on which human life depends.
Cooperation on such a scale and for such ends may well send a thrill through any man who can think, and certainly opens up the vision of a new world. For here was actualized a kind of "parliament of man," a great world unity of the free nations who seek, and must continue to seek, the triumph of freedom, of justice and of peace for all the peoples of the entire world.
If cooperation like this for great unselfish aims may be secured in time of war, surely we need not be without hope even yet of the establishment of a permanent League of Free Nations in time of peace. For, as President Wilson said, in presenting to the Peace Conference the draft of the League of Nations:
It is not in contemplation that this should be merely a League to secure the peace of the world. It is a League which can be used in any international matter. That is the significance of the provision introduced concerning labour.
Such a League, as President Wilson said, must be "a living thing," growing with the growth of the nations, developing to meet developing problems—the great problems of a humane and scientific control of production, distribution, and consumption; the problems of leisure, of recreation, of education, and of religion, for the whole race of men. Here is opportunity for men's highest powers in days of peace; here a great challenge for the liberation of human energies in peaceful outlets.
And here, in so magnificent an extension of cooperation among the nations, lies the only proper outcome for the immeasurable sacrifices of this war. This, too, is a great racial achievement, and possible spiritual asset, which must be carried over into the new age.
4. And, once more, the war demonstrated afresh, on an unexampled scale, the capacity of men for sacrifice. The massive heroism of the common men of all the nations has made this fact certain. It is the simple truth to say that more millions of men than ever before in the history of the world threw themselves unflinchingly into the support of a great unselfish cause, ready for whatever sacrifice that might involve.
The very numbers concerned are an inspiration. For it was not alone those who "went over the top" who shared in this sacrificial devotion. No man who enlisted with any sense of the issues at stake could know what his enlistment might involve of life or death; and in his enlistment he took his hands off himself, and laid that self in very deed upon the altar of country and humanity. In that, perhaps, half-blind dedication to a high unselfish cause, many a man found to his own surprise his life become marvellously simple and free. He had not known before that sacrifice was the way to liberty.
This very spirit of sacrifice gave to millions of men a new sense of the great values for which they fought, and a new grip upon them. They saw things in better proportion; the great values looming up as really great, and the relative goods forced back into their relative places. It was "the glory of the trenches," as Coningsby Dawson said, that they emancipated men from selfishness and from the domination of petty aims and fears—There's one person I've missed since my return to New York. I've caught glimpses of him disappearing around corners, but he dodges. I think he's a bit ashamed to meet me. That person is my old civilian self. What a full-blown egotist he used to be I How full of golden plans for his own advancement! How terrified of failure, of disease, of money losses, of death—of all the temporary, external, non-essential things that have nothing to do with the spirit! War is in itself damnable—a profligate misuse of the accumulated brainstuff of centuries. Nevertheless, there's many a man who has no love of war, who, previous to the war, had cramped his soul with littleness, and was chased by the bayonet of duty into the blood-stained largeness of the trenches, who has learned to say, "Thank God for this war!" He thanks God not because of the carnage, but because, when the winepress of new ideals was being trodden, he was born in an age when he could do his share.
And some such emancipation, as came to the men in the trenches, came in like manner to many soldiers and sailors who never saw the front; but who held themselves at home or abroad not less at their country's command. And it came surely, also, to those who waited in the homes for fathers and husbands, and sons and brothers, and bore them on their heart in love and prayer, and made common cause with them. How inevitably the home life, too, was exalted by the sacrifices of this war is suggested by Miss Rittenhouse in her poem, "I Have No Lover on the Battle-field"—I have no lover on the battle-field,
I do not go with sickening fear at heart, And when the crier calls the latest horror
I do not start. I have no lover on the battle-field,
I am exempt from terror of the night, I can lie down, serene and disregarding,
Until the light. But on the battle-field had I a lover,
How life would purge itself of petty pain, And what would matter all the petty losses,
The petty gain? I should be one with those who suffer greatly,
With pain all pain above, And I should know then beyond peradventure,
The heart of Love!
But the glory of the spirit of sacrifice is not merely that it emancipates and exalts the individual who feels it, but that it is contagious and spreads from soul to soul, and so becomes truly redemptive for other men also. Mr. J. J. Chapman had no doubt his own brilliant son in thought, who died earlier in the war, when he wrote:
The young men, as of old, shine as the natural heroes of the race. Their readiness to die restores our faith in human nature. It reminds us that the sacrificial part is what counts in the spread of truth. This much we know, and we know little else about morality and religion. To count the cost and dwell upon the life and property sacrificed in heroic action is to doubt the value of truth. To what better use could these young heroes and all this amassed wealth have been put? It was for this that they existed.
The spirit of sacrifice not only involves, thus, the uplift of high companionship in the fulfillment of great aims; but its unwonted prevalence means also that more millions of men, than ever before in the history of the world, have found in their own sacrificial experience the key to the understanding of the deepest message of religion, of Christianity, of Christ's own death—the message of sacrifice. Men have come to see in some half-blind fashion the meaning of sacrifice; that they can in some true sense do what Hinton long ago pointed out—make all their pains "identify themselves in meaning, and end with the suffering of Christ. ,, For when one turns all his pains into a willing sacrifice to God and to men, he makes the sacrifice itself," an instrument of joy "—for love rejoices in sacrifices for love's sake.
In the midst of all the drear monotony and drudgery of much of the war, in commonplace tasks that did not easily take on any glamour or glory of war, in mud and squalor and wretchedness and disease, every man still had his place in the huge sacrificial task, and offered his life for the triumph of liberty, of democracy, of righteousness in the earth. Surely that cannot happen for millions of men, and the world be not better worth living in hereafter. One does not wonder that one of the English chaplains was able to say that the favourite hymn of the London regiments, at the long gruelling battle of the Somme, was Watts' old Good Friday hymn—When I survey the wondrous cross, On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride.
Here again was a great racial achievement, and a great possible spiritual asset, which above all the Christian forces must make the very spirit of the new age.
5. Through all these great ideal achievements of the war, already surveyed, another came,—the resulting new revelation of common men. For if millions of men shared in that rare idealism with which America entered the war; if they awakened to a new sense of the supremacy of intangible values; if they arose to the demands of cooperative tasks unmatched in history; if they showed an unbelievable capacity for sacrifice; then in all this, there was involved a new revelation of common men, that should mean also a new faith in God and His universe.
We that have seen man broken, We know man is divine.
In the face of such scientific terrors as the world had never before seen, man's frail, human body by indomitable will held on its course. Common men of all the nations proved themselves capable of an endurance we had hardly thought possible to men, and of a heroism unsurpassed in the history of the world.
Barbusse's novel, The Fire, was one of the truly great books the war gave us. It is significant that it could be correctly described, in the whole heart and sweep of it, as "an ardent tribute to the mute, inglorious millions of ordinary men constrained to heroism by circumstances, brave, determined, reliable, but not imbued with any military spirit—those millions of uprooted civilians."
Wells counts this common heroism one of the characteristic things of this war—It is the peculiarity of this war—it is the most reassuring evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical ability has been going on throughout the last century—that no isolated great personages have emerged. Never has there been so much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very abundance of good qualities has prevented our focussing upon those of any one individual. . . . It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes, so much as that it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this war is the common man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular names. . . . The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all the pretensions of the great men. Imperatively these multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies. When I was a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism. I will confess that now, at fifty, and greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in love with mankind.
And this courage of the common man is ground, as William Allen White sees, for a great new faith in democracy—That courage—that thing which the Germans thought was their special gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German Kultur—we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the divine fire burning in the soul of us that proves the case for democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death for something that defies death—something immortal in the human spirit. Those truck-drivers, those mulewhackers, those common soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulance, are brothers to-night in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinship of men.
So heart-breaking and yet so inspiring has been this massive heroism of the common rank and file of men, that one does not wonder that it has begotten a new religious faith and led one like H. G. Wells to say on the one hand, "Our sons have shown us God"; and Dr. P. T. Forsyth to say on the other hand, "God has shown us our sons."
Surely it were a faithless generation that, in the light of the revelations of this war, and in spite of all its sordid and brutal accompaniments, should not find grounds for a new, great faith in common men.