>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E00789  <<<

TITLE: REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS 1865-1895
AUTHOR: EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
EBOOK: E00789 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

1865-1895

by EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN

TO
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

TO WHOM THE FOUNDATION OF "THE NATION" WAS
LARGELY DUE, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF A LONG FRIENDSHIP

CONTENTS

PEACE
CULTURE AND WAR
THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS
THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION
MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER
MR. HORACE GREELEY
THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN
JOHN STUART MILL
PANICS
THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM
PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE
THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT
ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS
THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR
CHROMO-CIVILIZATION
"THE SHORT-HAIRS" AND "THE SWALLOW-TAILS"
JUDGES AND WITNESSES
"THE DEBTOR CLASS"
COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION
"ORGANS"
EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER
PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS
"COURT CIRCLES"
LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT
CARLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT
SUMMER REST
THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES
WILL WIMBLES

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

1865-1895

PEACE

The horrors of war are just now making a deeper impression than
ever on the popular mind, owing to the close contact with the
battle-field and the hospital into which the railroad and the
telegraph and the newspaper have brought the public of all
civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so to speak, under
every man's and woman's eyes; and, what is perhaps of nearly as
much importance, the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the
increased complication of the social machine, render the smallest
derangement of it anywhere a concern and trouble to all nations.
The consequence is that the desire for peace was never so deep as
it is now, and the eagerness of all good people to find out some
other means of deciding international disputes than mutual
killing never so intense.

And yet the unconsciousness of the true nature and difficulties
of the problem they are trying to solve, which is displayed by
most of those who make the advocacy of peace their special work,
is very discouraging. We are far from believing that the
incessant and direct appeals to the public conscience on the
subject of war are not likely in the long run to produce some
effect; but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that
the efforts of the special advocates of peace have thus far
helped to spread and strengthen the impression that there is no
adequate substitute for the sword as an arbiter between nations,
or, in other words, to harden the popular heart on the subject of
military slaughter. It is certain that, during the last fifty
years, the period in which peace societies have been at work,
armies have been growing steadily larger, the means of destruction
have been multiplying, and wars have been as frequent and as
bloody as ever before; and, what is worse, the popular heart goes
into war as it has never done in past ages.

The great reason why the more earnest enemies of war have not
made more progress toward doing away with it, has been that, from
the very outset of their labors down to the present moment, they
have devoted themselves mainly to depicting its horrors and to
denouncing its cruelty. In other words, they almost invariably
approach it from a side with which nations actually engaged in it
are just as familiar as anybody, but which has for the moment
assumed in their eyes a secondary importance. The peace advocates
are constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the
combatants only think, and will only think, of the nobleness of
dying. To the peace advocates the soldier is always a man going
to slaughter his neighbors; to his countrymen he is a man going
to lose his life for their sake--that is, to perform the loftiest
act of devotion of which a human being is capable. It is not
wonderful, then, that the usual effect of appeals for peace made
by neutrals is to produce mingled exasperation and amusement
among the belligerents. To the great majority of Europeans our
civil war was a shocking spectacle, and the persistence of the
North in carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and lust of
dominion. To the great majority of those engaged in carrying it
on the struggle was a holy one, in which it was a blessing to
perish. Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears
than the taunts and execrations which American wives and mothers
heard from the other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands
and sons whom they had sent to the battle-field, never thinking
at all of their slaying, but thinking solely of their being
slain; and very glad indeed that, if death had to come, it should
come in such a cause. If we go either to France or Germany
to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If
the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt
them--there is no more question in the German and French mind
that French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in
fighting, than there was in the most patriotic Northern or
Southern home during our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a
German or French mother, the light of whose life had gone out at
Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow as a great gift of
God, would receive an address from New York on the general
wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know
of--that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to
make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible.
When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went
into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that
war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of
peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in
reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or
wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the
point of believing that there are objects within its reach for
which life were well surrendered, it has reached a region in
which the wise saws and modern instances of the philosopher or
lawyer cannot touch it, and in which pictures of the misery of
war only help to make the martyr's crown seem more glorious.

Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by
those who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell
upon the folly and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants
to stop fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suffering
and loss of life, and the destruction of property. The principal
effect of this on "the average man" has been to produce the
impression that the friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him
smile over the earnestness with which everybody looks on his own
wars as holy and inevitable, and his neighbors' wars as
unnecessary and wicked. Any practical movement to put an end to
war must begin far away from the battle-field and its horrors. It
must take up and deal with the various influences, social and
political, which create and perpetuate the state of mind which
makes people ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preaching
down war generally are very like general homilies in praise of
virtue and denunciation of vice. Everybody agrees with them, but
nobody is ever ready to admit their applicability to his
particular case. War is, in our time, essentially the people's
work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses and sufferings are
theirs. All attempts to saddle emperors, kings, and nobles with
the responsibility of it may as well be given up from this time
forward.

Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of
mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation?
It is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace,
and not after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has
gone mad with patriotism and rage. They are, first of all,
the preaching in the press and elsewhere of the false and
pernicious doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses,
and can be made happy by its misery; that the United States, for
instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French,
German, or English industry. One of the first duties of a peace
society is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down wherever they
see it, as one of the great promoters of the pride and hardness
of heart which make war seem a trifling evil. America can no more
gain by French or German ruin than New York can gain by that of
Massachusetts. Secondly, there is the mediaeval doctrine that the
less commercial intercourse nations carry on with each other the
better for both, and that markets won or kept by force are means
of gain. There has probably been no more fruitful source of war
than this. It has for three centuries desolated the world, and
all peace associations should fix on it, wherever they encounter
it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly, there is the tendency of the
press, which is now the great moulder of public opinion, to take
what we may call the pugilist's view of international controversies.
The habit of taunting foreign disputants, sneering at the cowardice
or weakness of the one who shows any sign of reluctance in drawing
the sword, and counting up the possible profit to its own country
of one or other being well thrashed, in which it so frequently
indulges, has inevitably the effect not only of goading the
disputants into hostilities, but of connecting in the popular mind
at home the idea of unreadiness or unwillingness to fight with
baseness and meanness and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there
is the practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in every
civilized country steadily adhere, of maintaining, as far as their

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 420267 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>