Militarism or Manhood?

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from The Arena, Vol.24, July to Decmeber 1900, pp. 379-392]

OF those larger problems associated, either relatively or as consequences, with the question of standing armies, it is not my present purpose to treat, but rather of the seemingly smaller but really greater problem of the influence of the spirit of militarism upon the individual. To this, after all, the question must come. Always as a final test it must be asked, even of the most overshadowing governmental policy, What kind of man is nurtured by it ? Not the question present to the mind of the legislator - ^how much may national wealth be increased? - but how will the soul grow and develop under it? By the value of their influence upon the individual must all systems stand or fall; and these influences are broadly comprehended within such as make for or against freedom, which has its concern not with communities of men but with Man.

It is not the purpose of this article to touch upon the immense cost of standing armies, nor the stupidity of that system which is spending millions to-day for engines of destruction that in consequence of fresh discovery may be useless tomorrow. Nor is it worth while to refer to the double injustice of sending the poor to be shot and later on charging their children with the expenses that are incurred. For the evils of war do not stop with the victims killed and wounded upon the battlefield; they do not end with the ending of the sorrows of those bereaved. War lays its heavy hand upon the infant sleeping in the cradle, and in burdens of taxation places along the future path of the unborn stumbling-blocks for little feet. In the indemnities demanded by the conqueror it visits future unoffending generations with its penalties. Wars to-day entail little of that bold plundering which of old had something about it of the fascinating color of chivalry, but has instead degenerated into a mere contemptible swindle of the unborn.

The economic waste of war has perhaps received its due consideration from those who have dealt with it more or less competently; yet this appeal has less weight than might be supposed with the working masses - for the reason that wars call great numbers away from a congested labor market, and tend to make a temporarily increased demand for laborers. To show that the destruction of wealth must inevitably lessen the sum total of human happiness is likely to be regarded, by those to whom the prospect of immediate employment is extended by the removal of great numbers of competing workers from the field of occupations, as an amiable theory in conflict with actual conditions. The remoter effects of war, of the fearful burdens of taxation it entails, which must be paid from the sweat and blood of labor, are too far in the future to weigh greatly with the man who receives his wages by the week and doesn't look further into the future than Saturday night.

Yet, in justice to them, let it be said that workmen look with little approval upon war. Says John Bums, speaking of the Anglo-Boer war, and in behalf of eighty-three workingmen's organizations: "This is not our war; this is not a war of the English workingmen." The working classes are sometimes accused of being swayed by dangerous impulses of emotion, of being easily excited by the appeals of labor leaders urging to attacks of violence upon persons or property; yet as a matter of fact hardly any class is less excitable than the workmen, in and out of unions. At those times when the war spirit takes possession of the people it is not the workmen who lose their heads. The great industrial populations are usually the least moved - it may be from a consciousness of how little they have to gain or lose.

Wars have been fought now from religious motives, now to advance the interests of rulers, and later to promote those of traders and speculators. But there never yet was a war to advance the interests of workmen, and just as surely no war ever did. Industrialism and militarism are antagonistic. The military spirit is always on the side of reaction - always allied with the non-progressive and anti-liberal movements of the time. Militarism is the propagating source of every anti-social infection.

There are many happy signs in the heavens, mingled with some less rosy ones. Military service has grown easier, but popular distaste for it has increased. This unpopularity is very marked in England, where it has kept pace with the improvement in material conditions. Of late years recruiting has been drawn almost entirely from unskilled workmen; and it is indicative of the temper of the governing classes of Great Britain that they have regarded with favor the large immigration of foreign workmen bringing with them a lower standard of living, and thus reducing wages and tempting the English workmen to look more kindly upon military service.

It speaks well for us as a nation of 75,000,000 people that a small army of 25,000 men could for so many years be recruited only with difficulty; it also speaks well for the prosperous condition of the country, for few enlist in the army who are able to earn a living in any other way. It speaks well, too, for that wholesome prejudice with which army life is regarded - the aversion of every free man to become a machine. But we have never lacked men of soldierly qualities when needed, and we shall not lack them so long as we remain free. Such qualities the American volunteer has supplied when the occasion arose. The truth is that only in this way can the best blood of a nation be enlisted in its defense - thus, or by conscription. Men will give their life to soldiering only when required by necessity or impelled by patriotism. But enlistments in time of profound peace will not give us an army that in morale, efficiency, or patriotism is equal to any real emergency. As a defensive force it will not be representative of the best blood of the nation, nor of its highest aspirations. But, precisely because of this, such a force may be utilized for partizan aggrandizement - may be moved as a great, silent, unprotesting machine in favor of some radical departure from safe traditional methods. Its influence, even without positive direction, is likely to be thrown as a force in favor of reaction; and it may sap the life of republicanism and republican forms, leaving such forms destitute of the spirit that is their life. The influence of great standing armies and of the spirit that such institutions engender has a deadening effect upon those f finer sympathetic cords of the national life. Even in its less I harmful aspects - its uniforms, its dress parades, its plumes and V epaulets - it is a poor and distracting display, pitiful by contrast with the condition of labor that builds civilizations and asks no badges nor epaulets and gets no stripes, save those the taskmaster lays upon its great, bowed, Atlantean shoulders. War is the only cause that makes one hate another he has never seen. In this respect war has a place all by itself as a creator of evil impulses. War, unlike a private quarrel, is the only cause that urges men (whole peoples sometimes) to exult over a fallen enemy - a meanness from which the more manly code of the prize-ring secures even a Jeffries and a Corbett. A private quarrel between neighbors, which ends in the final humiliation of one, rarely concludes with an exultant war dance by the other in the backyard of the vanquished. Nor does anybody hold that the defeat of one gives to the victorious dominion over his late enemy's cabbage-patch.

All militarism is savagery, not less so because it glitters with its helmets and moves to the rh)rthm of banners. War is essentially savagery in activity. All laws tending to humanize warfare are absurd and inconsistent, and every one is broken when it suits the convenience or the barbarism of the conquerors. Military laws have always been more humane than military practise. There has been some improvement, it is true, but not much. It is still lawful to put to the sword a garrison that offers a stubborn resistance, since the Brussels Conference defeated the proposition to exclude "the threat of extermination" toward a garrison that obstinately holds a fortress. Of course, this is not done nowadays, though such threats were used during the Franco-German war.

It is a theory laid down by Laveleye that in modem times wars are waged by army against army, while at former periods it was nation against nation. On the theory, therefore, that war is only a contest between men in arms, non-combatants are to be secured against all its penalties. Hence he thinks that the modern theory and practise of warfare exclude the right of capture of peaceful merchant vessels; but this is purely fanciful. Wars are fought not only with arms but with money, and to inflict the greatest damage on your antagonist is the justification of including non-combatants among those who must be made to suffer. Laveleye's theory would render immune from capture any city or town in the enemy's country that did not offer resistance.

Of course, an invading army never takes anything but what it wants - what it does not want it leaves, like any common thief. Do not imagine that if you were a soldier in an enemy's country you would not also take what you wanted - such wants not being bounded by your immediate necessities. The contents of the larder and the jewel box are all the same - merely property, after all; and there are occasions, especially after you had sampled the wine in "your enemy's" cellar, when they would be all the same to you. Mechlin lace, Sevres china, and the contents of the hen-coop- do not imagine that you would be able very sharply to discriminate between them. If you think you would, ask your army friend who has seen service, and he will have some stories to tell you. This is only one of the almost irreparable wrongs wrought by the usages of war upon the individual conscience.

To return to the well-meaning efforts to soften the horrors of war- efforts that cannot but excite something like derision. The Lateran Council of 11 39 condemned the use of the crossbow in warfare because of its inhumanity; Innocent III confirmed its prohibition; its use, however, continued. And the King of Prussia, during the Franco-German struggle, in accordance with Laveleye's theory, announced that he was making war "against soldiers, not against French citizens;" but this did not prevent him from levying requisitions against citizen non-combatants! When Wellington entered France he complained that "outrages of all descriptions had been committed by his troops in the presence of their officers, who took no pains to prevent them." Despite the "laws of war," all governments fear victorious generals, and have found it necessary to restrain them when marching through conquered territory.

To-day we hear tales of the misuse of the white flag by both Briton and Boer. It is safe to say that some of these stories are true. You can no more unleash the ferocious instincts of war in a man and expect that man to remain amenable to moral discipline than you can unchain a horde of hungry tigers and imagine that they will not slay and rend any helpless infant in their path. And this is the reason that modem warfare is as full of savagery as ancient warfare; or, if this seems an overstatement, why it has the same disregard of the humanities.

There is a darker picture, if that be possible, associated with this subject. So closely is war allied to murder that murder itself loses much of its infamy in a soldier's eyes. I trust I am not wronging a body of men as brave and honorable naturally as any other, and I desire not to be misunderstood; but those who have talked to soldiers know that many of them have stories to tell of unpopular officers who have been shot by their own men during engagements. No one at all familiar with army life in time of war has failed to hear rumors of this sort, told usually with amazing indifference by men not a whit less honorable than ourselves.

Advocates of "the strenuous life" defend the continuance of war as necessary for the development of the virtue of physical courage, or at all events justify war as furnishing opportunities for heroism. As well might one ask for immunity for "fire-bugs" on the ground that they furnish opportunities for heroism to members of the fire department. But one may doubt if the battlefield affords the highest examples of physical courage. The anesthetics of battle smoke and battle music induce a sort of somnambulistic state in which prodigies of valor may be performed. Even the Chinese possess a passive courage superior to that of any known race. Most of the heroism exhibited on the battlefield is of the passive sort, disguised somewhat by the activity of maneuver, the noise of cannon, and the onslaught of cavalry. There is but a small individual initiative to the great fighting mass. A French philosopher said that the art of creating soldiers was to make them more afraid of their own officers than of the enemy. To make more certain the death that awaits them in the rear, and less certain that which awaits them in front, is to secure armies of effective fighting force.

Philippe de Segur said a man could not be a hero without an iron constitution. Such heroism, then, is largely physical - largely a matter of temperament. In the old days, when it was foot to foot, eye to eye, and hilt to hilt, this heroism had something of the picturesque about it, which is essentially lacking in modem methods of warfare.

We need a popular revision of the word "courage ;" we must understand that it is of different kinds, possessed in its lowest manifestations by all animals, even the rodent. We hear now and then of "the enervating influences of peace" upon the nation; but what inspires to the highest courage in the defense of rights is not familiarity with the experiences of war - it springs from the consciousness of having rights worth defending, and dies only with the loss of liberty.

We hear of "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace." How "cankerous" Paradise must seem to the writer of that famous line I But if war has its moral uses, then is that steady progress of the race toward the humanizing spirit that constantly mitigates against war an essentially deplorable thing. The growing antagonism between war and the developed moral consciousness must be wrong if war is right. But is not an argument in favor of "the moral uses" of war all beside the mark? No nation ever made war because it regarded war as beneficial.

Now, it is the easiest thing in the world to be moved by the warlike spirit, the cry of patriotism, the girding of arms by the nation for war ; but it is a more difficult, as it is a more heroic thing, to stand in opposition - to speak boldly the word of protest, if conscience be against the war. But it is this higher courage that the military spirit visits with the name of cowardice. Is there any lack of heroism in the humbler walks of life? Pick up the daily paper, and in almost any issue you can read stories that illustrate its possession in the very highest degree. We have no lack of heroes; the annals of our fire department, our police force, our railroad service, will tell a story as full of heroic incident as any chronicle of bloody wars. But for that higher courage, of which civil life is full and militarism does so much to quench, we shall find few examples in army life. The long line of epauleted perjurers who took the stand in the Dreyfus case made a momentary lifting of the veil from a spectacle of moral stultification which the atmosphere of militarism lays upon the consciences of men.

There is another aspect of militarism which should be touched upon, and that is the incomparable meanness of the enmities of military men. History, which should tell the story, is usually reticent upon these matters. The efforts of Lee to depose Washington are seldom commented upon in popular histories. Coming down to our civil war we have the intrigues against General McQellan at Washington, the his- toric shame of which is somewhat mitigated by that officer's extraordinary view of his own importance, united, despite his genius as an organizer, with startling incompetency of initiative. We have Halleck pursuing Grant with extraordinary vindictiveness, and almost all the generals pursuing Butler - chiefly because that officer was not a West Pointer. Then we have the case of Fitz John Porter, and those extraordinary speeches of General Logan against Porter in the House of Representatives, which for virulence, hatred, and unrelenting ferocity are curious examples of the military spirit. Nor was the Confederacy at all behind the Union army in its animosities. We have the quarrels of Longstreet and Fitz Hugh Lee, of Secretary of War Benjamin and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, of Generals Bragg and Polk, and the bitter attacks against Quartermaster-General Myers.

In the recent Spanish-American war we have had similar examples of fierce enmities, spiteful depreciations, and cool assumption on the part of our heroes. We all know now that the battle of Manila, though executed with thoroughness, was not the wonderful exploit it was thought to be. The Spanish vessels were greatly inferior; there were no mines, of the absence of which, it is to be inferred, our officers were quite well informed; and our vessels were not within reach of the guns of the fort, which have been spoken of as neutralizing the inferiority of the Spanish fleet and bringing the forces opposed nearer to a point of equality. Yet not Dewey, nor a single one of his ofiicers, put in a disclaimer to the absurd adulations of the people. No military or naval hero ever does that; he accepts all hero-worship without a protest: and he is not to be blamed, for a people capable of that kind of frenzy are likely to turn and rend him with any variation of the paroxysms, as only a few weeks later Admiral Dewey found to his cost.

Few men, however, can stand unmoved amid a spontaneous national outburst of worshipful admiration. Take even so self- centered a character as Grant. As a military chieftain he stands with Washington, almost alone and almost faultless in the calm and unmoved front he bore in face of a people intoxicated by military glory and ready to exalt him to the position almost of a dictator. A plain, simple, unassuming man, yet even he, like Achilles vulnerable in the heel, had his defenseless side, and, strangely enough, actually lacked courage to say so. His real enemies were his friends, as frequently happens, oftener to your military man than to others. For them he was willing to lay aside the safe traditions which had governed the country from its beginning, and which regarded as dangerous and subversive of republican institutions the election of a Chief Magistrate for a third term. Lacking the courage to thrust his false friends away from his side, his Administration was marked by a saturnalia of corruption. Lacking in his civil office that keenness of perception which in his military capacity had guided him so unerringly to the selection of wise and competent subordinates, he surrounded himself with such men as Babcock and Belknap. Jay Gould used him to bring about the Black Friday panic. Thus it happened that the military spirit that created a reputation destroyed it, unmaking with the one hand what it had made with the other. For without that military spirit, which had developed into hero-worship for the great Union general, he might have suspected his own civil incompetency, or - what would have resulted in the same way - the people themselves would have been able to see it. Their toleration of such gross civil incapacity was due to the blindness of the military spirit. Now the unconscious cry was, "The hero can do no wrong!" as of old it was said of the king.

There is scarcely a class that has suffered more, in mental and moral deterioration, from the influence of the military spirit than the clergy, from the time of Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, all of them apologists for war. Much of the force and effectiveness of the clergy's ministrations in the interests of a gospel of peace and brotherhood has been lost by their apparent satisfaction with the prevailing methods of settling national disputes by killing people. It has resulted in developing a strain of cowardice in the clergy, who show a moral hesitancy in applying their gospel to the supreme test. The spirit of Christianity condemns war, but the clerics 3rield to its influence as readily as any class. They do not even attempt to adopt as a concession to the Christian faith the "wooden literalness" of the story which tells how an Archbishop of Mainz slew nine foemen with his own hand - not with the sword, "for that would have been contrary to Christ's word to Peter," interpolates the pious chronicler, but with a club.

It often requires a more keenly discriminating vision than is given to most of us to separate the "war spirit" from "the missionary spirit." One would imagine that the ideal missionary of some of these champions of Christ was not Livingston in Africa, nor even Gordon in China, but Qive in India, or Otis in the Philippines. It is clear that the ideal missionary of Bishop Cranston, of Denver, Col., is neither Clive nor Otis, but Ghengis Khan; for the Bishop says: "It is worth any cost in money, it is worth any cost in bloodshed, if we can make the millions of Chinese true and intelligent Christians." Of the same order of pious minds is Bishop Joyce, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who says: "We should settle the Chinese trouble with guns. That seems to be the best way to Christianize these Celestials." The words of Lord Westmoreland to the Archbishop of York, in Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," suggest themselves in this connection:

"You, Lord Bishop,
Whose see is by a civil peace maintained;
Whose beard the silver hand of peace hath touched;
Whose learning and good letters peace hath tutored;
Whose white investments figure innocence.
The dove and very blessed spirit of peace -
Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself
Out of the speech of peace, that bears such grace,
Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war?
Turning your books to graves, your ink to blood,
Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine
To a loud trumpet and a point of war?"

In this absorbing spirit of militarism that makes captive the minds of men it is your mitered Bishop who is the first to surrender all the Ten Commandments. His proselizting zeal becomes the fiercest as his murderous instincts develop (or perhaps the genesis is reversed) ; and as his passion for manslaughter mounts, his eagerness for the conversion of those that survive the Krupp and Mauser takes the form of positive mania. To protest that all this is un-Christianlike is ineffectual with those to whom church organizations are a militant army for missionary conquest. Most Protestant clergymen affect to look with horror upon what they imagine is a Jesuit dictum that "the end justifies the means;" yet they apply the spirit of that injunction with a murderous logic that they do not even dare to ascribe to the fictitious disciple of Ignatius Loyola.

Think of a militant clergy - and then of Him who stood against the world and asked the aid of not one armed man in all the earth ! Then think of this Christ wielding a spear or Roman short sword I Yet was not his life the highest expression of ideal courage and manhood? Did not the Roman centurion, the man of war, recognizing that his own standard of manliness was shamed by comparison with that of this heroic figure upon the cross breathing compassion for his enemies, cry impetuously? - "Surely this was the Son of God." What would the honest soul of the centurion should he be alive to-day, of the Bishop who urges us to make war upon the Chinese?

Military men share with the clerics this strangely distorted conception of Christian ideals. I quote from General Longstreet's "From Manasses to Appomattox": "Micah Jenkins, who fell by the same fire, was no more. He was one of the most estimable characters in the army. His taste and talent were for military service. He was a humble, noble Christian. In a moment of highest earthly hope [that is, amid the carnage of battle!] he was transferred to serenest heavenly joy. May his beautiful spirit through the mercy of God rest in peace," which, as his taste and talent were for military service, suggests a condition in which the warlike soul of young Jenkins will find small comfort!

To be true to conscience is the supremest manly virtue. Such virtue is impossible to a soldier. It is this that makes militarism so dangerous to a republic. For the qualities that make a good soldier are the antitheses of those that make a good citizen. Soldiers are the Acephala among the human species - belonging to an order having no head. How jstrangely perverted is the soldier's ideal of duty, which prevents him from throwing up his commission when ordered to fight in a cause that he knows to be unrighteous! But this is precisely because the soldier's ideal of courage is a low one; because he can conceive of no finer heroism than the passive kind - that merely animal sort, of which, as has been said, even the rodent has his share.

How this strangely corrupted notion of "duty" has led men to take up arms in infamous causes! Militarism makes a glory of that which is a shame, and a shame of that which is a glory. For devotion to duty is only admirable when the duty itself is admirable. I received shortly before his death a letter from General Lafayette McLaws, who fought with bravery and distinction through two wars, in which he said: "As for the war with Mexico, I have never read a reasonable defense of it, except that it was necessary to establish tfie principle that might makes right. The United States wanted the Texas country, Mexico was weak and defenseless, and hence the war." Yet this able general of the Confederacy won his first brevet in that war.

Glorification of the military spirit has become common enough of late, owing to nearly a half century of immunity from its horrors. "The strenuous life" has received more than its need of praise from the splendid savage who two years ago became governor of the great State of New York. In spite of certain admirable qualities, the Rough Rider governor is conspicuously lacking in those higher qualities which single out the man from among men. Impetuous as a Seyd of the desert, he seems to many the highest ideal of manly heroism. They have but to go back to the convention that nominated Blaine. Into that gathering our future military hero went breathing fire and fury against the candidacy of a corrupt man. It was thought that he would certainly march out of that convention along with those who had threatened to bolt in the event of Blaine's nomination ; this impression the young civil service reformer had sedulously encouraged. But his manhood failed him at the critical moment, and two weeks later he was stumping the States for Blaine I Those who saw his shilly-shallying at Philadelphia must have wondered what kind of a hero our Governor is, after all!

I have spoken of Colonel Roosevelt as a "splendid savage," and I use this term advisedly. The Colonel of the Seventy- first New York is right when he says that the Rough Rider Governor furnishes one of the few instances of a soldier who, compelled to kill men in the discharge of his duty, has afterward boasted of it. This Roosevelt does in his account of the battle of San Juan, with all the indifference of a nature that loves carnage for its own sake. How different are the words of one of the bravest soldiers who ever held a sword - the peerless cavalry leader of the Grande Army: "My sweetest consolation when I look back upon my career as a soldier, a general, and a king, is that I never saw a man fall dead by my hand. It is not, of course, impossible that in so many charges, when I dashed my horse forward at the head of the squadrons, some pistol shots fired at random may have wounded or killed an enemy; but I have known nothing of the matter. If a man fell dead before me and by my hand, his image would be always present to my view, and would pursue me to the tomb." (Murat, in a letter to Count Marbourg.) The spirit of militarism develops an unconscious hypocrisy, tending to obscure the real distinction of the rights of the weaker. We prate about "our rights" in the Philippines - "our right" to govern the Filipinos. Now it must be admitted that however little amenable men are to reason they are even less so to force. Then why not send 65,000 missionaries instead of soldiers to persuade the Filipinos that it is our "right" to govern them, and that it is right for them to yield? The only reason we do not do so is because our talk of rights in such connection is shameless corrupting to the individual, and therefore corrupting to the nation, is the spirit of militarism at all times and everywhere. Let it rule among a people, and, however the forms of republicanism persist, the Republic itself is moribund. However institutions preserve the outward garb of democracy, the Republic is slowly shaping itself to empire and is all purple within. Militarism is the Tarpeian rock that lies ever near the Capitol; it makes and unmakes nations, molding to strange uses the arms of liberty-loving people; debauches republican ideals and makes national heroes of Bardolphs who, if possessing physical courage, are morally as pusillanimous; engenders hatreds of peoples, and upon the altars of force makes offerings of the first-born of conscience. It gives us strange notions of heroism, and blinds us to the true nobility of civic valor, in this day fallen so low, and without which we shall perish of an inward cancer, though we number our military heroes by the score; that valor which dares to face all for principle, and which has given us our Love joys and Garrisons, heroes of a kind who are alone worthy of the consummate flower of the world's eulogy.