The Peace-Teaching of History

THE staple of History has always been War. Exhibiting the most forceful as well as the most brutal activity of men, it has shaped most of the primary conditions of life for all communities of the human race. In some way it has determined the career of most nations, from beginning to end.

Personally, in all ages, men have given themselves sacrificially to war more devotedly than to anything else. Collectively, in their tribes and in their corporate states, nations, and empires, they have given to nothing else such assiduous thought and care. For nothing else have they striven so untiringly to perfect themselves. To no other art have they ever applied so much of their minds and their means. To no other purpose have the resources of their knowledge been so strained, from the first rudiments of primitive invention down to the latest attainments of the science of the present hour. Their armies, their fleets, their weapons, their military systems, whether barbaric or feudal or modern, have always exemplified the highest constructive and organizing attainments of the latest day.

War, then, represents the most continuous, the most universal, the most impassioned and energetic of the collective undertakings and activities of mankind throughout the long past. It has exercised them in intellect and feeling, trained the natural forces in them, worked upon their ambitions, moulded national character among them, far more than any other. Of all subjects in history, therefore, it calls for the gravest treatment, and, as a rule, it is not so treated. It supplies to history, as a mere tale of the adventures of man in the world, the more enlivening elements of the story, the more dramatic situations, the more fascinating actors; but, as having a distinct and immense importance in itself, apart from its incidents and apart from the personalities concerned in it, — as being a tremendously dominating influence in history, to be investigated and profoundly considered as such, — how often is it brought to our consciousness by anything we find in a historical work ?

The writers and teachers of history lead us into every other special field of human action and make us attentive to the particularities of its importance; to the influences that have worked in it, for and against the welfare and advancement of mankind; to the causes and consequences that are traceable into and from it through wide surroundings of social condition and event. We are stopped thus everywhere in the presentations of history, to contemplate governments, religions, movements of trade, industry, invention, growths of literature and art. But it is not often that we are brought to the same consideration of what, in their nature and their importance, the influences and the consequences of war have been.

Yet all other influences and consequences have been secondary and subordinate to those of war. When we examine the constitutions and institutions of national government, we find more of their provisions and adjustments directed to anticipated contingencies of war than to any other object for which nations organize their rule. Four of the seven articles of our Federal Constitution as it was framed originally, and eight of the twenty-three sections into which they are divided, contain something of reference to that contingency. Eleven of the thirtytwo clauses which define the legislative and executive powers of the general government and those withheld from the states are concerned with the same. Elsewhere in the world, the organization and preparation of nations for conflict with one another enter into the construction of their governments in a measure far greater than this.

When we look at religions in their historical exhibition, we find them moving the greatest masses of men to the greatest animation when their differences have furnished pretexts for war; and we might be taught that very much of what goes into history under the name and show of religion is only the war-passion disguised. But how often are we led to see it so ?

When we turn to the scrutiny of commerce as an active agent in the making of history we see a different but even larger intermixture of its incentives and workings with those of war. The two coarse passions, the combative and the acquisitive, which can be the most powerful in human nature if not mastered by moral and intellectual strains, have been in alliance from the beginning of the social state, each using the other for the satisfactions it has craved. The warriors have always been eager and busy in the service of the traders, to break openings for their reaping in wider fields, and the traders have always been ready to give them that employ.

When we study the sciences and the industrial arts in their relation to the historical activities of mankind, they amaze us and grieve us by the alacrity of their devotion to the purposes of battle. It may be that as much knowledge and invention has gone, first and last, to the easing and bettering of the conditions of life in the world as has gone to the production of guns, projectiles, explosives, mines, torpedoes, fortifications, battleships, armies; but that is far from sure.

As for literature, if we should separate all that it has drawn from war of incident, inspiration, motive, color, excited imagination and emotion, would there be a remaining half of equal spirit and power ? I fear not.

It is, then, the hideous fact of the recorded past of mankind, that its exhibit of men in battle, or planning and preparing themselves for battle, or glorying in memories of battle, is the most persistent and conspicuous exhibition that it has to make. It is the most hideous of historical facts, but its hideousness is not made impressive to us in history, as history is too commonly written and taught. It ought to fill us so with horror and pain that the shows and trumpetings, the heroic and tragic romance, which garnish it and disguise the underlying savagery of it, could never divert our thought from its meaning of shame to the human race; but it does not.

I think the main cause of this is not far to seek. Each generation of the past, in leaving its records to posterity, has left them permeated with its own feelings and judgments — its own estimates and valuings of men and things — its own admirations — its own ideals. These carry an influence which has stayed more or less through all the centuries, in the impression which historical reading and study have made on successive generations of mankind. To this day it is hard for us to think of what was done in ancient Judea or Greece or Rome with feelings that are really fit and natural to the moral and rational state of the modern mind. Our ethical and logical standards, considered abstractly, at least, differ widely from those of the pre-Christian ages; but how easily we can read the Hebrew chronicles and the Greek and Roman histories, with no more than halfconsciousness of the difference, and with less than half-consciousness of the moral infidelity, which this involves!

It is only by a determined effort that we can realize how much of a coloring from primitive ideals of excellence and primitive conceptions of right has been carried down the current of written history, and how much of modern feeling takes a tone from it that is untrue to modern knowledge and belief. Its most mischievous perversion is in the admirations it keeps alive, for actors in history who were naturally admirable to their own times, but who cannot with reason be admirable to us. The heroes of an age and a people who imagined for divinity itself nothing loftier than the attributes of the gods of Olympus ought not to be the heroes of a generation which looks to Jesus of Nazareth as the perfected man; but what homage we pay even yet to the memory of men in Greek and Roman history who looked heroic to their contemporaries because they fought with surpassing valor and strength, whatever the object, whatever the motive, whatever the consequences of their fighting might be!

In the early stages of civilization, when social order is but beginning to take form, strife is a normal exercise of body, will, intellect, and energy in men; and it is natural that they should look to it for the high tests of human superiority. To society in that state war could not look otherwise than glorious, because it afforded those glorifying tests; and Poetry was born then, in passionate song-bursts of admiration for the invincible warriors of the tribe. Those birth-songs of poetry, which glorified war and the heroes of war, in Homeric Greece, in the Rome of the kings and the early republic, in the younger ages of all peoples who have sung any songs of praise, seem to have been powerfully the carriers of that glorification, out of times and conditions in which they expressed a natural feeling into conditions and times in which the feeling was wholly natural no longer. From generation to generation poetry has inspired poetry, arousing the emotion that demands it for utterance, and each has sent forward its motives and its themes. In that way the primitive heromotive of the poets went into history and has been projected through it, from first to last, with an influence much greater than we comprehend.

Of course that influence has always found lingering barbarisms of temper in large parts of all society to nourish it well; but it has nourished them even more, and they would not otherwise have kept the mischievous vitality they have to this day.

On the rational side of their nature men have always, in the process of civilization, been taking slowly into their understanding and belief a code of morality that would question every war, to find whether or no it could show on either side a necessity of defense that gave righteousness to that side; and that would put every hero of battle on trial, to learn what it was that he fought for and with what warrant he slew his fellow men. Civilization could not be a process of rational evolution if it did not work toward moral enlightenments like that. And it has. But feeling is stronger than reason in the majority of mankind, and antiquity, even primitive antiquity, has been able to transmit to us a thousand times more of its feelings than of its beliefs.

If history, in its large sense, embracing the whole literature of the past, serves as the vehicle of that transmission, the fault is our own; for it does not proffer to us from its cargoes what we are choosing to take. In all its showing of the conflicts of nations, races, parties, religions, its appeal to us intellectually is for abhorrence of one side or both sides of every war that ever was fought. It never justifies forgetfulness of the awful crime that is somewhere in every war, or indifference to the placing of the crime, or admiration for any performance of ability or bravery in the committing of the crime. If we permit ourselves to feel that indifference of admiration for deeds which morally indifferent generations in the past have called heroic, we are simply servile to traditional habits of feeling, and do a wicked violence to our own better knowledge of right.

And this tends to deprave the moral judgment we exercise on kindred deeds of our own time. If the blood-drenched figure of Napoleon shines heroical and glorious in the eyes of more than half of the people of the Christian world to-day, it is mainly because they see only his likeness in kind to Alexander of Macedon, to Julius Cæsar, to Charlemagne, and feel impelled by what we may call the habit of the ages to make their estimate of him correspond with the Greek, the Roman, and the mediæval estimate of them. Let us not blame history for bringing thus the barbaric standards of twenty centuries ago to the weighing and measuring of this modern prodigy of atavic barbarism. As much as we allow it to do so, history will keep to each age its own gauges of human quality, its own rules of conduct, its own heroes. When they are shifted out of place and bring confusions, perversions, distortions of moral sense into our view of events and of men in our own day, we do it ourselves; and in doing it we are false to the study and teaching of historical truth.

Not many of us go far enough in the following of Christ to feel that no wrong and no blow should be resisted, and that there can be no righteousness in war. But we cannot read history with just attention to motives in it and be doubtful of the wicked criminality of all wars on one or the other side, and of most wars on both sides. In many conflicts each party has persuaded itself that a righteous necessity compelled it to take arms; but the righteous necessity was never imperative to both; and the strict showing of history will concede it very seldom to either. Almost always, on the defensive as well as on the aggressive side of a war, there has been enough of wrongful temper, of needless provocation, of inward willingness for the sword, to burden it with a serious share of guilt.

We tried long to hold the fathers of this republic wholly blameless for the war in which they won its independence; but the farther we have been moved out of the atmosphere of their time the more impossible it has become for us not to see that some considerable excuses, at least, were given to the British government for the angry unwisdom of its measures, and that all the belligerent temper which exploded in a revolutionary war was not engendered in the cabinet and court of King George.

In like manner, the clarifying, cooling influence of time is working among us, in the North and in the South, a modification of our views of the sectional temper that was heated on each side to its conflagration in the terrible Civil War. Reason and just feeling compel us, in both sections, to see a large action of motives and excitements and instigations on both sides of the whole issue concerning slavery that were not purely patriotic, nor purely moral, nor purely from any unselfish conviction of right. I think there was never more of sincerity and pure motive in any war than in that; but it is clear to me that even that was an unnecessary war; because the best mind and the best feeling of the people never had control, on either side, of the discussion of the questions that led them into it. Influences more partisan than patriotic, and more of passion than of principle, were working for years to push the sections into conflict, and they did not work on one side alone.

We often say of the Civil War that it was inevitable; and that is true if we mean what Christ meant when He said, “It must needs be that offences come.” In his thought He reckoned the inevitableness of wrong-doing among men, and was pointing to no necessity which they do not themselves create; for He added, “But woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” Of all offences to God and man, that of war is assuredly the blackest we know or can conceive; and if ever we find reason to say of any war that “it must needs be,” let us take care to remember that men have made the need; that the woe and the crime of it are on their heads; and that we must not look for the whole guilt on one side.

History, written with truth and read with candor, carries this teaching always; and my plea is for graver attention to it than our tradition-colored habits of mind incline us to give. Especially in the introduction of the young to historical reading, it seems to me of great importance that we train them to a justly abhorrent attitude of mind toward war; to such an attitude of thought and feeling as will check the easy excitement of interest in armies and commanders and incidents of battle, awakening a moral and rational interest instead. If they read a story of war with the feeling that it is the story of somebody’s or some nation’s crime, they are sure to be moved to a judicial action of mind, and find their liveliest interest in searching out and apportioning the guilt. By this leading they can be carried into more or less critical studies of the moral, the political, and the economic antecedents of a war, scrutinizing the right and the wrong, the practical wisdom or the unwisdom, the true or the false reasoning, in public policy, in popular feeling, in the aims and measures of statesmen, that are discoverable to them in the doings and disputes that brought it about.

For example, in our own history, if young students of it, when they approach the occurrence of the War with Mexico, in 1846-47, are led to a serious examination of the circumstances which preceded it, not casually, as if they were only pursuing a common routine in the learning of facts, but with the especial attentiveness of a feeling that the conduct of their country is to be judged, as to its consistency with principles of right and plain rules of honor, the investigation cannot fail to interest them, generally, more than the mere story of the battles of the war. And it will give them new moral convictions, and a new conception of patriotism; for they will begin to see that a true lover of his country must care more for keeping uprightness and honor in the conduct of its government than for having victories in battle with other peoples to boast of, or for having conquered populations to rule, and conquered lands to cultivate, and conquered ports for extended commerce, and augmented wealth in conquered mines.

And when such young students discover, as they will, that the taint of dishonor, of false pretense, of iniquitous motive, is in all the procedure by which our government forced Mexico to engage in war with us; when they read the words of Benton, and of other honorable leaders of the party in power, who proclaimed and denounced the flagrant wickedness of its course, and when they note the emphasis of the vote in the elections by which a majority of the people condemned it, — then, if they are reminded of the value to us of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and large parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona, with Texas stretched to the Rio Grande, which were our conquests in the war, and are asked, “How could we afford to do without them to-day ? ” — then, I say, they will be brought face to face with such a question as will probe their moral sense to its depths, and have, on the moral side of their education, a tremendous effect.

Can anything that a nation gains by a wantonly wicked, aggressive war be thought of by honest citizens as the justification of its war ? Can a nation win covetable territory by means that would be criminal and shameful to an individual if he used them for winning his neighbor’s lands, and yet not be criminal, or disgraced, or merit less from its citizens of their fealty and love? Can a man uphold his country in an aggressive war with less wrong-doing than if the aggression were his own ? If such questions could be threshed out with earnest thoroughness, again and again, as they arise naturally in historical study, and in their bearing upon the facts of particular wars, I am sure that a new aspect would be given in another generation to the whole subject of war.

Now that the nations of the world are instituting a great, august tribunal for hearing and adjudicating disputes among them that threaten war, we may hope that it will become a prevailing natural habit, in the reading and study of history, to imagine a summoning of the authors of past wars to submit the grounds of their contentions to such a court. Apply that imagination, for example, to the abominable wars of the eighteenth century, in which half the world was desolated and tormented by thieves’ quarrels among the monarchs and ministers of Europe, in the evil time of their unrestrained power! Apply it to the War of the Spanish Succession, or to the War of the Austrian Succession, or to the Seven Years’ War! Imagine a bench of disinterested and honorable jurists attempting to give serious hearings and decisions as to whether Louis the Fourteenth may repudiate the solemn engagements that he entered into when he married the Infanta of Spain and joined her in renouncing all contingent claims to the Spanish crown; or whether Frederick the Great and his confederates may attack and despoil Maria Theresa, whose inheritance of the Austrian dominions of her father they had pledged themselves to uphold; or whether Maria Theresa and Catherine of Russia may revenge themselves on Frederick by organizing a powerful combination to carve and partition his kingdom!

There is no slightest open question between right and wrong to be found in the origin of one of those wars. There is nothing to argue about in the grounds on which they were fought. They offered, therefore, no case that could come before a tribunal like that of The Hague. And, what is more to be considered, no tribunal of that character could exist under the conditions which produced such wars. From which it follows, that the conditions producing a Hague tribunal are conditions that may fairly be expected to extinguish the possibility of wars as openly wicked as those into which Europe and colonial America were dragged by Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth of France and Frederick of Prussia called the Great. A generation that is able to contemplate the submission of its national disputes to a rational adjudication cannot easily be tolerant of a war that has no rationally debatable cause. We have gone far in the way of civilization within the past century and a half if we have come to this; and, realizing the advance, we realize how much of the actuality of civilization lies in the movement toward suppression of war.

Yet war has not only its tolerant apologists, who look upon it as a necessary evil, but its admiring upholders, who commend it as an exercise of energies and virtues in man which his best development requires. In their view he could not be manly if he did not sometimes fight like a wild beast. Courage, resolution, independence, love of liberty, would suffer decay. Rights no longer to be contended for and defended would be valued no more. Peace, in a word, would emasculate the race. Does history sustain such a view ? Not at all. The peoples which have exercised their self-asserting energies most in war are the peoples in whom those energies went soonest and most surely to decay.

Among the strong nations of the ancient East, the Assyrian pursued the busiest, most constant career of war; and its end was the most absolute extinction, leaving the least mark of itself behind. What has value in the ruins of its buried cities is what it took from the more ancient Babylonia. Among the Greeks, it was the Spartans who illustrated the fruits of the culture of war; and how much of Greek influence in history came from them ? The Romans were a great people, doing a great work in the world, — for how long ? Till they had exhausted the forces of genius and character that were native in them by persisting in war; and the exhaustion had begun before the Republic went down and the Empire took its place. The Romans had then organized and given their name to a great incorporation of the energies of many other peoples, — Latin, Greek, Gallic, Germanic; but the freshening absorption only retarded and did not arrest the decay. If war could ever invigorate and better a people we should surely have seen the effect in the history of Rome, and, surely, we do not.

Among modern peoples the French have had the most of whatever culture war can give; and the French have a less hopeful future than any other important people in Europe to-day. On the other hand the English have been and are, unquestionably, the people of highest achievement in the modern world; the people who have done most for the liberation and general uplift of mankind; and, of all who inhabit Europe, the English have had the least of whatever culture war and battle can give. If this seems to be a misstatement, bear in mind that the many wars of England have been naval more than military, involving relatively few men in actual fight; that she has used soldiers who were not of English blood, from subject races or subsidized allies, to a great extent in her wars; that a large British army, on the scale of the armies of Germany and France, has rarely been seen on any battlefield; that Englishmen had never had, since Cromwell’s day, at least, so extensive and so serious a personal experience of war as that which they went through in their late conflict with the Boers. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that the qualities exhibited by the people of English blood have been developed less by the culture of battle than those of any other living race, and that the barbaric doctrine which commends war as an exercise necessary to the moral training of mankind, is refuted sufficiently by that single fact.

It is far from my thought to question the moral nobility of the spirit which accepts battle as a stern, imperious, terrible duty of defense, when home and country, or sacred rights and institutions, are wickedly assailed. Then it is selfsacrifice, the very sublimation of the human soul. Then it is purely and truly heroic, and uplifts humanity by inspiring example. But courage and fierce energy of the kind to which battle is attractive, — what good to the world can come from the cultivation of them ? They are forces, to be sure, that have usefulness in other exercises than that of war. They are part of the power which drives men in that conquest of Nature which we call the material progress of the world; but are they not the part of that power which is ruthless, oppressive, dangerous to society, by the hard aggressive selfishness with which it works against the common good ?

But, leaving that question aside, and assuming that the coarsely militant courage and militant energy, as well as the courage and the energy that are militant only when duty makes them so, are good qualities in men, and to be cultivated for the improvement of the race, we are confronted by the discouraging fact that the very process of cultivation is destructive of the good effect we seek. We exercise the fighting temper in men by war, and kill them in the exercise, or keep them from marriage, and, in one or the other way, lessen the breeding of the quality of man that we are supposed to be endeavoring to increase. Every great war is a dangerous drain upon the stock of valor and fortitude in the spirit of the peoples engaged; and the drain runs near to the dregs when war succeeds war, as it does and will if war is believed to be a national good. There has been no lack of assiduity in the cultivation of humanity by war; and what has the product been ? Look at the training-grounds of Europe, where the schooling has been busiest and longest, and see !

History, not well studied, but written or read lightly, for its incidental romance, can make no other impression than those I have alluded to at the beginning of my paper. War puts a deluding emphasis on its own part of the story by its rubrication of the text. The past has tinctured it with states of feeling and thinking which ought to have faded long ago, in the light of increasing knowledge and in the warmth of the increasing neighborliness of mankind, but which stay and give their color to the influence of historical reading, if we take it with no proper filtration through the moral beliefs of our own day. The songs of the heroes of those ages when battle was a normal exercise of high qualities in men can still play upon our imaginative and sympathetic brains, just as the trumpets, the drums, the fifes, the banners, the plumes, the splendid pageantry of a marching army can play on our quivering nerves of bodily sense.

A poet, Richard Le Gallienne, has described the deceit of the emotion in exquisite verse: —