war, see the brilliant essay of Prof. Edward Van Dyke Robinson, "War and Economics in History and Theory," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XV, pp. 581-622. Reproduced in "Sociology and Social Progress," compiled by Prof. Thomas Nixon Carver (1905), pp. 133-173. In the present chapter I have borrowed extensively from Professor Robinson's essay.

CHAPTER III

PEACE WITHOUT EFFORT

To the average American of a few years ago the maintenance of peace seemed as natural and easy as breathing. Except for our brief and episodical conflict with Spain we had had no war with a European Power for a hundred years and we saw no reason why we should go to war in any of the coming centuries. Peace was merely an abstention from war, a not doing something, which we had no desire to do. We had no reason to provoke war, no foreign nation had a legitimate grievance against us. In any case we were inherently different from Europe. We were peaceful while Europe was war-like. So long as we tended to our own affairs—-and that was our intention—peace was assured.

Believing thus in our intrinsic peacefulness, it was in no spirit of humility that we met the outbreak of the Great War. We did not put ourselves in the place of the fighting nations, and acknowledge that in their circumstances we too might have been struggling in the dust. Rather we boasted of our restraining democracy, and of our perfect co-operative union, which protected us from the European anarchy. We, a people unassailed, talked loudly of our superior merit, and, as we looked over the broad oceans and saw no enemy, thanked God that He had not made us as other nations. Our compassion for the peoples of Europe was tinged with a bland, self-righteous arrogance.

It is not pleasant to-day to read the homilies which America, during those early months of the war, preached to unheeding Europe. Throughout runs a note of subdued self-exaltation. We, the Americans, so ran the boast, are not ruled by Kaiser or Czar, and cannot be stampeded into war against our will. We do not extend our national territory by force. Of all nations we are the one that has best compounded economic differences and best dissolved racial hatreds. We live in amity with all the world, and with piety preach our lessons to the war-mad races. How fundamentally insolent, though well-intentioned, was this message of one of our leading citizens to Germany. "The American people cry with one voice to the German people, like Ezekiel to the house of Israel: 'Turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways; for why will ye die?'"

Even in our churches we made the same unconscious boast. On Sunday, October 4, 1914, at the request of the President of the United States, millions of Americans went down on their knees, and prayed God no longer to scourge the peoples of Europe. It was a sincere prayer, evoked by real compassion. Yet nothing could more clearly have revealed our moral detachment, our obliviousness to the fact that the passions which brought forth this war were human, not European passions. We, the virtuous, interceded for the vicious; our prayer was "deliver them from evil." With malice toward none, with charity towards all, envying no nation its treasures, content to enjoy in peace what God had given us, America folded its hands in prayer.

To a sceptical European, accustomed to the cant of international protestations, this boasted peacefulness of ours seems suspicious. "Have you," he might ask, "always been peaceful? Did you not fight England, Mexico and Spain? Have you not taken advantage of your neighbours' necessities?" Such a European might not regard Americans as a nation, divinely appointed to bring peace to a world rent by war. He might not acknowledge that we are more law-abiding than other peoples, freer from race hatreds, gentler towards the unfortunates of our own race. He might point to our lynchings and riots; to our unpunished murders of Chinese, Italians and Mexicans; to the system of repression, by which the Southern whites terrorized the freedmen after the Civil War. If Europe did not solve the Balkan problem in peace, did Americans end slavery without resort to arms?

We may not like these imputations, but it would be hard to deny that in certain national crises we have not been impossibly virtuous. We have not always subordinated our national interests to the ideal of setting a righteous example. What we wanted and could get we got, whether it was Florida, Texas, California or Panama. We were not above the twisting or even the breaking of a treaty, we did not discourage filibustering expeditions too rigorously, and we were never, never meek. Thus in 1818, to take a single example, we addressed to Spain a polite communication in which we asserted that "the United States can as little compound with impotence as with perfidy, and that Spain must immediately make her election, either to place (an adequate) force in Florida or cede to the United States a province, of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession." Many of our communications to Mexico, Chile, Spain, and even England were equally arrogant.

The truth is that our peace has been a peace of circumstances, due to a favouring geographical and economic situation. Our peacefulness came down to us like our rivers, farms and cities, a heritage of exceptional conditions. We were inaccessible to European armies. We were supreme on a fertile, sparsely settled continent. We could afford peace. Our resources were immensely great and if we did not reach out for more, it was because we already had as much as we could handle. What we did need we could take from weak peoples, and a nation which fights weak peoples need not be martial, just as a man who robs orphans need not be a thug.

It might have been different. Had our Westward progress been opposed by millions of Indians, had France been able to resist our march beyond the Appalachians, or Mexico stood like a disciplined Germany between us and the Westward Ocean, we should have developed a military civilisation. As our growing population pressed upon our narrow frontiers, we should have had our war scares, our border conflicts, our national hatreds, our huge standing army, and the whole paraphernalia of militarism.

Still another element, besides our geographical isolation and our economic self-sufficiency, contributed to our intactness and security and permitted us to indulge in the luxury of pacifism. Europe protected us from Europe. We were one and the European Powers many. So delicate was the balance that the European nations could not hazard a really serious trans-Atlantic venture. They had little to gain and much to lose by fighting us, as we had nothing to gain by fighting them. Our interest in such European affairs as the independence of Greece, Hungary and Poland was purely sentimental. Towards Europe we were peaceful as we were peaceful towards Mars. True, our safe orators delighted in twisting the lion's tail and upbraiding the Czar of all the Russias. During the eighty-three years between 1815 and 1898, however, we were never at war with a European nation.

It was not that we loved Europe too well. England we detested and hardly a decade passed without some acrid boundary dispute. We thought her arrogant, greedy, supercilious, and she thought us arrogant, greedy and coarse. Millions of Irish immigrants intensified this animosity and our national vanity did the rest. But though we hated England she was too formidable to be attacked. Therefore we bluffed and she bluffed, and in the end we compromised.

With other countries it was still easier to keep at peace. Prussia, Austria and the smaller German states were too distant to affect our