Just as we got prohibition in this country as a result of movements from diverse directions, no one of which alone could have brought it about, so we have at last got a limitation of armament among the nations of the world. Prohibition came because the business man saw the condition of many of his workmen on Monday morning; the man in the South dreaded the power which liquor seemed to be gaining among the colored people; the people in the churches felt it was a moral issue, and a dozen other causes finally converged to bring about prohibition. And so I feel that because the demand for disarmament came from manly sources it has a validity and a promise of success.
There was published during the last few months of 1920 a very startling diagram of the expenditure of our Federal taxes. This diagram, which was got out with great care by the bureau of statistical information of the government, divulged that 92 [percent] of all the Federal taxes was being expended [for past wars and future wars.] They [put into this very large black section of the round wheel, which represented the total expenditure,] the money that was paid on war debts, the money that [went] into all the soldiers' pensions and the money which was to be expended for the very large naval program which at the time was being projected.
Education had something like 1½ [percent] of the space allotted to the expenditure of taxes; the research departments, the saving of life both in the agricultural and humanitarian sense, had about 2 [percent], and so forth. This calculation is not now perhaps altogether a fair example because it was based on estimates to carry out a naval program projected in 1916, before the United States entered the world war and when our shipping was suffering from the ravages of war. It was dropped when the United States entered the war because it was impossible to carry it out with the other huge expenses which the war involved; but after the war was over, to every one's surprise it was resuscitated and set in motion. President Wilson has predicted that [unless] the United States entered the League of Nations the only logical position was to make full preparations for war although [that] was said we did not believe should really go [page 2] to work to build the largest navy in the world. However, we set to work in the fashion. We laid down the keels for sixteen battleships, more I believe than have ever been planned for by any one nation at one time.
There are many reasons why this program was objectionable. In the first place the United States had become the creditor nation, and it seems very mean to take advantage of that fact, when other nations can not have their navies if they would. It is both ungenerous and lacking in magnanimity to utilize this moment to build a large navy.
Huge expenditure for armament uses money which is much needed for other purposes. From all sections of the country we are receiving daily reports of distress due entirely to a serious situation of unemployment. There is a slump in our financial and industrial life, largely because there is a lack of credit which might be given to other nations who are ready to buy from us, if they had the money with which to buy. If an international credit, for instance, could be given to certain European nations who are now unable to buy the wheat and other necessities of life which we have in surplus in this country a circle of trade might be reinstituted and reinvigorated. To say on the one hand that there is no money to guarantee these international credits and on the other hand to spend preposterous sums on a navy without which we have gotten on very well hitherto, was obviously inconsistent.
Thirdly, there is the point of view of the women, which is not to be overlooked. All over the United States there are large organizations of women, some of them with millions of members, who took a strong stand against the increase of armaments so far as this country was concerned. They came without any qualification for the disarmament program.
I do not believe we will be able to quench war, the lust of battle, until we arouse other primitive and powerful human motives which we all possess but which during the past few years have been inhibited, suppressed as it were, during the very years that the combative side has been so very much stressed. Man has been on the earth in some shape or another for 1,500,000 years we are told, but masses of men fighting against other masses of men is a condition only about 20,000 years old. For a long time men lived in communities, in a gregarious and friendly fashion, and developed their skill more in the use of the tool than of the weapon; the weapon was for a long time only useful when men went out in search of food. During these remote times two things were developed. One was a great desire for a sense of security and that is a thing which war stresses; the other was a great desire to be assured against death by starvation. The tribe became responsible for those two things; to guard its members from dangers outside and later from other tribes, and also to secure for its members freedom from the fear of starvation. Each member of the tribe came to have an equal share in the sense of security and the sense of preservation. These two things then are very old -- the desire for protection which a man has when he comes together with his fellows and which is very largely at the basis of primitive national life, and the desire for continuation of life that the single member of the tribe shall share such food and such care as the other members of the tribe are able to secure for all.
During these last years, and the years when war was being waged, we all felt the tremendous pressure which was laid upon the sense of security. It is almost impossible to get a modern nation to fight unless it can first be persuaded that it is doing so in the interests of self-preservation -- in common language, self-defense. In one sense all wars are wars of defense because a war must be construed before the whole nation will become interested in it. That sense of security is very primitive and very deeply implanted in the human constitution, and perhaps it is inevitable that it should be so. But at the same time there is the other desire -- to feed the world, to keep alive those people with whom you are associated in a family and a nation, and even in larger groups. The war itself finally brought that out. During the war we used to hear a great many accounts of the military engagements which were taking place on the fields of France and we turned sick with apprehension and fear as these reports came to us. But in the midst of them we gradually began to have other reports. There came tales from Belgium and northern France that thousands of people were being fed through the kindliness and help of those from the outside. Right in the midst of the war reports would appear purely scientific phrases about standards of nutrition and the physiological value of certain foods as against certain other foods. Gradually there came together throughout the world groups of people whose business it was to feed first the soldiers and later the huge civilian populations that would have perished unless food sources had been organized and placed at their disposal. Right in the midst of the desire for security which was in a sense responsible for the war, there arose ever stronger this other, this nutritive side, this feeding of the people of Europe which began to assert itself and became stronger from day to day.
Not long ago I was in the city of Vienna, I found there people from every nation in Europe, with their little [page 3] groups of workers who are trying to keep alive the children in that desolate city. The children were being brought back, some of them even from northern Sweden where they have spent some weeks or months of vacation. Little groups of welfare workers from every nation in Europe were doing what they could to keep from perishing the children of a devastated country, children who have been brought to such a low end of life during the long war, and, if I may be permitted to say so, through the terms of the peace.
Another chord had been struck. A chord more primitive, more normal than war itself had been appealed to in the desire to keep children alive. We know the wonderful organizations for food administration which were formed among the allied nations. We know all the things that happened under the pressure of this great desire to keep the world. I believe there is in that desire to conserve life a great moral challenge, that it could quench the lust of war at its very source if we really trusted it and realized that it is quite as important as the other things.
Take the situation in Russia. At the assembly of the League of Nations last September Dr. Nansen pressed his claim. He begged for resources with which to carry out his plans for feeding millions of people who would otherwise perish. Quite irrespective of their political affiliations and of the political difficulties which were raised and brought up against him, I believe that not only would his plan save millions of Russian peasants from dying, but it would save the League of Nations itself to thousands of men and women of every nation who as yet understand it so little.
We have more than 100,000,000 people in the United States. It will take a long time to convince them, one by one, of the value of a League of Nations. But when you can convince the man in the street, the woman whose primitive obligation and whose objective of life is to keep her children fed; when you can make them see that the league [page 4] has done a great piece of humanitarian work which could not have been done by any one nation, you will get the confidence of the common people, to use Abraham Lincoln's phrase. You will get it so completely that nothing in the world could keep the United States out of the league. After all, no nation can endure unless it has the understanding and the support of the bulk of the people who compose the nation. Something of that sort must be done with the League of Nations. It must get the understanding and affection of the simple men and women who would be enormously interested in that which would keep alive people who would otherwise die. One nation after another is tormented almost as by an unappeased thirst to come to closer relations with its neighbors. That tendency of man to widen the circle of his interests and sympathy is a normal and natural thing which has been largely responsible for his development.
To bring into this new international relationship the bulk of all the people and all the nations can only be done by appealing to something more primitive than war itself. I think we have a clue in our hands if we respond to this great desire for feeding the world, for keeping the children alive, for preserving those bases of life without which all other things are valueless. Personally, I think we shall quench war and the desire for war and we shall get disarmament if we arouse other motives and believe in them enough and fill them with such courage and sense of validity that they will count.
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