New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915: April-September, 1915Various
History
New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915: April-September, 1915
Various
World War, 1914-1918
The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is
immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock
Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our
people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not
a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an
hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other
side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they
are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out
that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are
dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We
are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so
uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill
of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he
will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his
ship--he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership
of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and
we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which
permits him to escape doing them.
And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to
which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so
much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic
massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning
of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government
does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to
certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so
doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of
ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which
makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the
lives of its own people.
Yet why should it care? Because of the physical force of the armies
ranged against it? But it has to meet that force in any case. It fears
that the world will be stirred. In other words, it knows that the world
at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain
things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we
now know it, if it permitted those things to be done. It would not so
permit them.
At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of
the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is
not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against
desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not
that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history
prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and
ponderable than these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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