Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace AssociationIntercollegiate Peace Association
History
Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association
Intercollegiate Peace Association
Peace; War
Finally, the demands of national egoism are urged in behalf of war.
For example, Japan needs new territory for her growing millions and
must assume the conqueror's rôle. Or France goes mad with the lust of
empire and goes forth untamed until the day of Waterloo. Or Great
Britain must have new markets; and, falsely reasoning that trade
follows the flag, and the flag follows the bayonet, she seizes a realm
upon which the sun may never set. Or the interests of white men and
yellow men, of black men or red men, clash; and then the cannon must
be the final test, might must make right, and the strongest must
survive. The greed of territorial aggrandizement, the spirit of
national adventure, the longing for commercial supremacy, the honor of
a country, the pride of racial achievement--each is urged to justify
the necessity for bloodshed and carnage. Such are the arguments of the
advocates of war.
To balance these, the advocates of peace plead four greater
considerations: against personal glory, the economic cost of
militarism; against the moral education of war, the higher heroism of
peace; against class interests, the sanctity of human life; and
against national egoism, the deeper spirit of national altruism.
A single modern battleship costs more than the combined value of the
property and endowment of all the colleges of a certain great state.
Two thirds of the money passing through the treasury of the Republic
goes to the support of the military system. Computing two hundred
dollars a year as the average loss to society occasioned by the
withdrawal of each soldier and sailor from productive toil, and adding
this sum to the war budgets of the nations for the past fifty years,
we obtain a total of billions, beyond the reach of all imagination.
The money which armies, navies, wars, and pensions have cost the world
in fifty years would have installed in China a system of education
equal to that of the United States; would have transformed the arid
deserts of India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid
railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have
dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation
of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family
on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half
century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings.
The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce
pauperism, elevate the peasantry of Europe, lighten taxation, and work
an economic revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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