The Audacious WarBarron, Clarence W. (Clarence Walker)
History
The Audacious War
Barron, Clarence W. (Clarence Walker)
World War, 1914-1918
This is just a simple, practical question in human advancement. The
world should now be big enough to grasp and effectively deal with it.
The true meaning of this war is, therefore, human progress: humanity
taking on larger responsibilities--the whole world answering the
question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" with a thunderous, "Aye! we are
one and all our brother's keeper, and we may well keep the peace of the
world!"
There is no question, national or international, no question of the
individual or collection of individuals, which cannot be settled by the
laws which belong in the human heart. Such laws may be called
spiritual or natural, divine or human; they are one and the same.
Moses wrote no new law on the tables of stone on Mount Sinai. The laws
were before the tables of stone, and before the creation of the
mountain itself. It was only for the people to hear and to do.
It is the same to-day. The laws of brotherhood--brotherhood of
individuals, brotherhood of nations, or aggregations of
individuals--are unchanged and unchangeable. It is only for the world
to hear and to do.
The doctrine that war is a biological necessity must go by the board.
The teaching that war is needed to harden men and nations must be
placed in the realm of pagan fiction.
If war is a necessity for man, it is a necessity for woman. If it is
good for men, it is good for children. If it is good for nations, it
is good for states. If it is good for states, it is certainly good for
cities. If it is good for peoples, it is good for individuals.
War is Hell, and from Hell. Hell may not be abolished, but it may be
regulated.
Wars may not be abolished from the human heart, but they may be
restrained from breaking forth to the destruction of the innocent and
the guiltless.
There is only one practical way to do this, and that is to have nations
under restraint, just as nations have states and cities under
restraint. Then international courts of justice may perform the same
work national courts now perform in respect to differences between
states.
Man has come up from the individual, or dual, unit through family and
tribal relation, the walled city, the policed state, into the armed
nation. He is now steadily stepping forth into the world as ruler of
himself, the creator of his own government, the heir and sovereign of
the world. He can step into the kingdom of manhood suffrage or
government only so far as the rights of his fellow men are recognized.
Evil holds its own destruction, and nations that live by the sword
perish by the sword.
For the United States to rush into the maelstrom of war, with
organization of armies and the building of armaments, is to invite its
own destruction.
For just one hundred years the North American continent has held the
practical example of the impotency of the war-spirit where there is no
war machinery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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