There is a book which was written by a Chinese more than 2,000 years before Christ was born, when all Europe was a wild and trackless wilderness, except for a little fringe of settlements around the rim of the Mediterranean, when the Greeks were just emerging from barbarism, and some thirty-five centuries before this Hemisphere was discovered. This book is on the subject of military warfare. The author’s name is S’suma Ch’ien. In it he wrote:
What, then, can be said for the scholars of our age, blind to all great issues and without appreciation of the relative values, who can only bark out their stale formulas about “virtue” and “civilization,” condemning the use of military weapons? They will surely bring our country to impotence and discord and the loss of her rightful heritage, or at the very least they will bring about invasion and sacrifices of territory and general envelopment
No truer prophecy than this has been handed down to man; 4,000 years of Chinese history prove it; the present chaotic plight of China is its dire fulfillment. History reeks with similar prophecies, with similar pacifism in high places, and with similar direful results. Yet movements are underway which make it apparent that with the whole gamut of written history before us, and the impressive examples of latter-day world experiences still a part of our own memories, we Americans are recoiling from the bogey “armed force.”
Witnesseth. With increasing frequency come from our own people accusations that the United States is a military nation, that militarism dominates our government and impregnates our diplomatic relations with nations beyond the seven seas. Indeed, so widespread has this idea become that millions of Americans have united in clubs, societies, associations, and federations to combat this real or fancied thing, militarism, which they conceive to be not only in direct opposition to the spirit of enlightened Christianity, but the rock upon which the Ship of State is swiftly drifting to evident disaster.
Themselves militant, these crusaders for peace have endowed and maintain a centralized, federated headquarters in Washington, under the very shadow of the War Department, which carries on a continuous campaign of press-drenching propaganda against the maintenance of federal armed forces, against the normal movement and employment of those forces, against congressional appropriations for national defense purposes, and the training of civilian soldiery; this together with an adroit system of lobbying on Capitol Hill for measures which have for their ultimate end the advent of pacifism as the prime factor governing our ideals of political thought, domestic and international.
These Americans are undeniably exercising a privilege vouchsafed them by the Constitution, they are breaking no law, they are actually striving for a result that is the hope and prayer of all mature, sane Americans, namely, world peace; but the magnitude of the movement, the complexion of its sponsors, the seriousness of the charges of militarism, the vigor of the attacks on our traditional governmental policies and agencies, and the uncompromising attitude of the leaders of the federation at Washington, challenge immediate attention to the whole subject by those who believe with the great British statesman that the “Constitution of the United States is the greatest instrument ever struck off at a given time by the mind and purpose of man,” and that the wisdom of its framers still stands as the guiding beacon of benevolent democracy here and elsewhere.
Among human beings, Americans, on the whole, are the most sentimental; their heartstrings are attuned to the pathetic note in every appeal for aid, whether local, national, or world-wide. They are the good Samaritans of civilization, hence they are the quickest to respond to humanitarian enterprises; goldbrick, “sob-sister” international supplications not excluded. Quick to act, their first impulses, whether sound or impracticable, suddenly become translated into veritable crusades. Howbeit, Americans are also fact-seekers, fact-analysts. The glory of their achievements in industry, in the sciences, in the humanities, in the development of a benevolent type of civilization which, beyond argument, today overlaps in its contributions to human welfare the most extravagant dreams of the disciples of federal paternalism, lies in their ability to face fact, whatever its character, and fight it to a logical conclusion. All social and political movements and innovations in this country, then, must sooner or later run the gauntlet of searching fact-analysis, must stand on a foundation provided by their fundamental value to the whole people, or fall because of inherent impracticability.
Whether or not these great organizations now attacking the very existence of our governmental armed forces, and banded together in the richly-funded federation known as the National Council for the Prevention of War, can substantiate their attacks and justify their own existence when themselves attacked by fact-seeking investigations gives ground for an honest difference of opinion. At all events, their rapid rise to power and influence reveals how little they have suffered from cold, hard, enthusiasm-killing, fact- delving attention on the part of the general public and its constitutional authorities.
Thus we find that public apathy and federal indifference to the activities of this council and its component boards and associations have resulted in one of the most amazing political moves in the history of constitutional government in this or any other land. Laugh at the futility and absurdity of this move as loudly as you please; it is formidably, vastly serious in that it represents the disciplined but unyielding, and as yet unchallenged, thought of the laity of the militant council just named which, according to the membership claims of its executive officer, constitutes more than one-quarter of the entire population of the country. And this one-quarter of our people, in their own minds engaged in a crusade for the early realization of the millennium by federal enactment, are the very ones we shrink from criticizing, from chiding, and even hesitate to expose to self-revealing, pitiless fact, for they are our mothers, our wives, our sisters, and our sweethearts. They are the members of such organizations as the Council of Women for Home Missions, the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the American Association of University Women, the National League of Women Voters, the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and a host of others of national scope and possessed of huge membership.
The political move in question, significantly blanketed as far as publicity was concerned at its birth, is a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as contained in S. J. Resolution 100, introduced before the Senate of the sixty-ninth Congress on Calendar Day, April 23, 1926, by Lynn J. Frazier, United States Senator from North Dakota. This resolution reads:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states:
ARTICLE—
Section 1. War for any purpose shall be illegal, and neither the United States nor any state, territory, association, or person subject to its jurisdiction shall prepare for, declare, engage in, or carry on war or other armed conflict, expedition, invasion, or undertaking within or without the United States, nor shall any funds be raised, appropriated, or expended for such purpose.
Sec. 2. All provisions of the constitution and of the articles in addition thereto and amendments thereof which are in conflict with or inconsistent with this article are hereby rendered null and void and of no effect.
Sec. 3. The Congress shall have power to enact appropriate legislation to give effect to this article.
This extraordinary resolution was read twice before the Senate without one word of inquiry or protest and then referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. While one wonders what influence and pressure, what mental process, or what profound emotion caused the senator from North Dakota to propose such an amendment to the Constitution, one is at an utter loss to understand how the other senators could remain silent when, on the face of it, their colleague’s amendment proposes nothing less than the dissolution of the Federal Union; the abandonment of a national entity founded and erected upon a cornerstone of consecrated unity—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—maintained and developed by toil and sacrifice unutterable, and which, under the favor of the Almighty, is civilization’s liveliest hope for the future preservation and expansion of law, order, justice, and freedom in a politically and racially chaotic world.
While it is manifestly unfair to accuse the senator from North Dakota of vote-baiting, to assert that he was carrying out the mandate of the National Council for the Prevention of War, his action is in line with the public demands of that body and its supporting associations. The writer has seen parades of peace-at-any-price advocates on the streets of our large cities where the participants carried banners and transparencies inscribed with the slogan "Outlaw War!” and others reading, "Write Your Congressman to Have Congress Outlaw War.” Senator Frazier, as we must believe, of his own free will and initiative, has begun an attack on the Congress and the Constitution which could not be more in accord with the council’s program if he were himself its president. Could one imagine the unprecedented folly that would bring about the ratification of this proposed amendment, it has one left-handed virtue; the United States of America, the greatest and most successful exponent of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people that the world has ever seen, would be voted out of existence and not wrecked by civil war. That doubtful virtue, it may be presumed, would be salve enough for a Frazier who otherwise contemplates the dissolution of this God-founded nation as a mere day’s work in the Senate.
It cannot be denied that if there are Americans who wish to see their country again plunged into the horrors of war they are among the feeble-minded and insane. But what can be said of the sanity of those who would sacrifice the union in their misguided efforts to keep the American people from ever engaging in a war for the defense of their homes and loved ones; aye, to keep them from defending that liberty for which our fathers laid down their lives and which they left us as a sacred heritage to be passed on without vestige of loss to a single blood-bought precept to millions yet unborn? Yet this is what Senator Frazier proposes; what the peace-possessed council is mightily striving for, and what our mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts, of the boards, associations, and federations are earnestly praying for. There is something desperately out of joint here. Were our fathers wrong? Was all the suffering and sacrifice that made and has kept us a nation a useless display of militarism? Was the blood our fathers shed wasted in behalf of a liberty not worth protecting? Is the Constitution a mere infamous excuse for the maintenance of armed forces that it must be emasculated to impotence? How did we get a Constitution so full of blood-thirsty provisions that a Frazier must strike it to the ground?
At the close of the Revolution, the weakness of the Articles of Confederation under which the colonies maintained a semblance of national unity was everywhere discouragingly apparent. The four years of turmoil and political and economic chaos following the joyful victory at Yorktown cried to heaven for a prompt and vigorous remedy. The remedy believed to be the sure and lasting cure was a “more perfect union.” Such a union could be realized only through the will of the sovereign people. Madison took the initiative and had sufficient political sagacity and force of character to persuade the Congress of the hour to call on the States for delegates to an assembly to be held at Annapolis, far enough away from the Congress and the great merchants of New York to insure its deliberations might not be unduly influenced, and a meeting was called for September 11, 1786. So few delegates reported that the assembly was dissolved, but not until an appeal had been made to the states to call a constitutional convention at Philadelphia for the second Monday in May, 1787.
In the interval between these two sessions came Shay s Rebellion in Massachusetts, a circumstance that brought forward the important question of domestic tranquility. Each impoverished commonwealth of the Confederation felt the tangible menace to government which that disturbance brought to light. George Washington, writing to Harry Lee, then in the Congress, hit the keynote of the situation in these words:
You talk, my good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is not government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst.
Shay’s Rebellion, finally crushed by General Lincoln with a hastily levied army, was an object lesson well heeded, and the Constitution came from the convention with provisions for maintaining forces to guarantee domestic tranquility and the common defense, bulwarks of the Union, all of which Senator Frazier proposes to abandon and thus enable enemies from within and without to wreak their will on a defenseless American people. Moreover, on this question of domestic tranquility rests the Ark of the Covenant between the states and the Nation. Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution specifies:
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a Republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion, and, on application of the legislature or executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.
For this guarantee and this protection the several states surrendered to the Federal Government many of their most cherished sovereign rights. And the Congress, of which the senator from North Dakota is a member, is the recipient of those rights, which constitute the “Powers of Congress’’ set forth in eighteen subsections in the first article of the Constitution, ten of which are concerned with the “guarantee and protection” promised the states and with the armed force to be employed in keeping the promise and in making the other eight “powers” effective; herein lies all that there is to the Federal Union. “Influence is not government,” wrote Washington, nor can machinery function without power, and power is force. The judge on the bench decrees incarceration or death, but the majesty of the law is merely the symbol of justice and authority; the judge’s sentence is carried out by armed men. Likewise, the “Powers of Congress” are mere empty gestures without the force to make them potent and effective.
When this government, or, more correctly, the recipient Congress, through political chicanery secures the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution which has for its purpose making null and void and of no effect those promises made by the Union to the states in return for surrendered sovereign rights, then those rights must automatically revert to the states concerned. This being done, the Federal Union is defunct. This very thing was discussed and became a closed issue during the constitutional convention. A schism developed in the debates on the question of proportional representation in the Congress by the states, some of the small commonwealths feeling that they were the subject of discrimination by their larger and more populous sisters. In the heat of the controversy, James Wilson suggested separation. A member from Delaware, replying to Wilson, gave a logical course of action on the part of those states whose rights have been surrendered to a Union that repudiates promises given in return, when he said:
The larger states dare not dissolve the Confederation. If they do, the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.
Nor can the states arbitrarily repudiate their engagements with the Union. This issue has also been closed forever; witness the failure of the Ordnance of Nullification passed by the legislature of South Carolina in 1832, and the more decisive failure of the Southern Confederacy.
It ought to be apparent that the “Outlaw War” advocates must see to it that this Frazier amendment is greatly modified if they desire it to become something more than a ridiculous proposal, and if they desire it to become a part of the Constitution upon such terms that the Union may legally survive. For, were it possible to find a sufficient number of spineless, potato-custard legislators in the capitals of three-quarters of the states to ratify the proposed amendment and yet permit the Congress to retain the surrendered state rights or “powers,” neither the three-quarters nor the Congress would be able to keep the stiff-spined one-quarter in the Union. Thus the amendment, in spite of its third clause, would in itself be null and void and of no effect, for it would be illegal to enforce it, and were this latter disability waived, it would still be unenforceable without the armed force which it prohibits. It is unthinkable that such a mad-dream, preposterous thing as this Frazier amendment will ever emerge from its pigeon-hole in the Committee on the Judiciary. It is just as unthinkable that the twenty-five or thirty million American women now squarely behind the move to “Outlaw War” will for one instant retain their interest in the Frazier proposal when they understand that its enactment and ratification would mean the breakup of the United States, the end of the Federal Union.
It must be that the Frazier line of attack represents the thought °f the extremist element in the peace-at-any-price ranks. There >s a less radical section that would stop short of dissolving the Union, but which is determined to do away with armed force m the United States. They desire a government, but they propose to run it to suit themselves. Communists, “I.W.W.”s, anarchists, and foreign-born agitators of soviet leanings without a gleam of knowledge of the fundamental principles of our brand of democracy join with the women and the male pacifists supporting the National Council for the Prevention of War in this Phase of the campaign. It is an unarmed America that these People seek, for, if unarmed and defenseless, the goal, the real aim of all this agitation, communism, will be the sooner reached. Scan the list and peruse the records and speeches of the leaders comprising the interlocking directorate of the council; it shows a fine rabble of communists and internationalists for our mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts to strike hands with.
This pacifist council declares that if the nation disarms that the power of its example will influence other nations to disarm. Here you have the same old word “influence,” although no more futile than the expression “power of example.” This “power of example” is only powerful when it is the mirror of leadership combining the highest type of courage, fortitude, achievement, and the will to stand four-square to the winds of adversity with knight-errantry not to be denied. An example of weakness, of bowing before the storm, of repudiation and spiritless surrender, wins naught but disgust, ridicule and derision, and invites attack and disaster. As for “influence,” it has come to mean that type of angleworm political action which burrows its subterranean way through sloughs of cowardice and reaches those who dare not meet the test of straightforward suffrage at the polls.
Nature abhors weakness and cowardice. Which creature do we applaud, which laugh at, the eagle defending his nest, or the ostrich burying his head in the sand? And are not the bravest the tenderest? As a nation we pity the under-dog, even to rescue—let Cuba testify to this fact—but why must we, as the council demands, volunteer to become under-dogs? What mother desires her boy to be a coward, officially or otherwise? What kind of mother can she be who deliberately seeks legislation to force her boy into the ranks of the under-dogs? Have all our mothers throughout our history been cruel, Godless Amazons, thrusting their offspring on the altar of war? Were our mothers all wrong when they kissed us goodbye and gave us their blessing as we marched away in 1898 or in 1917 to defend our common country? The thought is an insult to their tears and their sainted memory. Then what has possessed our women, some thirty million of them, that they follow a leadership which seeks to sap our manhood?
If the brutal truth must be told, the mother-love of these millions of American women is being played upon to the disregard of their common sense; they are being misinformed, exploited, and made factors in a terrible menace to the future welfare of their own sons. Woman suffrage is still in the spellbinder stage. The newly-made voters, as women have always been, are being turned to by professional religionists, ism-founders, and sob-issue crusaders—men and women—as legitimate recruits for communistic and internationalistic campaigns said to be cures for all the social and economic ills of the world. To win and consolidate the women’s vote, propaganda has been belched forth all over the land that we are a militaristic people, that our alleged huge armaments are being plumed for conquest, and that we are headed straight on the road to war. This is one of the most cruel lies in history, and it is high time that our women knew it.
In the first place, these propagandists for disarmament have abused the word militarism. Militarism is not power, it is not force. It is but the system, the motive, which would employ power. Organized force in the hands of one nation may constitute militarism, but the same force in the hands of another sort of nation does not constitute militarism. Thus militarism is a thing of the soul. It is hateful to every true American. It is hateful to us because it represents despotic leadership of bloodthirsty character forcing its iron will upon the weak and powerless. But because we hate this militarism, we are not relieved of the responsibility to guard the vital interests of the Nation with whatever moderate measure of military and naval precaution our safety requires. And how moderate are those measures! Today, when the National Council for the Prevention of War, and Senator Frazier, are striving with might and main to reduce us to impotency in the field and on the seas, we have ourselves voluntarily reduced our armed forces almost to that point. We are adjudged to be the richest nation in the world; our power to wage war, when driven to it, is colossal; our man-power is the most intelligent and resourceful among men; yet our Army, computed on the basis of soldiers per thousand inhabitants, is only one and two-tenths. One other country in the world has a ratio as low; little Costa Rica down in Central America. Even Germany, defeated and disarmed, has one and four-tenths soldiers for each thousand inhabitants. Is this militarism in the United States and disarmament in Germany? It is practical disarmament in both countries.
With our Navy it is the same story. We voluntarily entered into disarmament treaties and treaties of status quo affecting naval bases in our Far Eastern insular possessions, in which we destroyed a whole fleet of great ships intended to make our naval forces the equal of the combined fleets of Great Britain and Japan. We agreed to observe a ratio of 5-5-3 for ourselves, Great Britain and Japan, respectively. This embraced capital ships and aircraft carriers. In auxiliary ships and lighter fighting craft we proposed the same ratio; it was not agreeable to our friends, but we have observed that ratio. Great Britain and Japan have not done so. Thus we find that naval ships, cruisers, destroyers, destroyer leaders, and submarines especially, actually projected or laid down if not already launched since the Washington Conference number thirteen for the United States, twenty-five for the British Empire, and ninety-six for Japan. With these facts in mind, can we by any flight of the imagination justly accuse the United States of militarism? The facts make the question ridiculous.
Non-militarism has been our policy all through the years. With the close of the Revolution we reduced our Army to eighty officers and men! In 1788, the year that the Constitution was ratified and that the new Federal Government undertook to put in force the provisions of that Constitution, we raised our Army to 666 officers and men. With this pitiful display of “militarism” the government, in accordance with the preamble of the Constitution, sought to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity;” not a simple matter in that day and age. Because we had no Navy we paid tribute to the Barbary pirates for some twenty years.
This policy of unpreparedness has brought us into many preventable wars and rebellions. Yet, after every conflict we have listened to the pacifists and thus are never ready for strife; we have always been taken unawares and have suffered losses accordingly. One wonders if the women supporting the council full}7 understand what the ratio of casualties among unskilled and ill- provided soldiery is compared to that of trained and well- equipped troops? If they did have this definite knowledge, it seems hardly credible that there would be thirty million women clamoring for total disarmament in this country.
In conclusion, the suggestion is here made that the thirty million women who are, sheep-like, following the pacifist spellbinders, would do well to resolve themselves into a fact-seeking body. They might then learn that it is better for the world at large that we retain the military instincts of a nation wedded to peace. They might learn that the Congress cannot legislate militarism from the hearts of other peoples, and that the best guarantee 0 world peace is the strong right arms of the United States and of those powers actuated by the same principles of international justice and goodwill that have characterized our diplomacy ever since the founding of the nation. They might also learn that general disarmament, such as is being legitimately sought at Geneva, if it could be brought about, does not mean the end of wars; armaments, inanimate tools, do not bring about wars, it is the man behind the man behind the gun who starts them and the man with the most effective gun who stops them.
Let these thirty million women contemplate the spectacle of China, with its more than 4,000 years of pacifist civilization; there it is, 400 million strong, yet so weak that it is the victim of huge scale banditry from within and wholesale plucking from without—the result of forty centuries of delusion—what do those poor folk know of domestic tranquility, or of the safeguards of an adequate common defense? Contrast with this ruin, the prosperous, contented, influential solidarity of this land. Did not the ancient S’suma Ch’ien’s wisdom, scorned by his own folk, descend upon and direct the founders, builders, and protectors of this nation? And have our leaders so suddenly become legislatively crude and diplomatically witless that these inexperienced women voters must rise up and turn them from the tried and proven policies of the fathers into the paths which history shows to be the roads to ruin?
One more suggestion is advanced; if the thirty million American women now federated with internationalistic leagues cannot find tasks worth their talents in the social and economic development of their own land, they can find an outlet for their energies abroad. Let them dedicate the same amount of time, strength, and money now devoted to the ill-advised efforts of the council in making this country defenseless, to the education of outlander militaristic peoples in the principles of democracy as set forth in the Constitution now under attack, and they will hasten the advent of world peace and the millennium in direct proportion to the effort expended.