Читать книгу Defenseless America - Hudson Maxim - Страница 7

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Success in every human pursuit depends upon ability to discern the truth and to utilize it. Facts, though they may be stern, are our best friends, and we should always welcome them with an open mind.

Napoleon said that with good news there is never any hurry, but with bad news not a moment is to be lost. Consequently, those who discover to us certain facts of serious concern are our friends, even though it may be bad news. It is every man's duty, not only to himself, but also to those dear to him, to know the truth about anything which may menace his and their welfare, in order that he and they may become awakened to the danger and prepare for it accordingly.

Those who deceive us by warning us of danger when there is no danger may not do us any harm; in fact, they may even do us good by cultivating our alertness and awareness. The hare may jump at a thousand false alarms to every one of actual danger; but it is the false alarms that have given him the alertness to save himself when real danger comes. On the other hand, those who convince us that there is no danger when there is great danger are the worst of enemies; they expose us, naked of defense, to the armed and armored enemy.

Among the great deceivers with whom the human race has to contend is the confidence man, for he plays upon the fears, vanity, and credulity of his victim with the skill of a Kubelik upon the violin. He enlists his victim with him, and they work together to the same end. No man is greatly deceived by another except through his own co-operation. Every one has his pet egoistic illusion always under the spotlight of self-view; to him, his own importance is a veritable obsession.

A nation is only a compound of individuals, and what is true of an individual also holds true of any aggregation of individuals.

We, the people of the United States of America, are at this moment, and have been for many years, afflicted with a dominating egoistic obsession concerning our greatness, our importance, and our power, while we correspondingly underrate the greatness, the importance, and the power of other nations and races. Our accomplishments have indeed been marvelous, and we have not neglected to award them all the marveling that is their due.

There is no denying the fact that in many competitive pursuits requiring intellectual acuteness for the greatening of material welfare we have outstripped the rest of the world. But the rest of the world has been busy, too, and though we may possibly deserve more credit for our accomplishments in the aggregate than any other people, still, others have far outdone us in many important respects.

Our hitherto isolated and unassailable geographical position has enabled us to utilize our unequaled resources to become the greatest industrial and the wealthiest people in the world.

We have not been obliged to concern ourselves very much thus far with measures for national security, and having at home all the land we needed, we have acquired the habit of looking upon national armaments in the light of frills, which we must maintain merely for national respectability. Many of us look upon our Navy as dress-parade paraphernalia, to be worn on gala occasions.

Our response to the advocacy of a sufficient navy, of coast fortifications, and of a standing army adequate to our needs, has been that we have no use for either army or navy, and that coast fortifications would be a useless expense.

Our enormous wealth and inexhaustible resources have been and still are pointed out as reasons why we require no armaments, although, as a matter of fact, they are the strongest possible reasons for armaments of a magnitude proportionate to that wealth and those resources.

In America, we pride ourselves upon our so-called free institutions, blindly believing that they are free, and that, therefore, every man being an aristocrat, we, by consequence, have no aristocracy, entirely oblivious to the fact that we have merely substituted the esteem of wealth, and the power and the privilege which it represents, for the esteem of family worth and family name, and the power and the privilege which they represent.

Isolation and wealth beget vanity and arrogance; and vanity, resting upon the laurels of past accomplishments, rapidly fosters decadence and weakness; so that the very pride of strength and virility begets weakness and effeminacy.

It has been said that usually there are but three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves. The old man trades upon the name made in the days of his younger strength, and the son, seldom possessing the strength of the father, trades on the father's name, while the third generation generally gets back to shirt-sleeves again. Although this statement is not a general truth, it has truth enough to excuse it.

The main reason why luxury and opulence lead to degeneracy, weakness, and effeminacy, is that those who live on Easy Street, being relieved of the intense strife necessary to gain a livelihood and to climb to positions of opulence and power, suffer from weakness and decay, and finally find their way down to shirt-sleeves, at the foot of the economic and social ladder, either to be submerged in hoboism, or to make the climb of old progenitors over again.

What is true of individuals and families in this respect holds true also of nations, only it takes a little longer time, starting from shirt-sleeves, to get back to shirt-sleeves again.

We Americans were taught by the promoters of the American Revolution—in short, by the fathers of our country—that all men are created equal in respect to privilege, and that no class distinction and no class privilege were worthy of honor unless earned. By consequence, the symbol and the badge of our class distinction became the dollar.

Taught to despise aristocracy, we immediately created for ourselves a new aristocracy in the shape of a plutocracy. This aristocracy of wealth was fast becoming as tyrannical and unbearable and as much a menace to the freedom of the people as the old aristocracy which it had replaced. The old aristocracy had been established by the right of the sword; the new aristocracy had been established by the purchasing power of the dollar, and the people learned that combinations of wealth were a compelling power as great as the combination of armies, and that a government dominated by the dollar might become as intolerable as any form of absolutism.

Then there came another American revolution, led by the labor unions, which proved that it is only necessary for the people to organize, in order to conquer with the short-sword of the ballot as effectually as with the sword of steel.

Unhappily, just as intolerance and avarice have always led conquerors to be overgrasping and tyrannical, so have intolerance and avarice made prosecutions under the Sherman Law veritable persecutions. Now that the common people have found their power, nothing under heaven can halt them, or prevent them from abusing that power, except a higher education of the common people and their leaders, compelling them to understand the great truth that the people of a nation must co-operate with a patriotism that shall emulate the spirit of the hive of bees so admirably interpreted by Maeterlinck.

Nevertheless, we must remember that, while we may with advantage imitate the bee in this respect, the bee does not progress. There has been no enlightenment in bee-life for a hundred thousand years, for the very reason that the bees are dominated by that beautiful spirit of the hive.

We owe our ability to progress and to become more and more highly intelligent and enlightened, to the existence of that instability and heterogeneity which stimulate and develop us by causing us to strive for stability and homogeneity.

Life is a series of reactions between the individual and environing stimuli. For this reason, stern and exacting stimuli are required to develop a man to the full. In all the ages during which the race has been developing there have existed formative influences of the sternest and most exacting kind; so that, just as our ears are constituted to hear only a certain character of sounds, and sounds of a limited pitch, duration, and loudness, and are deaf to all other sounds, so are we constituted to react only to certain environing stimuli, and to react with each stimulus in a certain definite measure, and only in a certain definite measure. It is impossible for us to react supremely, or to be developed supremely, by mediocre stimuli, but we must have supreme stimuli, and in order to get those stimuli, there must be a prompting to activity that demands of a man every ounce of his strength; and everything that is dear to him must be staked to bring out and develop all the latent, larger energies that are in him.

Nothing that can be said and done by all the friends of national defense will make this country take adequate measures for its defense. Nothing but a disastrous war will supply the necessary stimulus. In all the history of the world, this truth has been made manifest—that no nation can be made adequately to prepare against war, no matter what the menace may be, without either suffering actual defeat, or being so embroiled in war as to realize the necessity for preparedness.

This country must first be whipped in order to prepare sufficiently to prevent being whipped. Therefore, our business at the present time is to pick our conquerors. I choose England. I would much rather see the red-coat in the streets of New York than the spiked helmet. I would much rather see the genial face of the British Tommy Atkins than the stern mystery of the Japanese face.

If England does not give us a good, timely whipping, we are going to be whipped by Germany or Japan, and the humiliation will be more than is really needed to stimulate us for adequate preparation.

When the present war is over, the precipitation of a war with England may not depend on what England will choose to do, but it may depend on what we shall choose to do. We have been a lamb rampant for a long time in a jungle alive with lions, and we have owed our security to the fact that the lions have been watching one another, and have not dared to avert their eyes long enough to devour us. If we did not have a grandiose sense of our importance and power, we should not need a whipping in order to prepare against war, but so long as we believe that we can beat all creation without any preparation, we are going to act just as though it were true, and England, although she may be friendly, may be forced, by our inconsiderate bluff and arrogance, to declare war on us. Much better England than any other country. England now has no territorial aspirations that would make her want to annex some of our land. She would be satisfied with a good big indemnity, which we could well afford to pay for the benefit we should gain from the war. If England will merely come over seas, and whip us, and tax us for the trouble, and thereby lead us to prepare adequately to defend ourselves against less friendly nations, she will do us the greatest possible good.

We are living and working not alone for ourselves, but also for those who are our own, and for all others insomuch as their interests and their welfare are in common with our own.

Our welfare is part and parcel of the aggregate welfare of all those for whom we are working, and our welfare and their welfare are not only a condition of the present, but are also a condition of the future. The welfare of our children and our children's children, and of those whose interests will be in common with theirs, is part and parcel of our own present welfare. This is the true philosophy by which we who are sane and conscientious are guided. Upon such philosophy are based all economics and all prudence.

The false philosophy of the selfish and the sensual, the spendthrift and the debauchee, is the philosophy of such as they whose acts of omission and commission brought on the French Revolution, and who said, "Après nous le déluge"; but such should not be our philosophy.

Therefore, if now there be a calamity in the making, which we are able to foresee must surely descend upon the heads of our children, even if it does not come soon enough to fall upon our own heads, it is a thing that should awaken our concern and stimulate our inquiry, and lead us to seek ways and means for averting it.

It is a fact, which I absolutely know as certainly as anything can be known in human affairs, that we, and all of those who are near and dear to us, are sitting today on a powder magazine with the train lighted, and it is only a question of the slowness, or quickness, of the fuse when the time shall arrive for the explosion.

The laws that govern human events are as mathematically accurate and as immutable as the laws that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies; the laws that govern human reactions—the reactions between men and men, communities and communities, nations and nations—are as immutable and are governed as exactly by the laws of cause and effect as are chemical reactions. Nothing can happen without a cause, and there can be no cause that does not make something happen. Every event is the child of its parents—cause and effect.

Now let us look at the parentage of the cause and effect whose progeny are soon to bring upon us the great red peril of war, and, finding us unprepared, will treat us as Germany has treated Belgium. We are rich—our country from one end to the other possesses a vast wealth of enticements to the invasion of a foreign foe—and we are defenseless. These conditions are the parents of vast impending calamities.

Europe, today, is involved in the greatest war in the history of mankind, and—in spite of all the saving grace of our so-called modern civilization, in spite of all the mercifulness of the Christian religion, in spite of all the charitable kindness of the Red Cross—the sum of brutality, savagery, and misery of this war is certainly not much less than it has been at any other time in the history of a striving world, every page of which has been written with blood.

We have arrived at a time when we must decide whether or not our safety can be better secured and peace maintained with armaments or without armaments.