Evening Star Newspaper, November 8, 1931, Page 80

2 better kind of world, with more liberty for common folk, with freedom from the hatreds which had led to all this, with a wider sense of unity among the tribes ot men. Wasn't it a war to end war? Wouldn't the human mind learn a les- son from all this slaughter and destruc- tion? When peace came, wouldn't there be a more civilized scheme of human relationship? SPLENDID promises were made Dby statesmen and leaders, and it is pos- sible, though doubtful, that there were men in the front-line trench, crouching under the scream of shells, who believed them and obtained some little comfort for their souls before they died. But afterward, when those who had escaped looked around upon a world in ruin and stared toward a future which none could guess, there was for many of them noth- ing left but heartbreak and ghost mem- ories and a sense of having been be- trayed. Thirteen years have passed since then. How stands the world now? How many of those promises have been redeemed? What lessons did we learn and put into effect to establish a better order of life, with more security for common folk and some ideal of civilization higher than that of cave men and warring tribes? I don’t want to be ironical, though God knows there is the chance here for irony. Looking around the world today, there is no blinding vision of a higher stand- ard of human intelligence than that which led the world to war. Thirteen years after Armistice day the same na- tions that fought in that death strug- gle, which left unhealed wounds in the very soul of the world, stare across each other’s frontiers with the same old sus- picion and hostility. The passion of na- tional egotism is even stronger than before the war, and there is no drawing together of human tribes except for a defense against other groups. They have given lip service to the ideals of international justice and arbi- tration. Many of them have renounced war as a part of their national policy. Many of them belong to the League of Nations, which was established to se- cure world peace on the lines of intelli- gen{ co-operation and discussion. But they are heavily armed, unless the po- litical pressure of more powerful states prevents them from arming. Their war departments are searching, not without success and with the aid of scientific ex- perts, to discover new weapons and methods of destruction which will give them an overwhelming advantage in a new struggle. Under economic stress the great powers are prepared to cut down their war budgets, provided their potential enemies agree to do the same, thereby enabling them to maintain their superiority of de- fense and striking power if they need it. Germany, disarmed after her defeat but capable of rearming rapidly, frets under this inferiority in military strength and will not submit to it much longer. Her young men, too young to have experi- enced the agony of war, have rallied to the standard of a Nationalist leader who thinks in terms oi force, military dis- cipline and aggressive action. It is natural. It is inevitable unless civilized nations forget their old blood feuds and, 13 years after the war which laid them low, turn to a new ideal of life based upon intelligent co-operation, for civilization itself is menaced at this very time by an utter collapse caused by the ruin of the last conflict. There are few signs of such intelligence. New nations, liberated from old tyrannies after the armistice, adopted immediately the men- tality of their old tyrants. Many of them have been brutally intolerant of minor- ities which came under their own do- minion. All of them have an inflamed sense of nationality which sets their nerves on edge against neighboring states. They have shut themselves be- hind their frontiers with high walls of trade protection and military force. UROPE has been Balkanized. Ram- shackle as it was, the old Austro- Hungarian Empire was a better system, at least in its idea of federated states, than this jealous jig-saw puzzle of intol- erant nationalities, though I know it is heresy to say so. I believe in patriotism and in a nationality which cherishes its traditions, its folk songs, its language and its cultural inheritance, but I believe also that European civilization will wither un- less patriotism permits of greater unity. Oriental nations are restless and lurch- ing toward war and revolution, There is still the menace of war between Japan and China, which may involve other na- tions like Russia with consequences not yet conceivable. japan's recent sullen attitude toward the League of Nations caused a shiver of apprehension among thoughtful people in many countries who know that war in the Far East may mean the continuance of misery in the West. The problem of India looms ahead. Gandhi’s demand for independence would, if abruptly granted, lead to religious and racial warfare which would be hideous 1n tragedy beyond our present imagination, although recent history not 13 years old has hardened us to horror. Thirteen years after the armistice there is no spirit of peace in the world. The miracle is that, apart from minor con- flicts, these jealous nations have kept their hands off each other’s throats so long. That has been due to groups of men apd women in many countries who have served the cause of peace with a courage and devotion that was proof against despair, ridicule and hatred. Remember- ing those millions of dead boys, looking back to those four and a half years of ruin, slaughter and madness, they have tried to carry out the pledges made to humanity by its leaders that never again should such a thing happen. They kept the League of Nations alive, though many times it was reported dead. They stood at the thin front line using weapons of conciliation and compromise against the upholders of militarism and sacred ego- ism. Reaching out across their own frontiers, getting in touch with men and women with the same ideas, they formed a spiritual force in the world which has not been without its victories and which still stands as the only hope of humanity in the struggle between intelligence and cave man instinct. It was their spiritual support which brought Germany into the League of Nations, which forced through the Kellogg pact, which created the naval truce and which stamped out many smoldering fires that otherwise would have blazed into war. Their success is by no means assured. Intelligence is still limited to small groups and lonely minds. The mass still thrills to the beat of drum and the call of passion. The old slogans of national hatred and egotism still have a power enormously more appealing than the call to international justice or human co- operation. To youth, careless of danger and eager for service and sacrifice for ad- venture’s sake, the senseless bragging of the loud-mouthed patriot sounds more heroic than the quiet words of the philos- opher who advises them that in modern warfare victory has no value and that civilized nations must unite or perish. In France and Germany, in England and the United States, as in other coun- tries, there are many minds who see world problems in larger aspects than mere selfish nationalism, but they are outnumbered by the hordes of unthink- ing souls who respond only to passion and prejudice, That is a world danger more alarming now than in the old days, be- cause democracy, which is all powerful in many nations, rules by quantity and not by quality of brains. THIRTEEN years after the first Armis- tice day we must admit that we have utterly failed to build a secure system of civilization upon the ruins of the war. There i8 more poverty, more sharp-edged anxiety, more hopelessness among the masses of people in this thirteenth year after the armistice than in the years that immediately followed the war. So far from getting better, economic conditions of life are getting worse. They are so bad that it is no scare- mongering statement to say that civiliza- tion is menaced with economic collapse, threatening starvation to great popula- tions. The monetary system of the world has broken down. It is not quite certain yet that we can patch it up again in time to prevent a disaster. We behold the frightful paradox of a world in which people are starving because there is too much wheat and poverty stricken because in certain countries there is too much gold. The natural need of man to use his hand and brain for his wife and family is denied, because something has gone wrong with the mechanism of exchange. In many industrial countries there are millions of men lounging about without work or wages, kept miserably by some system of dole, or poor relief, or public charity. Some of them have been work- less for so long that their spirit has gone out of them, and they look to the state to go on keeping them. Great nations like Germany, highly or- ganized, with industrious pedple, with an enormous energy of production, are des- perately presseqd to save themselves from bankruptcy and ruin. England, so rich ahd powerful before the war, so stern in financial integrity, so sure of stability of the pound sterling, was forced off the gold stand2rd and is still deeply anxious for the immediate future, because of dis- tress in other countries to whom she has loaned vast sums of money which they cannot repay. Even the United States, which in the world’s imagination seemed rich beyond dreams of avarice and pros- perous beyond anything known in his- tory, has not dodged this economic typhoon which has wrecked millions of small homes. Order has not yet been restored. The machinery of industrial life is out of gear. What is the cause of all this? The root cause, in my opinion, was the failure of our leaders to understand that the inherited wealth of the world was par- tially destroyed by the war and that “paper money, pretending to represent that wealth, was worthless. Democracy in the victorious nations was tempted to believe that the war need not be paid for in further suffering and sacrafice, but that there could be a redistribution of wealth to make every one prosperous. Few people knew or had the courage to tell them that much of the world’s wealtn had been blown away by shell fire and that war loans and bonds had nothing behind them but the industry and com- merce of the future. England, as I pointed out 12 years ago, though nobody believed it, spent during the four and a half years of war as much as in the two and a half centuries before the war. She had nothing left but credit based on future trade and foreign loans. All her war bonds were simply promises to pay, provided her own people and her debtors went on wogking and making profits. The gold in the Bank of Eng- land, as in the other banks of othsr coun- tries, did not represent real and absolute wealth, as was believed in the old days before the war. It only had value as a token as long as it was kept moving by the exchange of goods and service be- tween one nation and another. When it stopped moving it became worthless. It stopped moving, except from one hole in the ground to another hole in the ground. WITHOUT getting deep into the mys- teries of gold, this at least seems’ true—war debts, reparations, war bonds and loans from one country to another were figures on bits of paper or promises to pay by lumps of metal, which have no meaning and will never have any mean- ing apart from the natural ebb and flow of world trade, industry and employment of world populations, freely exchanging the results of their labor and the credit of nations with mutual trust in each other’s stability and integrity. The Magazine of Next Sunday’s Star Will Contain: “On _]ohrrson’s Farm”—A First-Run Story “Stop Reckless Driving”—Says Franklin D. Roosevelt “Mussolini Memorializes Forgotten American War Exploit” “Vanity—VVoman’s Greatest Asset” “er I'wo Billion Dollars a Year for Music” “The Bridge Forum,” Book News, Music Notes and the Latest in Art None of those things happened after the war. World trade was checked by artificial boundaries and prohibitions. There was no confidence among nations. Credit broke down. It was a moral breakdown before it became a monetary brgakdown. tting back to primitive simplicities which underlie all human problems, how- _ ever complicated, it seems to me that the source of all our present troubles lies in the illusion that we could live more lux- uriously after the war than before the war, in spite of all that wasted wealth and the four and one-half years devoted to destruction. Greed for more money, more pleasure, more magnificence over- took the war-stricken world. Nations like England and the United States lent money at high rates of interest to the defeated nations, crippled by their bur- den of war debts. The borrowing nations had an illusion of new prosperity for a time because of these vast loans, the in- terest of which they paid out of the bor- rowed money itself. Everybody was eager to lend money or borrow money without real security. Everybody except the laboring classes gambled on, futures, believing in the mirage of wealth which could be nothing but an illusion unless it were created by hard labor and the exchange of goods. Money became divorced from reality. It is still divorced and will remain so as long as unpayable debts are counted as assets, But the mirage has faded. The illu- sion has been broken by stern facts. We know now that all this gold being shipped about, all these borrowings and lendings of paper money, mean absolutely nothing but confusion and chaos unless based on confidence. Real wealth is created by labor and the steady toil of millions working in security and in an orderly scheme of life. We cannot grow rich out of the poverty of our neighbors. We can- not maintain a high standard of living on money lending, or borrowing, or gam- bling. We must get back somehow to the eternal realities of earning what we spend before we spend it. Perhaps we have all been too greedy for the good things of life. Perhaps the materialism of the post-war world has defeated its own object. I don’t pose as a moralist or an ascetic. I like the good things of life, but I think there are spiritual values worth more than wealth—such as truth, beauty and simplicity. I am a follower of Gandhi, at least so far as being distrustful of the machine, with its standardization of production and its replacement of human labor by wheels and cogs. We cannot put the clock back or smash the instruments of man’s inventive genius, but I believe it is one of the necessities of the world’s recovery from its present distress that the machine should be controlled lest it master us all. At present its efficiency has outstripped the pace of the human being. We cannot keep up with its ter- rific output, its deadly competition with human labor. Every day the wheels turn faster and faster and more men or women are displaced from the fields and factories. It is running wild, this machinery of ours. There is overproduction and under- consumption. So far we have not ad- justed our scheme of life to its mechan- ical energy. We may get from one place to another faster and faster. Yesterday the record-breakers traveled at a hun- dred miles an hour. Today it is 400. Everything is speeded up, including en- gines of destruction, so that we can kill each other faster if we are out to kill, New York’s skyscrapers are no safer than London’s chimney pots if there is another world war. THIRTEEN +years after the armistice civilization is not sure of itself. The ideals to which some of us pledged our- selves are not fulfilled. As the years pass the dangers seem to thicken, and we are all on edge with ap- prehension. Humanity is at the cross- roads of an unknown land, and we have no sure guides. Yet some of us still go on hoping in the only quality which has ever saved mankind from its perils and disasters. It is the hope that intelligence will master stupidity, the hope that the spirit will overcome brute force, the "npe thnt there is some virtue in us to defeat evil. I am optimist enough to believe that there is enough common intelligence in the world to unravel this economic tangle in which we are coiled and that good will is enlarging its domain. The spirit moves above the machine, and in spite of all that death 13 years ago, it will produce new leaders of life in the next adventure which awaits us.