How far it will be possible to take these national armaments out of
national control remains to be seen. Already America, who is as deeply
demoralized by Capitalism as we are, though much less tainted with
Militarism now that Colonel Roosevelt has lost his front seat, has
pledged herself to several European States not to go to war with them
until the matter under dispute has been in the hands of an international
tribunal for a year. Now there is no military force on earth, nor likely
to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements
as Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality
of Belgium. Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are
not worth the scraps of paper they are written on. They always will
footle in this way. They might as well say that because there are crimes
which men can commit with legal impunity in spite of our haphazard
criminal codes, men always do commit them. No doubt nations will do what
it is to their interest to do. But because there is in every nation a
set of noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an
overwhelming interest in creating and maintaining a tradition of
international good faith, and honouring their promissory notes as
scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling debts and
fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every
international guarantee except the howitzer. Why, the very Prussian
Militarists themselves are reviling us for doing what their own
Militarist preachers assumed as a matter of course that we should do:
that is, attack Prussia without regard to the interests of European
civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between France and
Russia. But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by
assuming that there was no such thing as shame (_alias_ conscience),
terrified herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we
were immediately ashamed not to defend them. This idiotic ignoring of
the highest energies of the human soul, without the strenuous pressure