The Voice from Rome
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...Second, even suppossential fallacy that lay in any theory of final victory: ing that such evidence could be produced, there is no at the very moment when the greater part of Europe way at this time of day of rendering it effective for 540 THE COMMONWEAL October 13, 1926 anything more practical than national holier-than- around the council table at Versailles...
...innumerable biographies and diaries dealing with the The haughty embargo placed by one power on any disperiod are studied...
...The great Pontiff, phases had shown a strong tendency to revert to the addressing the heart of mankind, opposed the greed of methods of barbarism-"Men," in the French writer tariff barriers, of exclusive commercial nationalisms, as De Pierrefeu's phrase, "howling their war-cries, falling firmly as he stood out against the lust of war...
...The blooming loot...
...Wisdom, seated thouness...
...that the just claims to reparation of those who had Something new, then, seems to be happening to the borne the burden of the havoc tended to disappear in vision of the world as the war which all but wrecked the welter of acquisitiveness and never took the place it recedes into a perspective of years...
...that disease and less the French republic with its imperial velleities...
...The eyes of the Recluse seen full light, notably the Russian state archives, only of Rome looked far ahead...
...They included competition in armaments on industrial resources from which the gold might come, land and sea, the insane figment bequeathed by pagan were foreclosed on...
...distress in one segment will infect others, both economiIt is simply imperialism as a working system...
...First, the means for assessing war It is only now, when the backs of victors and van- guilt in such an overwhelming proportion as would quished alike are bent over the bitter harvest of post- leave one party among the combatants under the onus war settlement, that men are beginning to own how in- of having precipitated the slaughter, either does not evitably the disregarded word of the Vicar of Christ exist, or those who could produce it have good reasons contained the germ of all the remedies that necessity for holding their hand...
...Like the song of a lark, or the murmur of the sea Responsibility for the war is a subject upon which which many a soldier will remember having caught less and less is being heard as time goes on...
...The intimately dependent upon another...
...ring nations heard for a moment the voice of reason But it has grown wise to two very common-sense conand charity before the guns smothered it anew...
...They perceived the es- serve to increase the doubt...
...The conflict in its later monopoly of the goods of peace...
...to abdicate, should have realized that a war unlike any That it was not so just before and during the first other war must be followed by a peace unlike any other two years of the struggle becomes evident when the peace...
...There that dismay at the price that would be exacted from was nothing modern in the best sense, nothing truly the vanquished was protracting the struggle beyond civilized amid the atavistic welter of carnage to which reason, he dared, while the issue was still in the bal- western Europe had turned in August, 1917, save what ance, to suggest a mutual condonation followed by dis- reached it in the words of one feeble old man, speakarmament, as the only Christian and practical solution...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...ing from immortal Rome...
...Hunting war responsibility has become the once more on the throne which ferocity had forced her most academic of all pursuits...
...war world should be have wilted in the climate of inIn a word-there were all the evil things that leap evitable cool reason...
...Even the countries which featured cussion of so vital a matter as the freedom of the seas, their reluctance to enter Armageddon, most plausibly the insistence on the possession of mineral deposits by buoyed themselves up from the start with a vision of another, the rush by all to secure mandates and to some vague and vast plunder, in territory and gold, to stake out claims in far countries, which, through no be exacted when the disrupter (who was always the fault of their hapless population, had been drawn into party of the second) had been overthrown and humil- the orbit of a mondial Armageddon, were so insistent iated...
...At the darkest moment of principles of international hygiene according to which the war, the late Pope Benedict XV begged the com- the world would have to live when its fever was batants "to cease their useless slaughter...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, October 13, 1926 Number 23 CONTENTS The Voice from Rome 539 Fire (verse) Eileen Duggan 555 Week by Week 541 Poems Helene Mullins, Jessica Powers, The Battle in Gotham 544 Paul Dent, Eleanor Custis Shallcross, Spanish Ascendancy 545 Mary Carolyn Davies, James E. Tobin 556 Closing the Dante Contest 546 The Plav R. Dana Skinner 557 San Francisco Michael Williams 547 Books R. M. Patterson, Jr., A Study in Chaos...
...Well may the Fortnightly Review Rome which labels itself supremacy-that other fig- conclude that "only the strangely befogged mentality ment, a tradition from Pitt and the early British Whigs, produced by years of war hatreds and war propaganda that called itself the Balance of Power...
...It is very much they deserved in the imagination of the neutral world...
...cally and socially-these things have been seen so One of the most unfortunate things in the whole clearly that they are not likely to be forgotten, in our unfortunate chain of circumstances which the world time, for the sake of employing violence anew to attain war uncoiled, was this : that peace was made before the supremacy...
...A chastened peace settlement of 1919, unanimously predicted that generation is at our doors, asking for something that all the economic losses of the war would be made good will be a better help in time of present trouble and by compelling the Central Powers, not only to pay more available for future safety than either...
...They ing until the feebler group disappeared...
...That this was not the case, the world knows...
...That one portion of society is to mind when the word imperialism is mentioned...
...the diplomatic legerdemain that sought to regroup al- The tensely emotionalized theories upon which liances, the cynical opportunism that preferred to draw statesmen based their conceptions of what the postprofit from old grudges rather than strive to heal them...
...A similar were, in all truth, a prophetic declaration of the rules atavism prevailed over the minds of all but one man, social life must observe if world decay is not to be the and he stricken and already disillusioned, who met sequel to world destruction...
...It is re- full `reparation' for all damage done, but also to alized that destiny in the major issue is only the ag- indemnify the victors to the last penny for the cost of gregate of a series of acts, and that the acts which the war...
...In his upon one another hand to hand, and slaying and slay- words there was more than a temporary counsel...
...There was could ever have made serious men accept such an idea...
...It is not during some chance lull in the bombardment, the war- so much that the world has wearied of the subject...
...The loot...
...Louis, an alert a dimmed and blurred vision, were being slowly re- organ that keeps a keen eye open upon the shifting adjusted to a focus permitting clear outlines to be dis- thought of the world, does not exaggerate when it tells tinguished...
...that there is really villain of the piece is neither the German, nor the something like an international organism, one hand of Austrian, nor the Russian, nor the British empire, far which must know what the other does...
...Perceiving allayed and its poisoned blood drained away...
...And this reparation, by a crowning folly, made war inevitable were committed deliberately and was to take place in "gut" as well as in "gels," in specie in full defiance of the lessons that history is there to payments at the very time the colonial possessions and teach...
...clusions anent it...
...Neither the wickedness and inordinate us, referring to an article already published by the ambitions of one set of combatants (which set does Catholic Times on papal policy during the war, that not greatly matter) nor the theory of some vertiginous the real Utopians and dreamers were not at the Vatiattraction of fatality, which replaced it for a few can, but were "those politicians and publicists of the years when men had grown weary of charge and Allied nations who, in August, 1917, and until after the countercharge, will meet the case today...
...as though a field-glass, which had allowed at first only The Fortnightly Review of St...
...The documents which have is forcing upon them today...
...But there is still unfortunately plenty of lessons of war had had time to sink into the hearts of room for sly and selfish experiment toward getting a either victors or vanquished...
...Theodore F. McManus 550 J. M. Egan, Henrietta Dana Skinner, The Passing of Parties in France.' Thomas Walsh, Frederick H. Martens, Robert Sencourt 552 Harry M cGuire, Paul Crowley 558 It Is All Very Odd Mary Kolars 554 The Quiet Corner 565 THE VOICE FROM ROME N O PRONOUNCEMENT that came from the was blowing away the substance of generations to come See of Saint Peter during the war was so bitterly from the mouths of its big guns and meditating futile resented or so entirely misunderstood as the famous schemes of compensation for all the waste and havoc, appeal, made to The Leaders of the Belligerent Na- his voice was the only one which dared to define the tions on August 1, 1917...
Vol. 4 • October 1926 • No. 23
