Peace from the Strong
PEACE FROM THE STRONG WITHIN a few weeks the Catholic Conference on International Relations, which is the development of an ideal mooted at the recent Eucharistic Congress in Chicago, will...
...By an historical accident, which may never be repeated on so vast a scale, a considerable number of the men have seen war at first hand, and know the deadly drudgery, the nausea, the suffering and spectral divorce from life of a game that is played at its fighting end by sweating, starving, footsore, and groping human creatures...
...No other persons," declared the preamble of a resolution passed at a convention of old combatants held more than a year ago, "know so well the nature of modern war as do the members of the American Legion...
...It is no less certain that what we now agree to call civilization would disappear in the process...
...in the willingness of a Church which preaches peace to bless the banners under which the Christian warrior will fight and die at need...
...The sentiment, ranging from suspicion to open contempt, which now reaches them from the extremists that we have mentioned, would become a just and universal judgment...
...At another, quite as naturally, will be ranged those who believe that force and submission to force are the systole and diastole upon whose oscillation the world will be run to the end of time...
...Is there not always an alternative—submission...
...It is an antinomy noticeable in many spheres of human conduct...
...An immense simplification of human effort would undoubtedly ensue...
...If we needed any proof that the hope to end war forever is a delusion," says an editorial in the World's Work, which devotes its current number to gloomy conjectures on the probable source, extent, and result of the next great armed conflict, "we may look at the armaments of the nations...
...For the latter, acrimonious notes that are scarcely-veiled ultimatums, shores beset by battleships, their batteries run out for action, landing parties, a harsh executive word, only withheld when some brother, equally formidable, shows signs of uneasiness...
...Roughly, this difficulty may be said to reside in the retention, by every nation, and to a degree only limited by its power to borrow and tax, of the means to war, as an essential without which not only national dignity but national existence is inconceivable...
...Deliberately, and as an abiding principle, the use of two measures seems laid down: one to the brother whose claims are backed by lethal power on land, on sea and in the air, and quite another to the weaker member whose backwardness, whose helplessness in the face of overwhelming odds, makes national dignity and any attempt to maintain it laughable or pathetic, as you choose to take it...
...The law of the jungle, where those would take who have the power and those keep who can, would be our palladium...
...It is needless to insist upon signs that are headlined upon the front pages of the press at the moment these words are being written...
...It may be said that this picture of strength made perfect in meekness is Utopian...
...Less than a decade after this war-to-endwar, the world remains under arms and in one of the most populous countries of the earth armies are locked in a death struggle for the right to govern four hundred millions of human beings, while the great powers stand on the sidelines in danger of being drawn into this new vortex...
...PEACE FROM THE STRONG WITHIN a few weeks the Catholic Conference on International Relations, which is the development of an ideal mooted at the recent Eucharistic Congress in Chicago, will be meeting at Washington...
...To enlist this large body of opinion sincerely and effectively in the cause of peace among nations, to find, using a phrase that swept the thinking world two decades ago, a "moral equivalent" for war and for the emotions, some of them very noble and desirable, that war arouses, would seem to be the duty that lies before all bodies who make the harmonious development of the world their desideratum...
...What we are watching, in fact, as the growth of armaments and of efforts to render their use unlikely proceed side by side, is the old distinction, so often drawn by theologians in the ethical sphere, between "potentiality" and "action...
...But the question is complicated, at the very start, by a factor without whose frank recognition as a main difficulty all discussions upon peace will prove so many futile gestures...
...No discussion of international relations, in short, will be worth one night's hire of the hall in which it is held, unless it takes note of this ill-omened arrogance, and insists that it shall disappear from the language of diplomacy henceforth...
...Between the two extremes lies an 590 extensive territory of persuadable thought, men, and women too, who feel themselves the inheritors of conditions they did not create, whose hearts thrill at the rhythmic beat of disciplined feet or the sight of a great battleship riding at anchor, who uncover their heads as the national flag passes, who teach their children the sacrificial beauty of death accepted in life's springtime, and who, in no conceivable conjuncture of their own lives would put into practice the doctrine of "force majeure" of which such things are the symbol...
...The paramount task before all those, Catholic or non-Catholic, who make relations between powers and principalities their concern, is to attempt to restore a conscience to the international mind...
...If so, it is only Utopian as chivalry was Utopian during the brief period when it possessed the imagination of the world, or as conscience itself is Utopian...
...Were the issue thus nakedly stated our only concern —were the peace that angels invoked at the moment its Creator descended upon the earth, and the "order" that once reigned at Warsaw the sole alternatives before mankind, it is not easy to see what ends conferences, leagues, and conventions devoted to the discussion of international relations would subserve...
...But one thing is certain...
...The connotations it awakens differ widely in different minds, and no conference on the subject has ever been arranged without bringing certain sharp variations to light...
...For confidence, patience, dignity, for reluctance to humiliate a weaker brother or to speak the contemptuous word that renders even national suicide preferable to surrender, we look, not to the weak and disarmed, but to the strong man who keeps his house, knowing those things which he has are safe...
...It is not too soon to indulge in a little mild speculation as to the impression its discussions will make upon the world at large, and to ask how far, when the last speech has been made and the last report presented, we shall be the richer for a concrete body of Catholic opinion, which has placed itself on record, not only for the preservation of such technical peace as we now somewhat insecurely enjoy, but, what is vastly more important, for the peaceful as opposed to the forceful solution in future contingencies...
...It lies, like some vivifying force, at the root of the entire Christian conception of virtue as opposed to the deadening law of necessity that has infiltrated in systems borrowed from the fatalistic Orient...
...The banner of one successful, intelligent and conscienceless force, waving in turn over swarms of human termites or over pyramids of skulls, would replace the present confusing national emblems...
...For the former, conferences and round-tables, diplomats scurrying over Europe, portfolios under their arms, a seat at the council table where the gods make good and bad weather...
...in the free choice betwixt good and evil by which man fell, but through which he can rise again...
...It persists in many manifestations which strike the hasty and shallow thinker as incongruous and insincere—in the precept of chastity laid upon a ministry which rejects the eunuch...
...Idly shall we seek to conjure away dangers now familiar and which, or so we humbly trust, worked out their own bloody cure ten years ago, if the emergence of new nations into consciousness, through a stress and turmoil that have become part of the history of the old, is seized upon to play the dismal game of exploitation and robbery over afresh, and to plant a crop of dragons' teeth of which generations to come will have the harvesting...
...Luckily, the issue is by no means so sharply defined, nor as yet at the mercy of that "lusus naturae," the coldly logical mind...
...It cannot too often be reiterated (and The Commonweal can plead that it has done its humble part in keeping the disquieting fact before the eyes of its readers and well-wishers) that the mere word "peace" is no panacea for present dangers and discontents...
...At present, there is no blinking the fact, morality in statecraft is at a low ebb...
...And is any excuse viable, any forbearance likely, for the weak nation, large or small, which refuses to recognize the law on which empires are built...
...At one extreme wing we shall always expect to find ranged those who have adopted pacifism as their creed, and who plead, with the apparent logic of all fanaticisms, for an outlawing of war and armaments together...
...War is no more the natural and inevitable release of armed strength than lechery of virility...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 22
