The Tocsin for Peace
RATHER more than a month ago, in welcoming the news that a Catholic Conference on International Relations would shortly meet at the national capital, and while still uninformed as to the...
...But there is nothing ludicrous in the ideal they upheld before the modern Attila smeared them from the map with his big battalions and gun-parks...
...It is audible in every country today where wealth, power and ambition make a threat to impose the groupwill upon weaker and less cohesive groups, not only possible as a last resort, but extremely effective as a first...
...One of them, it freely admitted, is a clear and ringing "adsumus" whenever an appeal, no matter whence heard, makes human need and human suffering audible...
...How has this double standard, which practically leaves the existence of smaller countries one of sufferance and dependance, arisen in our world...
...A single battleship today could cover the actual territory of the venerable Venetian republic with its batteries...
...While awaiting the publication of an official report, which must necessarily be an affair of time, it will not be amiss, in the space that editorial comment permits, to glance at one or two of the suggestions that were opened up as general discussion following the reading of each paper...
...What The Commonweal permitted itself, in a recent editorial, to term "an extensive territory of persuadable thought" lies outside and beyond them...
...The enthusiast brings his indignations and disappointments...
...the optimist his rosy visions of a universal brotherhood to be attained by a process that often, when analyzed, is indistinguishable from simple wishing...
...Now, neither the air of making a startling and disconcerting discovery which the English journal affects, nor the surprise with which the charge is received in this country, is altogether justified by facts...
...A clear enunciation of principle is the cutting edge of any movement dedicated to effect change by clearing away misconceptions that have created an intolerable situation...
...By devoting its preliminary sessions largely to an examination of this elementary right, by inquiring why an axiom held valid for individuals is questioned for bodies of individuals that call themselves nations, by suggesting means through which it may be restored as the abiding dogma in diplomacy, the Catholic committee at Washington, or so it seems to us, has not only covered the ground in two days upon which the fight for peace will have to be waged, but bases its argument solidly upon a conviction that has become part and parcel of the American theory of life...
...A tendency is very evident to use the revelation of what modern war has become as an instrument of pressure, not upon the strong brother who has just tested its ineffectiveness, but upon the weaker brother who cannot hope to wage it with even the most distant prospect of a successful outcome...
...To them the real atavists are, not themselves, but those whose immoderate nationalism (that latest of the heresies, for which more than one thinker sees a condemnation looming that will impress the imagination of the world) has restored something of its old tribal fearfulness to war, carved new frontiers through sentient communities, and completed, in the cause of secret diplomacy, the severance between the part of the nation that feels and the smaller part that schemes and plans...
...To keep the balance, to impose upon this mass of good will, inevitably conditioned by the spiritual temper of those who contribute it, a direction that will result in practical measures toward peace, is a hard, and often an ungrateful task...
...Any return to this system of large and small nations—" powers" in something more than the raw suggestion of force, with a seat at the council board and a voice that the rivet-hammer in shipyards and the tramp of training levies is not needed to amplify, may well seem, to the positive and pragmatic mind of today, nothing better than a mediaeval dream, an attempt to mount the time machine and set the gear in reverse...
...Those who affect to see no change at all in international relations, but at most a cruder assertion of tyrannical fact, cannot look to history for support...
...The double voice (it will save recrimination to admit it at once) is a property common to old world and new...
...For it must never be forgotten that all such conferences as that recently held at Washington, are come-togethers of men already persuaded, in theory at least, of the justice and benefit to the world of the cause they advocate...
...Largely, as more than one speaker at Washington noted, from the material standard which weighs nations as it weighs men, in a balance where size and wealth, rather than intrinsic worth, depress the scale...
...Catholics, to whom mediaevalism carries something more than a connotation of barbarism and futility, will be less sure...
...In any open debate upon international relations, certain varying points of view are sure to be manifest —were it not so, discussion would be sterile indeed...
...the student his knowledge of international relations in the past...
...Each speaker contributes that which he has...
...RATHER more than a month ago, in welcoming the news that a Catholic Conference on International Relations would shortly meet at the national capital, and while still uninformed as to the schedule of its deliberations, The Commonweal ventured to express a hope that, out of the meeting, some concrete expression of Catholic opinion would issue on a subject that is searching men's consciences, none the less significant because circumstances rendered it extremely unlikely that any imprimatur of Catholic authority would be attached to it...
...The little principalities of the German Reich, each with its petty reigning prince, its minuscule court and army smaller in number than the police force of many a modern metropolis, are rare figures of fun to the contemporary mind...
...Going a little further back, commercial leagues such as the Hansa Towns, with no territorial ambitions at all, are discovered, enjoying extraterritorial rights such as no nation today would dream of demanding, save as the aftermath of a war of open conquest...
...The very preamble of our own Declaration is a simple reassertion of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enjoyed by all men without distinction of race or creed...
...But happily for humanity, it also comprises a large body of men and women whose hearts are wrung by what is past and uneasy over what looks likely to come...
...Their place in the hegemony of nations was independent of the number of bayonets they could put in the field, or the number of armed keels they could set afloat on the ocean...
...One of the most deplorable developments of the great war has been a descent in the tenor of the language held by major to minor nations...
...They think they know by what roads the world arrived at Armageddon, and through what diversity of moral teaching the respect for natural law that might have saved it perished from men's minds...
...It numbers among its ranks the careless and unaroused, it includes an entire category often to be found in very high places, of what might be called the "hard-minded"—men, that is, to whose consciences ethical principles that are never questioned in private life, make no appeal at all in public affairs, and whose minds, often without a consciousness that justice is departed from, have become indurated by the conception of an a-moral and irresponsible state, propagated, with what monstrous results the world is witness, by Machiavelli and Hobbes...
...Up to the Napoleonic era, at least, a host of small peoples managed to live side by side with great ones in peace and dignity...
...They will not feel that it is routed back to safety and away from steeper abysses until to the Christian doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God is added its only honest corollary—that all nations are equal in the sight of the law...
...The other, or so it is claimed, is a dubious, even a "muffled" voice, when the question is one of the rights of the smaller nations that lie within our orbit of influence...
...A recent article in the London Times, widely commented upon in our secular press, referred to "two voices" audible in present-day America...
...They certainly will not cease their effort to make something infused with its spirit the resurgent force of a world weary of competition and hate, because such effort has necessarily to proceed with different instruments and against obstacles that have grown with time...
...In another section of our present issue, an article written by Mr...
...It is not necessary (nor likely) that this principle be new...
...William Franklin Sands gives a brief summary of the progress registered during the two days that the provisional committee sat in practically continuous session...
...the sceptic his doubts...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 1
