Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Polk County observer. (Monmouth, Polk County, Or.) 1888-1927 | View Entire Issue (July 21, 1914)
THE FOLK COUNTY OBSERVER, TUESDAY, JULY 21, 1914. "THE BURDEN OF THE NATIONS 99 (Continued from Friday.) RussiaI don't think I ever visited a country in ail my travel up and down the length and breadth of the world with so much anticipation as I went to Russia. I never came away from any place in this world with so sad a heart. Russia is a wonderfully beautiful country, attractive in its physical endowment. I think St. Pet ersburg and Moscow are two of the most beautiful cities I ever saw. No where have 1 seen such evidence of lavish bestowals of wealth upon cer tain things. I never have stepped in side the arched doorways ot such churches altars gleaming with gold, the holy icons framed in blazing dia monds and precious stones, they are paved with marble, wainscoted with malachite, panelled with lapis lazuli; and yet, step out of that environment of magnificence, and on the porches and on the steps of this majestic church youi look upon the most awful squalor and pitiful poverty you ever saw. Old men and women lying tliere literally rotting, mumbling through toothless gums a prayer for a few pennies to keep .them from starvation. I never saw such drunkenness. The government makes and sells the whis key, vodka, and the more vodka the peasants drink, the more profit in the pocket of the government. And what does the government care for the few thousand of these mujiks? Russia covers one-seventh of the land surface of the globe. Out of her stupendous population of millions seventy-two per cent can neither read nor write, and in the sense that we know it, there is not a public school in the whole empire. Russia carries a crushing debt of four and three- quarter billion dollars. She borrows money every spring to pay the $2,000, 000 interest on it; and yet she has provided this vear four hundred and ninety-seven million dollars as a mili tary budget, and at the knout's end she is taking by increased taxation from her peasants and poor the money with which to build and equip a navy to replnce the one that Togo sent to the bottom of the Sea of japan. Well, there is Japan! Poor little bankrupt Japan! The logical end of the whole grotesque delusion! Fifty millions of industrous, economical, pa triotic people wresting a living from a soil impoverished by centuries, with out national resource, figuring income and expense to the last penny, halv ing each pitiful coin in willingly borne taxation eighty-five per cent of Ja pan's income is derived from taxa tion she has nothing else. It means that her people must give each year an average of twenty-five per cent of nil they have and earn to pay Japan's penalty for following her "Great Al ly" in the race of mad militarism. Only fifteen per cent of the land of Japan is arable, and that only under forced intensive tanning; all the rest of it is waste sand, rock, and lava, which would not grow even a blade of grass, and even the fifteen per cent of arable soil must be artificially fer tilized before it will bring forth any thing at all. Japan has a national debt of $1, 378,000,000, an average of $21.75 for every man, woman and child in the whole empire. If you put Japan upon the auction-block tomorrow and sell her before the nations of the world, everything, from one end of the em pire to the other jewels of the em peror 8 crown, her manufactories, railroads, tea fields, everything I question whether at public sale the whole empire would bring enough to discharge the stupendous crushing debt that she has laid upon her shoulders in an endeavor to keep up with her great "Ally of the West." I have been in Japan a great deal for the last ten years. Some of my best, warmest, and most trusted friends are men who stand high in the councils of the empire and who nie striving with all the intensity of their intense natures to solve their prob lems. I spent a very pleasant day not long ago with Count Okuma, one of the few remaining old men of the ancient regime. For from being the fire-breathing, sanguinary monster that a great deal of our sensationol description pictures as describing the leading men of Japan, be is a delight ful old man, spending the twilight of his lite in good deeds, lie has en dowed a magnificent university, where some three thousand young men and women are engaged in the laudable pursuit of getting an education. He has one of the most magnificent col lections of orchids in the world. He specializes in beautiful first editions and rare Confucian classics, lie is philosopher and a sage an ideal old man. lie said to me, as we were talking about these things: "The impression has gone out through the world that the Japanese are a san guinary nation that we are blood thirsty and quarrelsome, and that we delight in warfare. Have you ever stopped to think that Japan has fought just two wars in all ber his tory, and that both those war were in defense of what she considered as yon in America bare considered when you fought her sacred rights and her national honor. What Ja pan needs, and must have, ia Dot war. She has had enough of that, bearen knows. She need fifty yean of quiet, constructive peace to win back the comfortable prosperity to which men may look as an ideal of national existence." - I am sure that Count Okuma sim ply voiced the sentiment of multi tudes of men whose names I might call, and with whom I have talked in his expression of hearty gratitude to the United States. He said : ' ' You opened the door for us by which we came out into the sisterhood of civil ized nations. It was you- who led the way. Shall a child make war upon its revered mother ?" And that is the sentiment you will find in Japan. Don't believe, my friends, the things that come filtering through the yellow dispatches from Tokio, designed mere ly, to make reading matter tor sensa tional scare lines. Yellow journalism depends upon springing sensations, oven at the expense of kindling be tween nations the awtul catastrophe of war. Japan is not going to fight you, not because she has only nine teen battleships where you have thirty-eight. Japan is not going to fight you, because she does not want to fight anybody. She wants to be let alone. She wants peace constructive peace. She is not going to fight any one, because she can't. She went back irom rortsmoutn de feated in her demand for indemnity not by the diplomacy and the strat egy of Witte, but defeated by her own empty-handed poverty, for she knew, the Russians knew, that japan could not have delivered another bat tle to save ber souJ. Tliere is only one way Japan could fight you, and that is that some European nation. intent upon her suicide, should under write the method of her self-murder, or that the Hebrew bankers of Europe should take a mortgage on her tea fields and lacquer factories, feeling certain of its enforcement. Japan is not going to fight you as long as you and I ace true to the principles upon which America stands. Japan will look to you as her inspira tion and her friend. But there is not a nation of the world, from the least to the greatest, but has a hundred causes of para mount importance to the future of her people why these wasted millions might be well devoted to some other service. No matter what is left un done, the military mania is ever cry ing with feverish greed for more. Side by side with neglect of na tional duty and the squandering of national resources, militarism is breed ing internal dangers. The civilized world is seething with discontent. Everywhere the mass of the people are developing a resentful opposition to the existing order of things, and by far the greater part of it comes from the crushing and constantly in creasing demand for larger sums to devote to national defense, lo the masses of men taxation is only justi fiable when its results are manifested in the general good. It is hard to convince men of the necessity, in times of peace, of vast creations of arma ment, when, in order to pay for it, there must result ruinous taxes, lonj hours, short wages, high prices. The burden eventually becomes too heavy to be borne, and then comes chaos, In England today, with an annual income of one billion dollars, eighty- six per cent come from almost ruin ous taxation. In Germany, in addi tion to the government ownership, the taxation burdens all classes of iho, people and Germany has just asSesJsBtl" a special Income Tax of 8 per cent for military purposes. In France, the in terest on the national debt alone is five dollars a head for every living soul in the Republic, and the war bud get takes $7.20 more per capita. In Italy, taxes range from twelve per cfc-nt on houses to twenty per cent on income. In Japan, ninet per cent of the income is from, taxation and Japanese patriotism rises, to a willing rate of thirty-five per cent but lie pays it with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, and Banzai for the glory of Japan. Far beyond the decadent effect ot actual war is the immoral effect of vast bodies of segregated men. Mur der, cruelty, rapine, and loot always follow in the trail of battle, but they come quickly and they pass quickly; but far more lasting and degrading are the vices that bang about the idle thousands of armed peace. In Germany today titty-seven per cent of the men are unmarried. Tliere are three reasons for that peculiar condition of things: The hist is that the average population is 310 to the square mile. It takes "Jbrave man. conscious of his power of parenthood, to complacently look into the face of the possibility of increasing that per cent of population, then every man in Germany under the ajre of forty can be called on a few days ' notice to the colors. And when he is called he must go. He may dislike the order of things, he may dislikeithe War Lord, but when he is called he must go. put on his unfiorm. and stand up and make a target of himself to be shot at, whether hewill-r,not; and no man wants a wife, with a cottage and a little brood of children, with a contingency like J&t before bim. Then a great many of 'the men in Ger many do not need to be married. Let me tell you just one single fact a little bit of bar sinister, not worse in Germany, I take it, than in sny oth er eon n try, but I Happen to -Jisve the statistic for this last year ten per cent of all the children bora in Ger many were fatherless, so far as recog nized wedlock was concerned. Tliere were born (n Germany 172,814 ille gitimate chifdren the very large ma pority, said'the census report, in the neighborhood of cities housing large garrisons of troops. A friend of , mine, who is a major surgeon in the English army, walked with me through a great military hos pital, There were twelve hundred men from garrisons scattered all over Great Britain. My friend told me that out of, the standing army of To- htrt i nn ,,n " 1 - .j,uuu jut?u uver iuu,uuu weic uu,c lessly, haplessly, incurably invalided as the result of vices that hang around snm of tile soldier. , In the United States army a't least 1,200 meii more than an entire war- footing regiment are constantly un der medidnl treatment for venereal disease. 'These results of vice over balance all other causes of disability. Typhoid,, malaria, smallpox, all these are negligible beside the black plague. In 1902,, out of every 1,000 men 102 were diseased. In 1912, with all re cent discoveries as to prevention and cure, there were 11,211 cases of ven ereal disease, as against 3,737 of nil others. , That is. the army. In the navy the rate is lfiO. Surgeon-Gen end Rixey, in his 1909 report, said "This class (venereal) of disease ren ders entirely ineffective for over month .three battleships, with a com piemen! of 1,000 officers and men for each. And yet what can you ex pect? ' Don't you see that if you teach a man that one commandment is wrong, you can't for the life of you defend the other nine? Don't you see that if it is right to commit murder, you have no logic by which you can teach him that it is wrong to commit adul tery? Don't you see that the whole moral fabric stands or falls by the same' logic? The underlying genius of warfare is strategy, and in the conception of strategy the end always justifies the means. Deceit, fraud, untruthfulness, spite, betrayal these are the methods of military statesmanship. Embody thein in modern civilization, and you have found war s philosophy. Aside from Japan, an anomaly among the sister nations, the greatest powers ot the world are all the repre sentative embodiment of Christian civ ilization. Cut out all reference to the spiritual side of religion, all reference tosalvation, or heaven, or hell, or im mnrfnlity; make Christianity merely tli'e dynamic of a desirable type of civilization, u educe the much disput ed question of foreign missions to a rot-re desire to carry culture about the world. What sort of a front does the Christian civilization of the world pre s?nt as it prays its prayers and sings its psalms under the shadow ot naked steel, while the "perishing heathen" laugh in ill-concealed contempt and h'v, "Look how these Christians love!" , I think the saddest thing I saw in "my whole journey around the world was a cartoon in a Mohammedan pa per published in Cairo. I happened to be in that part of the world when Italy declared war against Turkey to take Iropoli. The most inexcusable act that has happened in modern civil ization was the declaration, of war against Turkey for a little strip of and land in Iripnli. Italy had no reason to fight, unless it was that she said: "We have a big army. We have trained them to kill. , Unless we give them something to kill, they might get to killing each other or us. We have got to have something to keep our battleships from rust ing away at the docks. All the na tions have taken a bit of Africa. England took a grab, France took a piece, Germany reached over and took a little; if we are going to train in big company we must have a piece of Africa. ".-So Italy declared war. I happened to be in Italy, when the legions marched away from their homes in Florence, in Rome, in Naples. These regiments of boys came down the steets and took ship? . that took them to Africa; they knew not what for; they cared less. I never saw a particle of enthusiasm in those regi ments. They looked to me very much like our regiments of national guards boys mostly; broad shoulders, brown cheeks, healthy looking; no 'bands playing; the merchants did not leave their stores; the populace did. not gather in cheering crowds. I saw no enthusiasm of any kind. They took ship and went to fight for a piece of Iripoli. , A few weeks after that I was in Cairo. A battle had been fought I saw a cartoon I shall never forget. The Moslem artist had drawn a re markable picture. It was the desert of Tripoli, in the immediate, fore ground a single towering palm tree. Under it an old man was standing an old desert sheik, his tattered bur noos scarcely reaching to his poor ankles, his green turban on his head, and the wind blowing his gray locks about bis face. Beside him was a lit tle weazened old woman, crouching at bis side, as be flung around ber a protecting arm. Just over her ws s younger woman with a babe suckling at her naked breast, another little child pulling ber skirts. All of them seemed to be shrinking from some ap proaching terror. Away yonder on the line of the horizon "some one had firtd a shell that had described its fiery arch in the sky. It had sud denly burst above them, where it look ed, like some great meteor falling from the sky, and underneath it the Mohammedan cartoonist had., written, ''Is this, then, perhaps, the Star of Bethlehem?" Oh, the awful cynicism of it, when we remember that the nation that fired the shot that killed helpless old women and drabbled little children in their own blood was the nation in whose capital sits the head of the greatest religious organization in the world, "The Vicegerent of God, tfl rule in His name." How can Christ ianity but stand abashed in the pres ence of this militarism that gives the lie to its Pnnee of Peace? So civilization today faces its most tremendous problem. Morals, educa tion, progress, and religion are bound up in one. Militarism squanders re sources, increases taxation, raises the cost of living, breeds rebellion and anarchy, lowers moral ideals, spreads leprous vice, makes of religion a thing of grotesque hypocrisy, paralyzes mis sions, throttles the , world. Reason cries "Halt!". But fear has reas on chained. Not a. nation of them all but would stop today if it could; but self-preservaticfn .is the first law of life. In the aggregation of ancient states heredity is stronger than sa gacity. The world is tricked by a delusion. Armed peace is not peace, but po tential, menacing war. There is only one way to insure peace, and that is to abandon the possibility of war. The world wants peace. It wants a constructive age that will prove the ideals of humanity and make our dreams come true. Who will lead the way? It will require courage and self-sacrifice far beyond the heroism of battle. Who is to lead the way? America can do it. Is she brave enough ? Can she do it still? Has she gone too far, or can she still be what our fathers dreamed when they planted - that Hag, a new constellation in .the; firmament of the earth ? We have made some sad mis takes. The contagion, with its glam our and its barbaric fascination, has touched our sober judgment. We who are supreme in our self-sufficiency who for a century laughed at the follies of the Old World" madness- have allowed ourselves a venture in the domain of Bedlam. Providence flung us for a moment into the fore front of the world,- and instead of remembering that'-Ve stood for a new age and a new pbilosophy we dressed ourselves in the 'uniform of modern savagery and began' to ape the insani ty of the older world, v We are not oy instinct -a military nation. It does not set. well With the genius of the Republic. It does not attract our men. ' Our young men are men of vision, of accomplishment ; men of peaceful "''conditions. They dream dreams. There is nothing attractive to the young men of America in be ing shut, up in dusty barracks, and burning up in practice marches. If they must march, they want to march for something and to some place. Our old men are not taken with the pos turing of pomposity and the glare and glamonrs of European militarism. Our American women don t go down into the dark valley and the shadow of death to' breed boys to be made targets"for bullets unless there is something behind the bullets that is worth sacrifice. What we have done, we have done well. Let us con gratulate ourselves on that. With our tremendous resources, what we have made is the best that an be made. At Spithead, at the King's Corona tion, peace advocate as I am, I hugged myself when I looked upon the lordly Delaware, supremest ot tbem all, and proof to the world of what money and Yankee genius can do when it sets out to do it. But we don 't want Delawares; we don't want standing armies and big navies. We have no hereditary enemies. We have no old feuds' to fight over. Our militarism is artificial,- but- its tremendous cost is proof of how easily we might come to the brink of ruin. We have only succeeded in col lecting an army of 81,785 men and a navv of 47.500 less than lSO.OOU men in all even after offering chromos of their enlistment. We have a population of 100,000.000 on a self-sufficient area of 3,571,223 square miles. What a wonderful thing it is to stand across the seas and look at America! You think about America sometimes, but did you ever look at it at the angle of five thousand miles and see what it looks like? Did you know that you can take England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Ger many, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy. Austria, Greece, Turkey that is, all of Ecu-ope except Russia? Now take a map of the United States; cut off New England and straighten the east ern line; split the map down the summit of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. You have a square republic now, bounded on the north by Canada and the Great Lakes, on the east by the Hudson River and the.' Atlantic, south by Mexico and the Gulf, 'west by the Rocky Mountains. Now, between the Hudson River and the Rockies between Albany, N. Y., and Denver, Colorado yen can take all Europe except Russia, and lay it down once, twice and a half a time two and a halt-times -two and a half times and still have one-sixth of our territory left to make a frame to go around the marvelous picture and hang it oh the Pole Star for all the world to view in wonder and amaze. Here are 1,800,000 square miles of arable soil, capable of supporting, not our present 100,000,000, but capable of supporting a thousand million pop ulation belter than any equal area on the face of the earth. " We have a national debt of a round billiondollars every penny of it war debt, too. During the past thirty years our' population has increasd eighty-five per cent, our wealth one hundred and eighty-five per cent, and our expnditurcs four hundred per cent. For the - ten years before the Spanish war we, appropriated yearly $24,000,000 for Oii-rrmy and $27,000,- UOO lor our navy, since the Spanish war each year $83,000,000 at least has gone to the yar Department, an average ol $108,Q0p,000 to the navy. In the ten years we have spent $1,- 975,000,000, enough to have paid the entire national debt and have built three Panama Canals. During 1912 our entire income was $702,000,000. Of this we expended $054,000,000, and of that expenditure $444,000,000 went to the War, Navy, and Pension departments. Seventy- two per cent, that is, of the entire income for war, past,; present, and to come, and twenty-eight tier cent, or what was left, for all that' a great nation should do deserts to be irri gated, swamps to be drained, rivers to be deepened, harbors to be dredged, forests, to be guarded, roads to be built, tuberculosis to' be fought, can cer to be investigated, ten million ne groes to be cared for all,, all the mighty problems of a free Republic to be met, and we kept twenty-eight per cent ot our income and gave the rest to a cheap imitation of European insanity. The whole public school system of America cost in 1912 the sum of $426, 250,434, and we lavished $444,000,000 on our pet delusion. A single bat tleship costs at least $15,000,000; its upkeep at least $750,000 per year. We have grown, alas ! so accustomed to battleships and their cost that the enormous magnitude fails to impress us as it should. The cost of one battleship would fur nish a faculty of twenty-five profes sors to fifty colleges for five years. It would furnish the entire public-school system to ten cities of 50,000 inhabi tants for ten years. It would give a complete college or technical educa tion to 20,000 young men. It would build modern sanitary tenements, whose small rental would keep them in lasting repair and condition, cap able of housing 300,000 souls in com- tort and satety. It would build and endow fifteen manual training schools and enable them to send out each year ten thousand boys and young men fit to earn not a mere competence, but an-adequate living. Instead of cost ing three-quarters of a million dollars to keep it in repair, and in ten years at most going to the scrap-heap of uselessness, that one battleship would eliminate ignorance and ;crime and pave the way to usefulness and suc cess for thousands of men for gener ations to corne. And We are urged to perpetuate . this monumental extrav agance-yearly not by building one ship alone, but two or three, and even four so wild jjas become the mania of the 'extreme advocates of militar ism. " We have fifty two fourtceri-inch guns in our navy, each throwing a 1,400-pound shell, firing three shells a minute. There monsters of destruc tion carl reach a target fourteen miles away. e have thirty-six thirteen- lnch cannon all but as powerful. These guns cost $75,000 apiece. Ev ery time a gun is fired it burns $1,000 to. ashes, and all this while people starve in our slums, children die like flies for lack of pure milk, and half famished girls sell their virtue for the price of life. And we pay $75,- 000 for one gun! Why, my God! a nation that .will do a thing like that deserves the doom that fell on Babylon and that swept Rome from the hills she thought were eternal. And all this without an enemy in the world without a single power to challenge us to combat. Let America stop. We have noth ing to. lose. We have an imperishable immortality to gam. More, we can teach obr own people a higher, loftier purpose of .life than the sordid greed fox territory, and nower that dominates the policy of the world. We' can pour out our millions for the people's good. We can fight poverty and want. We can campaign against vice and unrighteousness. We can make our armies conquering battalions who shall bear the triumphant banners of accomplishment. We can bridge our rivers, scale our mountains, make ample our harbors, bring the crystal magic of our streams, beneath whose touch our arid deserts shall bud and blossom into gardens of beauty and fertility. We can harness our water falls until the whir of masterful ma chinery shall make a symphony keyed to the music of peace. . Never came an army borne from a hard-fought campaign erpwned with such glory as belonged to the mud daubed, water-stained : regiment of our national guard who for a few months ago fought the floods and gave battle to the swoolen'jivers.. Their hands were blistered from the shovel handles and their shoulders were ach ing from the burden of bags of sand ; but they left behind them,- not hos pitals stinking of putrid blood or sod den fields laid out in - windrows of mangled, ghastly dead. They left be hind them mothers clasping to thank ful hearts the children rescued from the torrent, and bappy towns,- rejoic ing even in the face of grim destruc tion, over the valor of the nation's men who had fought for a nation's weal. -! a . We have -nothing to lose save the sorry, sordid, boast of.,, cruelty;; and power. We can gain. the realization of a true democracy a-nation-bitrting tor the Common Good. ; ,' , .' Let America stop ! Let America stand before the na tions clad in simple honesty, pan oplied in elemental justice. Let her appeal to the common conscience of the world. Let her say to the war mad, demented powers of Europe: , "There is a way out, and we will lead. We will help you police the sea; we will give our quota to a con stabulary of peace; but we are through. No great standing army, no mprfi leviathan battleships. We trust td' what we (boast of ias .the highest attainment of; 'the" -age -the inmate justice of civilized , humanity. ' ?f " ' "Touch us ifyott dare Violate at yoursperil the sacred cgis with which we panoply the world's peace! "We shall have our problems, but for !their solution you will go with us to The Hague; you will stand be side'! us at the bar of international arbitration, plead your cause with all the eloquence you can command. Then we1 will nlead ours. Then the Court shall - decide. But when the verdict is given you will abide by the decision of that court, or we shall hold you up to the scorn and contempt of the en lightened conscience of the world." Within thirty days of such a pro nouncement the nations of the earth will stand behind America, thanking God for the moral courage of a peo ple who had dared not to fight for peace, but to live to make peace. It is America's supreme opportuni ty. It will demand of us clean hands and a pure heart. They must be with out reproach who bear the banner of righteousness. Heaven grant us the courage to be what our fathers dreamed. And so when the day shall come, as it must come, when in company with earth's mighty past this great Republic shall lie down at last, . its duty done, its responsibility ended, 'may they write above her resting-place, not "This was the richest nation in the world," not "This was the greatest nation in the world ' '-"-but above her may they write in letters of light, that all the ages to come tnay read and glorify, the proudest epitaph a nation may win, "Thi This - was America, the Peacemaker of the World. ' ' THE CLASSIFIED "AD." In learning t.o , utilize Classified-' A4wrti8in'g,J you ; take' a "sifrleague" .''stride ? toward success! -There, are still'some people living .in Dallas and Polk county, who - have, not) learned to use The Observer's classified advertising columns. They know'tnat there are j.'such things aajjjwant ads," ana proDaniy assume mat some people must find them useful. . But, for some reason or other, they have not put these "ads" to the test of usefulness to themselves. These same people have "caught up" with events in many other directions. They utilize the telephone, the tele graph, gas, electric light, the street cars. They adopt mod ern convenience for house keeping. They utilize time and labor-saving appliances in business. But, having a task for a classified advertisement to do, they try to find some other way to accomplish it.- If it is a renting task,tbey depend upon a placard. "-If ' it is a property selling task they put up a "For Salefjigu."J If it is a position-finding task, they rely upon pergonal friends to help them. If they have furnished rooms to rent, they place an advertisement in the window or over the door bell. When these people make their first successful use of want advertising, they acquire a new optimism. Irksome tasks become mere business matters. New possibilities without number open to tbem. They learn to utilize the "Six-'-League Boots" of publicity when occasion requires and every little daily . problem be come manageable. The Ob server is 'published Tuesdays and Fridays, and give re sult. It hfc bean proven. Seal-Weekly Observer 11.60 a year.