The Farmington times. (Farmington, St. Francois County, Mo.) 1905-1926, 1917-07-20
IN THE DAY OF ARMAGEDDoN

20 The great war has now endured for
almost three years, and yet there are
stih people who do not seem to have
discovered its meaning. These peo-
pleS consist apparently either of
+ peace-at-any+price pacifists or of
those whose range of political vision
is so limited that they are incapable
of grasping the larger meaning of
the struggle. The peace-at-any- price
| pacifist pursues an absolutely sim
Pile and easily discernible policy. He
is to be found, however, nearly al
ways in countries which have been
wont TO consider themselves without
the range of any conceivable conflict.
He is most numerous and most artic-
ulate, naturally, for this very rea-
son, in the United States. But, af-
ter this, he is to be found in England,
less in numbers, and speaking with
less assurance, for the simple reason
that, though England has stood, as
has been said, sin a great pool a
swans nest" and so largely free
from the dangers of TIE banks, still
it has been only in pool, and not like
the United States girt, practically, by
the oceans.
Once, however, the main continent
of the Old World is reached, the pac-
fist decreases in numbers, and be-
comes comparatively silent. Most
couptries in Europe had known, be-
fore the great war, in more or less
modern times, the meaning of inva-
sion, and so their people had grown
less willing to say that nothing was
worth fighting for, and to maintain
| that national subjugation meant only
! the exchange of one form of capital
( istic exploitation for another. The
Italian people did not think that,
when the Austrian officers walked
/ daily in the Piazza in Venice, nor did
the Bulgarians nor Macdeonians think
so when the soldiers of Abdul Aziz or
Abdul Hamid occupied their farms and
villages. The frogs were neither the
first nor the last of the families of
this earth to discover that there is
considerable difference in the methods
of King Log and King Stork. And
the contention that invasion and con-
quest only meant the substitution of
one master for another is a theory
which it is much easier to maintain
with an ocean between yourself and
the demonstration of the fact, than
on one side of the other of an mag
mary line, marked out by differently
painted posts. =
AS for those whose political insight
reaches no farther than thanking
themselves that they are not as other
men are, or who think that the whole
fighting world has gone crazy in the
present Walpurgis night of slaugh-
ter, or that every man or nation 60
ing out to battle does so from a pure
ly selfish or unworthy motive, it will
be necessary for them to soften their
self righteousness with little of the
milk of humility and generosity, and
to extend their historic horizon lit
tie beyond the walls of their own
houses. As in every other form of
human activity, there have been wars,
and numbers of them, fought, on both
sides, for the meanest and most sor-
did motives. But it must be remem-
bered that the mere contention that a
war has no better motive than self
ACKNOWLEDGMENT or self-enrichment ne
cessitates the corollary that one side
in the struggle may be defending it
self against this self-aggrandizement
and this self enrichment, and defend
ing itself most probably also against
superior strength, since it is certain
that those who go to war for self-ag-
grandizement and self-enrichment on
ly do so when they think they are
strong enough to win the day.
Now do the people who object to
war for any reason at all, really be-
lieve that the world would have been
richer if the culture of Greece had
been submerged, at Marathon, by the
tide of Persian conquest; that the
world would have been happier place
to live in, if the Arabian tornado had
swept away the army of Charles
Martel at Tours; that liberty of con-
science would have been safeguarded
by the triumph of the Armada over
the fleets of England in the Narrow
Seas; that social, political and reli-
gious liberty would have been en-
HANGED if the burghers of the Neither
lands had bowed before the march of
Alva's infantry; or that the great
idea of equal sister nations would
have been brought nearer by the tri-
umph of the Georgian policy in the
then British colonies in North Ameri-
ca? 1t is all very well for people, who
are enjoying, today, the golden learn
ing of Greece, which if the Persians
had triumphed would have disappear
ed probably as completely as the mas
terpieces in the library at Alexandria,
who have not had to fight to escape
the yoke of the Crescent as have the
Bulgar and the Serb in our own time,
who have had the battle of religious
liberty fought for them in the jaws of
inquisition, whose theories of civil and
municipal freedom were maintained
when the liberating waters of the
North Sea flooded the tulip gardens
of Holland, and whose ideals of mod
erns democracy were inscribed in the
Declaration of Independence, to de-
clare that war is vile thing, and that
nations which go to war are only hap
lpy in the cockpit. OF course war is
vile thing, but there are viler
things than war.
These people forget that the pas