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Not only there is not now, but there never has been, any other nation in the world so wholly free from the evils of militarism as is ours. There never has been any other large nation, not even China, which for so long a period has had relatively to its numbers so small a regular army as has ours.
But they do express, it may be vaguely, but yet sufficiently, the sense of the people at large. Now, notwithstanding all that had been done to educate them up to it, I do not think that the people at large in Germany had ever endorsed the implications of the policy of German militarism. The Social Democrats certainly had not.
We are to regard any disproportion in the number of the sexes as inimical to monogamy. We know that in the past, when there has been a great excess of women, as owing to chronic militarism, polygamy has been the natural consequence; and we must recognize that such an excess of women at the present day is a predisposing cause, if not of polygamy, of something immeasurably worse.
Before their eyes, with every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour.
Our own objectives are clear; the objective of smashing the militarism imposed by war lords upon their enslaved peoples the objective of liberating the subjugated Nations the objective of establishing and securing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear everywhere in the world.
By May 1st, 1917, the situation so changed in Europe that it was apparent to observers that only by the most stupendous efforts of all the Allies could the German Government be defeated. At the very beginning of the war, when Teutonic militarism spread over Europe, it was like a forest fire.
To “crush Prussian militarism” means to do away with a sinister political system. It means exorcising an evil spirit. And we must clearly understand that, in order to exorcise that evil spirit, we must have the co-operation of the German people themselves. We must help them to achieve their own salvation.
And so, even though we have had ocular demonstration of the appalling ruin which militarism can produce, we may yet, if we are not careful, forget all our experience and drift back into notions which are not really separable from precisely those ideas which we are at present reprobating in the German nation. The real test is this: Is, or is not, war a supreme evil?
If Castle government is wrong in Dublin it is wrong elsewhere; if militarism was wrong and foolish and futile in Cromwell's day, it is wrong to-day, to-morrow, and for all time; if England really intends at the great Peace Congress to come forward as the champion of small nations, she must be able to show an Ireland prosperous, contented, and freely allied to her without the aid of a single soldier or a single threat.
In that way, they attach lies to truth, and prevent us from seeing that militarism is in reality everywhere, more or less hypocritical and unconscious, but ready to seize everything if it can. They force opinion to add, "It is a crime to think of anything but beating the German enemy."
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