Of all sneers none is so carelessly thrown as the charge of cowardice. To call a man a coward is almost to obliterate him from discussion. The man who uses the term always implies that he himself, of course, is a brave man. He acquires at once a kind of moral superiority, and puts his opponent on the defensive. Caution and reason thus become positive vices, every honest doubt is made the mark of a timid soul. Those who want twenty dreadnoughts regard as cowards those who want ten; the advocates of forty dreadnoughts look with scorn upon the advocates of twenty. Men who wish to prepare against one possible enemy are cowards in the eyes of those who wish to prepare against two possible enemies. The proposers of a much larger army are tinged with yellow in the eyes of the conscriptionists. In America we are fast getting into the frame of mind where the scale of courage is measured by what the wildest jingo proposes as the correct method of licking creation.
Since all men resent being known as cowards, the jingo has an enormous advantage in any argument. He bullies men into agreeing with him by playing on their fear of appearing to be cowardly. He hammers upon moral cowardice in order to drive people into an attitude of rhetorical bravery. It is an old, old trick, but it works. Take two elderly men both over military age. Let the rumor of war appear. The man who is ready to sacrifice other people's lives at short notice appears as the hero; the moderate person who resists the stampede and braves the denunciation for doing so, is somehow labeled coward. In the German Reichstag the men who upheld the war party could pose as the gallant pacifists; Liebknecht, who stood up unmoved against the storm, was put down a coward. But, by any just estimate, where was the courage and where the timidity? Who had that iron in his soul of which free men are made? In England there is now bitter discussion between those who want a sensible peace and those who will set no limits to their vengeance. Which position is the easy one, the soft one, the one of the molly-coddles? Which position requires courage, and which requires nothing but the willingness to drift with the current?
The courage of the battlefield and the courage of the editorial sanctum are not identical. Courage is not so simple a virtue. At a dinner table, in a drawing-room, on the stump, in the Senate, the easy attitude is to follow the loudest declamation, to go with, not against, the violence of the tribe. It involves usually no risk, and it is almost always a cheap way to approval. Yet there is no guarantee that the fiber of a people is sound because no one appears who is willing to risk the sneers of the angriest. It may be that the people who are ready to sacrifice popularity, to face ridicule, to stand out for reason and adjustment, are the people who really have the bravery that freedom requires. Not to be afraid of being called a coward has been often recognized as a high order of courage.
It would be a great gain if our military agitators would use words like coward and poltroon with more discrimination. They are not synonymous with a desire for peace, with an opposition to conscription, with a determination not to invade Mexico because some bandits have committed a crime. All men less violent than the most violent have not white hearts and yellow souls. All are not cowards who wish to weigh carefully the purpose of armaments that mean a break with the whole tradition of American life. All are not poltroons who insist upon analyzing the intention of those who wish to make us the greatest military nation on earth. All are not spineless who think that the honor of a democracy is not that of a Spanish grandee.
The cause of preparedness is not helped by floating it upon a stream of jingoism. Many of us think there are powerful reasons for re-defining American policy and preparing armaments to uphold it, but the cause is endangered and made odious by those who treat it as an issue between cowards and heroes. The military propagandists will, if they don't look out, have taken so extreme a position that the American people may regard them as a greater danger than any possible foreign enemy. They are feeding the deep and experienced suspicion of ordinary men that all armament leads to militarism, that any concession provokes the appetite of those who like the virtues of war better than the virtues of peace, who like military equipment for its own sake and propose to rule the nation in its interest.
There is in America today the beginning of that very military arrogance which we are told this war is being fought to abolish. It shows itself in contempt for all efforts toward peace, in programs of armament that are the vistas of a nightmare, in denunciation of the virtues that make a free and tolerant people, in a hatred of other points of view, in the attempt to haze and ostracize those who have different opinions, and in the assertion of a brittle, touchy impatience at the thought that anything human can be adjusted without slamming the table and rattling the windows.
The militarists are forcing the issue in such a way as to consolidate the opposition. If the American people have to choose between their virulence and the amiable intentions of the official pacifists they will follow the pacifists. They will risk the Monroe Doctrine and American prestige in the East, they will prefer the defeat of a foreign policy in some future war to any proposal to deliver the country into the hands of those who in the last months have got deeper and deeper into their own violence. The real desire of Americans is to make a civilization in America. They will prepare what is necessary to defend that; they may even be induced to take a share in the policing of the world. But they do not, want to be told that war is a gymnasium of the virtues; they know it to be the stinking thing that it is. They want no extra gold lace and no more tom-toms than are necessary. They do not wish to spend their energy in dreaming war games. If they have to fight they will do it sadly, and with as little bombast as possible. Their condemnation of Germany in this war is based on what they believe to be a dangerous military psychology in the rules of Germany, and they are shrewd enough to detect and resent that same psychology when it crops up in America.
