Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/174

 demanded a new conception of national rights and methods.

Back from the war came the plain men of the democracies old and new—thirty or forty millions of them. The greater part of them, and especially the thinking part, had been quarreling in their thoughts with the institution of war. If our returned soldiers felt this less than their European comrades, it was because they had borne a shorter strain and had needed less of the propaganda of peace through war to keep up their morale. The Société des Anciens Combatants in France corresponds to our American Legion. Lodge after lodge of that society in 1919 passed a resolution saying that their real object now is “la guerre à la guerre” (war against war). The rumor, spread by governments as a feeler, that the British and French armies were going to Russia to fight the Bolsheviki produced instant riots and mutinies. I witnessed the Ruhr Rebellion of April, 1920, in Germany. Now while this revolt was stirred up by the Communists, the average Ruhr insurgent, I found, was out primarily to end militarism. “If those soldiers have their own way,” said the men of the Ruhr, “we’ll be fighting the French again in two years. We don’t want any more wars.”

Yet so strange are these times that governments, supposed to be the expression of peoples, emerged from the Peace of Versailles more nationalistic, perhaps more belligerent, than ever before.