Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/81

Rh pean republics, regardless of race. I need not go into the history of the republics of antiquity, modern instances being sufficiently instructive.

As I remarked, militarism on a great scale began in Europe with the French Revolution and attained a high degree of development under the first Napoleon. It declined somewhat under the influence of the reaction which was caused by the general state of exhaustion after the Napoleonic wars. It revived again after the revolutionary movements of 1848 when the new French Emperor sought to fortify his throne by warlike prestige, when Italy and Germany moved for the accomplishment and maintenance of national unity, when continental Powers, following the example of England, became ambitious of colonial expansion and when new inventions in the appliances of warfare stimulated the Powers in a course of nervous rivalry. It is thus that the deplorable conditions came about which are so pointedly set forth in the peace manifesto of the Russian Czar; that millions of young men at the period of their greatest vigor are withdrawn from productive pursuits; that “the intellectual and physical strength of the nations, labor and capital, are largely diverted from their natural application and unproductively employed” in gigantic preparations for possible conflicts of arms, and that the nations are burdened with very onerous taxes for the purpose of providing engines of destruction.

For the burdens European nations are thus bearing, the advocates or apologists of the system have a ready plea of justification. It is that the nation refusing to bear those burdens would soon be at the mercy of its ambitious and possibly hostile rivals. The Frenchman tells us that, aside from his desire to take revenge for the defeats suffered in the German war, France must strain every nerve in preparation for a possible conflict,