National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 5/A Poisoned World

A Poisoned World

By William Howard Taft, Ex-President of the United States

From a meeting of the American Red Cross War Council, Washington, D.C., May 24–25, 1917

A review of the dreadful horror of this war brings back to one the attitude of mind of many good people in the outset of the war, who wrote communications and expressed themselves orally to the effect that this had shaken their faith in the existence of a God; that it could not be that a good God would permit the horror and agony of spirit of his children such as we saw before our eyes.

The war goes on. There has, it seems to me, developed in the war some evidence of the divine plan of eliminating from the family of nations a conspiracy to put the world under the heel of a ruthless philosophy of military force to take away the liberty of mankind.

If you will study the history of Germany for the last half century, you will see that conspiracy disclosing itself more and more clearly.

The doctrine preached openly in the philosophy of that country was that there is no international morality; that there is no rule by which a nation may be governed except that of self-preservation, as it is called, which means self-exploitation over the ruins of other civilizations and other peoples and other nations.

The minds of a people poisoned

So deftly has that conspiracy been carried on that the minds of a great people—a people that have demonstrated their greatness in many fields—even in that fifty years, have been poisoned into the conviction that it is their highest duty to subordinate every consideration of humanity to the exaltation and the development of military force, so that by that, force they can take from the rest of the world what is needed to accomplish their destiny, at whatever cost of honor or principle.

I yield to no man in my admiration for most of the qualities or all of the qualities of the German people except this obsession that they have been given through the instilling of that poison in the last fifty years.

Where do you see the working out of the divine plan? That was a cancer in the world. It had grown to be so formidable that it needed a capital operation to excise it and restore the world again to the station in the development of Christian civilization which, but for that, we would not have reached.

So we have seen it in the destruction of the greatest autocracy, perhaps—at least apparently the greatest autocracy—Russia, whose alliance with the Entente Allies gave for the time the lie or apparently gave the lie to the proposal that they were fighting the cause of freedom, fighting the cause of freedom against absolutism.

That toppled over, and now we have arrayed on the one side the democracies of the world against the military autocracies on the other, and the issue has been clearly drawn so that it may be seen by the wayfaring man, though a fool.

Accompanying this devotion to military efficiency, as a God, has come that blindness which is in the end to destroy the Hohenzollern philosophy of government.

After two and a half years of struggle that has tested the endurance nearly to the breaking point of the great nations engaged, Germany, in that confidence that she has in the science of warfare, has said: “We will starve England into submission and we will end the war,” and in the accomplishment of that she forced, because she had to force, into the ranks of her enemies, at a time when this war is to be determined by money, by resources, and by men, the nation that can furnish more money, more resources, more equipment, and more men than any nation in the world!

And now, my friends, do not let us minimize the task we have before us. We Americans are a good people—we admit it; but one of our weaknesses is an assumption, justified by a good many things that have saved us from egregious mistakes in the past, that God looks after children, drunken men, and the United States!

We have got beyond that reliance—I do not know whether we have or not, but we are going to get beyond that reliance. Germany is not exhausted. She is, by reason of this system of fifty years standing, the greatest military nation that ever was organized, and she still has great fighting power; and she arrayed ourselves as her enemies because, with that devotion to system, with that failure to understand the influence of moral force in a people, she was contemptuous of what we, who had ignored military preparation, could do in this war.

She has now made an egregious error, as it is for us to show. When we went into this war there were a good many people that thought all we had to do was to draw a check or several checks for a billion dollars, and that “George” would do the fighting.

The fruit of Germany's contempt

That is not the case. One of the things which has happened ought to give us the greatest hope and satisfaction. It is largely due to the gentleman who has just addressed us, the Secretary of War, and the President of this administration.

We have begun right in the raising of an army, and that is one thing gained. We have provided for a million or perhaps a million and a half of men. That probably will not be enough.

A great deal better that we should make overpreparation in a matter in which the whole welfare of the world is engaged than that we should make underpreparation!

What has been said I only wish to repeat, and that is, while we can intellectually, perhaps, visualize the war, if we sit down to think about it, we do not in our hearts feel it yet. It is something apart from us.

I read the other day, as doubtless you read, “Mr. Britling Sees It Through,” and studied the psychological development of the coming of the war to him. That is what we have got to have.

Soon we'll realize we're at war

We shall not realize what the war is until our men, those beloved by us, have been exposed to the dreadful dangers, to the character of wounding that is so horrible under this modern system of warfare, and until we all go to the bulletins and study the names to see whether those who are near and dear to us have been taken for their country's sake.

Then the war will come in to us. Then there will be nothing but the war and everything else will be incidental; and until that psychological change has come, we shall not feel the whole measure of our duty as we must feel in order to carry this war through.

The Red Cross is the only recognized agency through which we may help to take care of the wounded of the armies and the nations that are fighting our battles.

It is an admirable arrangement that some such avenue as that should be supplied to give vent to the patriotic desire of those who cannot go to the front, to help in behalf of their country and the world. Every country has a Red Cross, and every country must have it, because no army can furnish the instrumentalities adequate to meet the proportion of wounded that this war furnishes.

Six million beds of pain

Think of it! Forty million at the colors, seven million dead, six million on beds of pain, and the whole of Europe taken up with hostilities!

You cannot exaggerate the function that our Red Cross will have to perform merely in attending to the wounded of our army and other armies in carrying on this fight. Therefore, one hundred million dollars, great as the sum seems, is inadequate; but the first hundred million dollars will be the hardest hundred million to raise!

And we must leave no doubt about it. I thank God that the organization is in such competent hands to do the great work that has to be done.

And now, my friends, the one thing for which we ought to be grateful is that in this great war, in this war in which we shall have to make sacrifices—oh, such sacrifices, so great that they wring tears from us as we think of them—we should be grateful that we have a cause worthy of all the sacrifices that we can make!

Source: William Howard Taft (May 1917), “A Poisoned World”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(5): 459–467.