Why Defend the Nation?/National Defense—Its Need

by Frank David Ely

CHAPTER II.

National Defense—Its Need

WE ARE a heterogeneous people of widely differing ancestral traditions, past environment, and future hopes and ambitions, but with ample justification for belief in all. As citizens of a common country in which we live and have our being it becomes our duty, in all wisdom, to now and again pause, take stock of the times, reckon on the trend of events, and to seriously ask ourselves and our neighbors whether this or that course now being run is wise or right; just as the mariner who, his transit on the sun at its zenith by day and on the stars at night, checks and verifies his position on the chart that he may know to a certainty that his vessel will avoid the rocks and shoals and make safe harbor. And so if we would run true as a nation we who are responsible must first know the course, and then by checks and balances constantly prove that those whom we have placed in charge are holding to that course.

Those who go down to the sea in ships have great concern that the captain and mates should be competent navigators; and so with the Ship of State, we, as fellow owners and travelers therein on the common journey of life, must feel interest in the skill and wisdom of those we charge with the care and guidance of the affairs of the Nation.

Insurance of life and property is a national trait—an American custom and habit of highest business sagacity; yet no insurance compares in value with insurance of the Republic; for with that lost, all is lost.

There is, there always has been, and there doubtless always will be, much misunderstanding among the people over that part of their own affairs which pertains to government. Life offers much to interest and divert; time is fleeting, the human mind is limited, and the demands of those dependent upon us are perhaps so insistent that we know not how to pause in our daily work. But as we love those near and dear to us, and as we see, day after day, our country affording homes of peace and joy and plenty and gladness to over a hundred millions of our countrymen, while just across the sea destitution and suffering prevail in many lands—lands where new and strange ideas of government have gained alarming credence among despairing peoples filled only with a natural desire to ease their sufferings and improve their position, but whose efforts have resulted in their more complete undoing—it behooves us the more to look to our own safety and to the safety and prosperity of those we shall leave behind us here, and to know just where our course leads.

Ours is a country of the people and for the people, where the people rule through direct representation. From its very origin it has been a land of the free and a home for the oppressed of other and less happy lands. What it has been it must always be, and this is best assured by holding fast to those principles, ideals, and traditions that are purely American and adherence to which has brought wealth, gladness, prosperity and peace to the land. Liberty and freedom, truth and justice have been our watchwords. Respect for the will of the majority and for the rights of the minority; respect for law and established institutions; respect for other men's opinions and beliefs; respect for the processes of evolution as against those of revolution; and respect for the dignity of labor with complete freedom to engage therein as we desire, and to worship according to the dictates of our own conscience with no man or set of men to say us nay—there are some of the ideals which have served in the building of this Nation, and which all true Americans cherish; and, please God, let us all by our united effort, and by His aid, assure that America shall ever go forward, ever a land of liberty for her sons and for all others who here gain asylum.

Such a heritage as ours seldom comes to any people. Once gained, it must be insured to all posterity by the wisdom, foresight, and unflinching courage of generation after generation as these in turn succeed to the temporary charge as well as to the blessings thereof, so long as time and the world shall endure.

Despite ancient and inherited prejudices detrimental to the development of needed powers, this country has always arisen to meet every emergency with which it has been confronted. Many of these efforts have proved costly, and have strained the Nation well nigh to the breaking point, but, like the race from which we sprung, we have somehow “muddled through.” But even though successful in the past, those very successes, in the light of deeper knowledge and changed conditions, warn us against any implicit faith in dependence upon emergency action. A city does not wait until the flames rage and the mob loots to organize fire and police protection, nor await the ravages of disease and pestilence to insure good water supply and establish proper health measures.

Our ability to meet and solve the great questions which have been vital to our development as a great free nation has rested mainly on the sound basic training of the entire body politic. The “little red schoolhouse” was the forum which primarily fitted for their life's work many of the greatest leaders known to our history. The nineteenth century was one devoted in the main to the settlement and upbuilding of our undeveloped territory and lands. Living thus close to the soil as a great agricultural people, simplicity was the rule in life, and the absorbing questions thought out and discussed were in the main those fundamental to the development of the Nation.

Now the free lands of our great West are no more. The industrial strides of the Nation have placed our industrial products ahead of the agricultural in value, and the environment of great masses of our people has changed from the freedom of the farm to the congestion of the cities. Life has grown harder and more complex. The fundamental has become clouded and overshadowed by the immediate questions of how to live and how to gain a competence, our avenues for which are concededly unequaled elsewhere.

Under these changed conditions the foundation for assured safe action, which is well-informed, sound judgement in all men, has become weakened. The motives for the establishment of the Nation, and which have set it free and far above all others on this globe, are in danger of becoming hopelessly obscured. As against party government and majority rule we are drifting toward the dangerous shoals of the bloc, of many parties, and of minority rule. In these conditions the politician, rather than the statesman, flourishes, and his breed is not the one which builded this Nation from a wilderness.

The conditions of our masses to which we have alluded as establishing a danger line exist in practically all of the older countries, where they have been of far longer duration; but there they have fewer of our blessings, such as our higher wages, regulated industries, free hospitals and libraries, free schools, improved and sanitary living conditions, amusements unending and within the reach of all, in addition to our full possession of the individual rights guaranteed under our Constitution. Thus our dangers are less than theirs, and our structure of government safer. But with lesser questions permitted to fill and sufficing to occupy the public mind, lesser men suffice to meet the demands for filling public office mediocrity rules, and superficiality may be said to be one of the crimes of the day and age. Mere politicians are hailed as statesmen, malingerers and profiteers abound, and the public treasury is oppressed with demands the meeting of which has inordinately taxed agriculture and industry and endangered stability. To cure our real and imaginary political and economic ills, legislation is invoked on the slightest pretext, regardless of the fact that wealth results from the untrammeled operations of commerce under the laws of supply and demand. Freedom of speech too frequently verges on license, and discipline has all but vanished. Over-regulation of personal habits; the over-development of reforms into well established, well paying occupations for the professional reformers; governmental interference in business to an illogical degree; and widespread neglect of our religious duties to our own very decided detriment, are among our most common evils. Radicalism threatens established property interests, and until the rights of property are clearly respected—until the frame of mind throughout the great body politic demands most thorough respect for property as well as for life, business cannot gain that volume and stability which the natural impetus of world growth offers to impart. When business flourishes there is ample employment, fair prices, and good times for all. With business chained, threatened, constantly railed against, capital in very self-protection withholds that which it has, awaiting a more opportune day for release. Cities and States, seizing the opportunity in unemployed capital desirous of some safe return, are becoming increasingly burdened with debt through the ceaseless issue of tax-exempt securities to secure funds for local improvements, thus defeating the Federal aim for income to meet the national budget and throwing the burden of the load upon the merely well-to-do and the poorer class, as against the rich, upon whom Congress intended it to lie.

Thus the fact stands clear that the time is at hand when we must take inventory, separate truth from fallacy, and discard the latter.

It was John Ruskin, a man far ahead of his day, who said that if we would see a thing correctly we must see the whole of it. Any correct view of the needs and duties of government in America must, then, start with its beginning—with the Constitution or framework of the government in which we live. Better yet, it should go into Colonial history and note the facts which led our forefathers to the adoption of that Constitution, after trying weaker and unsatisfactory measures; study the failures of the Continental Congress and its successor, the Articles of Confederation; and when that is done any fair-minded American will concede that the purposes of government, so clearly enunciated in the preamble to the Great Document, are on and all as vital and essential today as when so decreed by those high-minded patriots who, with clear brains and stout hearts in rugged bodies, builded for themselves and for all posterity the very highest “place in the sun” known to the nations of the world.

Those basic purposes for forming this government, enunciated in the preamble to the constitution, are broad and vital: A more perfect Union, for union was found essential to strength and sovereignty; the establishment of justice, since justice was the demand of every colony from its very birth; domestic peace, so essential to happy internal relations and development; to provide for the common defense, a lesson thoroughly learned throughout Colonial history and in the dark years immediately following on the Declaration of Independence, when the Nation's efforts were all but paralyzed in the actual establishment of that independence under the operation of the Continental Congress and, later, under the Articles of Confederation, the weakness of both establishing the necessity for centralized authority with full coercive and sovereign powers; the promotion of the general welfare, a broad provision carrying the necessary authority for all development and improvement for which time might develop the need and which might not be included under the other provisions; and lastly, the insuring of the blessings of liberty to themselves and to all posterity, than which no other desire was more strongly intrenched or more effective in securing independence.

These six broad purposes, the ground plan of the government we today enjoy, are as essential to the continued growth and the maintenance of this Nation as they were when originally enunciated and adopted. One hundred and thirty-four years of growth under the Constitution (during which period the Nation has endured through trials that would have terminated it had it other than the soundest of foundations) have thoroughly demonstrated its fitness to endure as planned, and further, that it could not endure as a free Nation if subjected to any vital change. Tinkering with the Constitution is most dangerous.

The facts above stated should lie deep in the minds of every man and every woman who exercises the rights of suffrage. That they are not so is very apparent from the constituencies which return to seats of power men who have demonstrated the most thorough unfitness to have voice in the affairs of government. Truly, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” and it should become the vow of every good American to contribute all that he may to the furtherance of knowledge of the essentials of our government, and to give his unqualified support to every vital basic purpose thereof.

From the beginning of history men formed themselves into groups for mutual self-interest—primarily for self-protection and defense. This tendency of mankind—than which there is no other so humanly fundamental—resulting in obvious advantage to those within the groups, forced those who were without, and whose interests differed materially therefrom, to form other groups according to individual and collective needs. In the course of time some of the groups grew to great proportions and were called tribes, peoples, races, and nations.

The stronger and more virile groups and nations have always dominated the weak, compelling tribute or recognition in one form or another; and this dominance will continue so long as man possesses the primitive passions and the instinct for trade and commercial advantage. The teachings of civilization will ever soften and ameliorate the effects of power held by one nation superior to another; but it is contrary to human nature to yield power without an acceptable return or as the result of conquest, and “water won't run up hill.” A people who will not or cannot lead must then expect that other nations, more progressive, stronger, more virile, will seize the banner of leadership, which they can then only follow. And if they decline in emergency to defend their own—their homes, their business, their commerce, their domain—in a word, if they refuse to be soldiers when their very existence demands, then must they be prepared to yield—even to become slaves if that horrid condition be imposed; for without defensive strength and power they will be helpless to resist, however offensive to their civilization or to their sensitiveness be the demands. The mother who refuses “to raise her boy to be a soldier” in event of his country's need should then reflect: “Am I not then raising him to be a slave?”

Grave dangers to the Nation lie in our exposed and all too tempting wealth, which offers the very richest plunder to a warlike power or coalition prepared for quick struggle. They lie, too, in the discontent and the unbelief of certain classes in our ideals. They would substitute other forms, even communism (socialism), for this our heritage. The succession of communism in Russia, so recently witnessed, was a catastrophe; its establishment here would be a cataclysm. Americans mean that America shall endure. This demands our watchfulness of all nations and a wise guardianship of our own.

The purpose of good government is ever to improve the conditions and habitations of man; and an inglorious yielding by one nation to another can never serve that purpose or satisfy high ideals. A well-considered policy of National Defense is simply the sanest and the only sound insurance that our free institutions shall live and flourish. Its need is both paramount and fundamental.