p. 7 | Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Dec 7, 1905

Note and Comment

THAT China is fast coming to the front as a military power is indicated by telegrams like the following from Shanghai, of recent date: “Chinese military maneuvers, conducted in accordance with the Western pattern, began yesterday. One army is defending Peking against the advance of another army from Shangtung. The foreign critics present are greatly impressed by the enormous improvement shown by the Chinese troops. Their progress in five years has been sensational.”

IN his address at the opening of the one hundred and fifty-second academic year of Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler gave some attention to the recent disclosures of modern business methods, and told some plain truth. We quote one paragraph:—

Put bluntly, the situation which confronts Americans to-day is due to lack of moral principle. New statutes may be needed, but statutes will not put moral principle where it does not exist. The greed for gain and the greed for power have blinded men to the time-old distinction between right and wrong. Both among business men and at the bar are to be found advisers, counted shrewd and successful, who have substituted the penal code for the moral law as the standard of conduct. Right and wrong have given way to the subtler distinction between legal, not-legal, and illegal; or better, perhaps, between honest, law-honest, and dishonest. This new triumph of mind over morals is bad enough in itself; but when, in addition, its exponents secure material gain and professional prosperity, it becomes a menace to our integrity as a people.

What will supply the needed moral principle? Surely not that which has brought about the lack. In the old-fashioned gospel there is a power which keeps men in the right path—“the power of God unto salvation.” It is the repudiation of this gospel which has prepared the way for the present moral collapse. The people need the message of the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

THE influence of socialism upon militarism is coming to be a matter of serious concern in Europe. One aim of socialism in Europe, it seems, is to abolish war through a refusal of the soldiers to perform military duty; in other words, through the principle of the strike. The strike idea, say European journals, is now being seriously urged upon the soldiers of Europe by socialist and radical agitators. “There is,” we are informed, “an International Anti-military Association in full operation, and its agents carry on a diligent propaganda by interviewing and disseminating their literature in the inns and cafes frequented by soldiers.” In these appeals to the conscripts, “these youth are reminded that they owe neither duty nor obedience to the state,” and “are bidden to throw away or break their weapons of destruction, or to discharge their rifles against their commanders, and are invited to join the ranks of civil workers.”

The recent general strike in Russia, which brought that government to terms and forced it to grant the demand for a representative government, was an object-lesson which workingmen everywhere will not forget. The threat of a general strike has already been made in Austria, and there are other countries where such a weapon might prove quite as effective as it did in Russia. Even the United States can not be said to be beyond the possibility of coercion by this powerful agency. The general distress and disturbance caused by the coal strike of 1902 are still fresh in every mind, nor is it forgotten that the settlement of that conflict exhausted the powers not only of the State of Pennsylvania, but of the national government, and was effected at last only by an extraordinary and extra-constitutional step on the part of the nation’s chief executive. In socialism, allied as it is or may become with the various workingmen’s organizations, the governments of the present day have an enemy with which they do not know yet how to reckon, and the fear of which is driving many of them to closer union with Rome. While socialism seems bent on abolishing war, in the form which makes use of armies and navies, it is impossible that its propaganda should fill the world with the spirit of peace, because it is not based on the principles of the Prince of Peace.