PUBLICITY AND PEACE

Ten years ago today, the Senate, after two days of heated discussion and speech making, voted to throw this country into the greatest struggle in modern history. Two days later, on April 6, 1917, we were formally at war. We had become "but one of the champions of the rights of mankind". President Wilson's words were taken up and echoed from one end of the world to another. We had declared war to end war; we were fighting not for dominion or for conquest, but in order that some day such strife should not be possible.

Ten years have passed. The newspapers of the East united yesterday to mark the solemnity and the import of the occasion. Yet, in the eloqence and in the fervor of what was written on editorial pages, it became only too easy to overlook the news that these same papers carried. One, in its leading story, describes relations with Mexico as strained to the point of war. Another leads its front page with a story picturing the armed menace of the new Germany. Others discussed the rumblings of war that have thundered out of China ever since the Nanking incident. Every paper carried a story on the Balkan situation. In four different places does war impend.

These are situations which may mean much or nothing. To some, they will seem but flimsy foundations for the outbreak of war, but on just such frailties have wars been built. When once alight, the flame is hard to quench. Nothing could prove this more strikingly than the memories which this anniversary evokes. The wave of patriotism and of war-hysteria began in minor size, but, once started, it carried everything before it.

The CRIMSON for April 7, 1917, printed a special telegram from General Wood, a leading story on the recruiting activities of the R. O. T. C. and two editorials urging preparedness and action. But also on the first page there is an article written by a famous German professor on the Faculty, in which he says:

"It would be useless to repeat the reasons, often stated before, why I am unshaken in my conviction that the European war was forced upon Germany by the aggressive coalition of her three neighbors. . . . It would be useless to state once more the reasons why I cannot think of Germany as an autocracy, but must continue to think of her as a country where the enlightened leadership of administrative experts, endowed with large responsibility devoted to the public welfare, guided if not controlled by popular supervision, has brought about a type of citizenship and a state of society as healthy and progressive as exist anywhere in the world."

A metropolitan newspaper, printing such an article the day after the declaration of war, might have been suppressed. Yet it is the kind of sane and dispassionate writing that should be constantly before the public, even in war time, but above all in time of peace.

Not only this kind of writing, but any writing having to do with war, has become trite and hackneyed. It is one of the unfortunate consequences of the last decade. A dead and dangerous apathy is the result. If war is ever to be outlawed, if the ringing phrases of President Wilson are to become more than effective recruiting slogans, there can be no such thing as overemphasis of peace.

To a certain extent, probably to a greater extent than after any other war, this is being done. The success of plays, novels and films dealing with war from other than the motive of patriotic propaganda, bears witness to this truth. But it is the press of the world upon whom the responsibility fairly rests. That newspapers are the great public educators of today and that war is the greatest weapons of a fighting nation is its press; the greatest bulwark of a peaceful country should be its press. The justification of the newspaper as a social force is yet to be found. When it comes, it will be at least in part the repetition of pacifism in time of peace until the time may come when it shall be no crime to be a pacifist.