The Germs of War/Chapter 2
2. Two Cases of Preparedness.
Be it so!
Take the argument on its merits. The United States is opposed to war. She is preparing in order that she may play her part in maintaining peace. By what means may war be prevented and peace established? Or, put the question more generally, and ask, "How do you avert an impending danger?"
Your city is threatened with typhoid fever. Do you import doctors, hire nurses, and rush through appropriations for new hospitals? or do you boil the water and inspect the milk?
You are an intelligent human being, living in a scientific age. Across the path of progress, you find an obstacle before which you must stop. This obstacle may be a plague, a crime-wave or a war. What do you do?
There is only one answer to that question, the whole world over. Any thinking people living under any form of government and speaking any language, will follow exactly the same course. They will face the obstacle squarely and ask:
Question 1. What is it?
Question 2. Why is it?
Question 3. How can it be overcome?
These are the three questions that science always puts to every new obstacle that it encounters.
Primitive men cowered in fear, or prayed to their gods, or ran away. The honest, fearless seeker after truth first asks the questions of science, and then labors until she finds the answers.
There are many fields in which the three questions of science have been asked and successfully answered. The people of Havana for centuries had been plagued with yellow fever. Year after year the terrible disease returned to the city, to overwhelm the people and to take their children and their loved ones. Some said, "It is a punishment for sin," Others, "It is the will of God." The American men of science came, asked their questions, and set about discovering the answer. "What is yellow fever?" They found that it was a disease that was produced by germs. "Why is yellow fever?" After long study it was discovered that it was carried by the mosquitoes. "How can we destroy the mosquitoes?" A method was found, and since the American occupation of Havana, yellow fever, that had, up to that time, been an annual visitor, has become a stranger to the city. Yellow fever, like every other disease which afflicts civilization, will be destroyed when we find the germs and destroy them.
Find the germs! Discover the causes! Then and only then can you deal with the effects.
Remember the experience of the English-speaking race with its criminal classes. The good Samaritan of the Parable took his man to the hotel, cared for him, and paid his bill. Therein, he showed himself charitable. But was he just? What were the germs of this crime? The injured traveler, like the person stricken with the yellow fever, was the effect. Ask the questions of science, "Who were the criminals?" "Why were they criminals?" "How can crime be prevented?" Pity the effects, but seek out the cause!
For centuries the criminal law of the English-speaking world has been written as though the criminal alone were to blame. The pillory, the dungeon, and the scaffold completed the work begun by the blugeon of the policeman. "Give us enough pillories, dungeons, scaffolds and blugeons" insisted the upholders of the criminal code, "and we will stamp out crime."
Well, did they?
The penalties which the English Code prescribed for criminal offenses, even of the most trivial character, were frightfully severe. Did crime cease? No! Did it diminish? No! What was the reason? The law was trying to abolish a thing that it did not understand.
The up-to-date social scientist has begun to treat crime scientifically. In answer to the question, "Why?" the criminologist has discovered that there are two chief causes of crime. First and most important there are the frightful economic and social conditions under which millions of children are pushed toward the brink of the criminal precipice. Second, there are the mental and physical defects that unbalance the individual who is suffering from them. Practically all of the crime from which society suffers can be traced to one of these two causes. The policeman’s club has no more effect on either of them than it would have on a sandpile.
The hideous criminal code, built on the power of force, has failed because the causes producing criminals were entirely beyond the reach of the code. If one-half of the people in the United States were hanged in the next year, there would still be crime. No amount of punishment of individuals will have any effect on a thing for which the individual is not responsible. It is as easy to stop the flow of a river with a dam as to stop crime with a jail.
Today we are looking for the germs of crime. Instead of dealing with the effects, we are seeking to check this social scourge at its source.
The old system of treating the criminal failed. It failed to reform the criminal, and it failed to prevent crime. It failed because it was unintelligent. It had taken no notice of causes.
Many people are today talking of war, and its prevention. The same questions that are asked in any other scientific inquiry must be asked here. There is no use in trying to prevent war, until we understand the causes of war. It will be time enough to think of preventing war when we have isolated the germs of war and studied them.
What are the germs of war? Where do they breed? On what do they thrive?