| In this game France puts up a battleship; England
sees that battleship and goes it one battleship better; Russia comes in
and raises it a battleship or two--did, before the untaught stranger entered
the game and reduced her stately pile of chips to a damaged ferryboat and
a cruiser that can't cruise. We are in it ourselves now. This game goes
on and on and on. There is never a new shuffle; never a new deal. No player
ever calls another's hand. It is merely an unending game of put up and put
up and put up; and by the law of probabilities a day is coming when no Christians
will be left on the land, except the women. The men will all be at sea,
manning the fleets. This singular game, which is so costly and so ruinous
and so silly, is called statesmanship--which is different from assmanship
on account of the spelling. Anybody but a statesman could invent some way
to reduce these vast armaments to rational and sensible and safe police
proportions, with the result that thenceforth all Christians could sleep
in their beds unafraid, and even the Savior could come down and walk on
the seas, foreigner as He is, without dread of being chased by Christian
battleships. - Autobiographical dictation, June 22,1906 (reprinted in Hudson Review, Autumn 1963) |
|
By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we
shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.
- Notebook, 1902
...armaments were not created chiefly for the protection of the nations but
for their enslavement.
- Letter to Baroness von Suttner, 2/17/1898 (quoted in Carl Dolmetsch, Our
Famous Guest)
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