Conan Doyle and the Millennium
Conan Doyle and the Millennium is an article published in The New-York Times on 11 march 1899.
Conan Doyle and the Millennium
There was a meeting held recently at Hindhead, in England, to consider the Czar's peace proposition, over which Mr. Conan Doyle presided. As Chairman, he was assisted by Mr. Charles McLaren, Mr. Corrie Grant, and others. In a speech Conan Doyle among other things said:
This peace rescript was no new thing. Nineteen hundred years ago a great peace rescript was given to the world, but that message of peace and good-will had not been acted upon, and during that 1,900 years wars had increased in number and violence until things had come to such a state that on the Continent of Europe, the most civilized part of the world, every man was brought up as a soldier, Wars of the future threatened to be more terrible than the wars of the past, for they would not be conflicts between two nations, but between two armed races. Such a monstrous state of things obviously called for some improvement, and the Czar's rescript seemed to be a practical opportunity for the nations of the world to pause and examine their consciences, and to see if anything could be done. [Applause.] There had been many objections to the proposal, and some people seemed to think that the Czar had some secret Machiavellian design underlying the proposal. He did not think so. He believed that be was absolutely honest, and that he was actuated by the highest and most unselfish ideals. He thought he meant every word he said, and it would be time enough to think otherwise when his actions openly contradicted his words. It had been urged against the proposal that it was impracticable, but, he said, there had never yet been a movement for the moral or material improvement of the world which had not been described as impracticable. Lord Roberts had objected that the Czar's scheme was too far-reaching in its character. The history of the world showed that violent changes invariably brought reaction, and the only thing that made for real progress was a slow movement upward. It was for this reason that he approved the Czar's scheme. It seemed to him to be a moderate one. He did not propose to take a single man from our army or a single ship from our navy. All that he proposed was that we should stop for a while, hoping that this would be the beginning of better things.
Mr. Bernard Shaw did not apparently pin his faith to the Czar, being with Mr. Conan Doyle rather on the side of the biggest battalion. This is a part of his speech:
The greatest danger was insincerity. There would be no difficulty in getting up any number of meetings and passing any number of declarations in favor of peace. All the statesmen of Europe were saying polite things of the Czar's rescript, and the very men who were ordering torpedo boats were expressing approval. But every man knew that, if the submarine boats which were being experimented with in France were a success, we should have them, Germany would have them, and nobody believed that the Czar himself had the power to prevent Russia from doing the same. If they were going into the peace crusade merely to repeat the platitudes they had been repeating every Christmas, and putting on their Christmas cards, they would do no good, and the armaments would go on in just the some way. There had been suggestions that war should be made less terrible than it was at present. It was not the ironclads that fought, but the men in them, and if men were reduced to their original state, they would fight just as horribly the day after with their fists and teeth. [Laughter.] They must clear their minds of cant. He utterly disclaimed being a disarmament man in any sense. As long as war existed the more its naked, wicked, and murderous character of massacring men by machinery was shown the better. The most hopeful sign of all was the proposal to establish an international tribunal, before which public opinion would force men to take their disputes. When that great tribunal was established, he hoped the most advanced nations would put their armaments together for the purpose of compelling the other nations to submit their disputes to arbitration. [Applause.]
