Munroe Smith

Edmund Munroe Smith faced the problem of determining the truth of historical episodes as a trained and conscientious jurist approaches problems of the law. On more than one vehemently-disputed question, he has said the final word. Indeed, if he resembled an enlightened advocate in the thoroughness of his brief for or against a controverted historical conclusion, he was the court of last resort in his weighing of the evidence. His was the type of mind and writing that inspired immediate confidence in readers who had hesitated, on the one hand at the group of contemporary historians which draws emphatic conclusions without investigating facts, on the other at those who search untiringly for original data and then interpret them in the light of whim, fashion, or desire of novelty for novelty’s sake. The ending of the war brought into sight not only “best-selling” historians who outlined the world’s history on the basis of half-baked information and individual prejudice, but that far more mischievous group which busied itself with reading into newly-discovered documents a white-souled innocence for the Imperial Germany of 1914 and Macchiavellian duplicity for England and France.

But Munroe Smith had been beforehand with them; he had administered the antidote before they prescribed the dose. In February, 1915, he read before the Century his masterly thesis, afterward widely published in America and Europe, entitled “Military Strategy versus Diplomacy.” From the contention of the German professorial round-robin and of the pro-German propagandists in America, that Berlin was forced into instant declaration of war by a menacing outside world, he appealed to no less renowned an anti-pacifist than Bismarck. Threatened with a sudden clash over another Balkan State in 1888, he reminded us, the Reichstag learned from Bismarck that “Bulgaria [for which, says Munroe Smith, read Servia] is assuredly not an object of sufficient magnitude that, on its account, Europe from Moscow to the Pyrenees and from the Baltic to Palermo should be hurried into a war of which no one can foresee the issue.” But how if Germany had to attack in order to escape being itself attacked at a disadvantage? “If we attack,” answered the Chancellor, “the whole weight of the imponderables will be on the side of the adversaries whom we have attacked.”

But in 1914, said the Berlin professors of 1914 and say the present-day American apologists, Russia was already mobilizing. So, Munroe Smith pointed out quietly, was Austria on the eve of 1866, when Bismarck, precisely because he was “particularly anxious to avoid the appearance of aggression” and in the face of angry protest by Moltke and the army, kept Prussia “at every stage in the dispute one move behind Austria in the matter of open military preparations.” “Mobilization,” he shows conclusively from the record, “is not in international theory and practice regarded as cause for war. The proper answer to mobilization is mobilization.” In the extreme diplomatic tension of 1870, Bismarck cheerfully pledged observance of neutrality to Belgium, thereby presenting an agreeable contrast with the pitiful excuses of poor Bethmann-Hollweg. In 1914, Munroe Smith concluded, it was army insistence alone which demanded Belgian invasion in violation of the treaty, “leaving to diplomacy only the hopeless task of getting the German armies through Belgium into France without war with Great Britain.”

It is not too much to say that this calm judicial paper had a place in determining the view of serious men which even Mr. Beck’s “Case against Germany” could not dispute. For Munroe Smith it was the embodiment of a life career. So far from being an anti-German propagandist, he had prepared for his work in international jurisprudence by years of study at Göttingen, Berlin and Leipzig. He had there imbibed the very best of Germany’s own teaching on the subject. At Columbia he shaped during forty years the mind of his classes on this absorbing subject. The Century, which was to him a second home, will not remember him for that achievement alone. His graceful literary style was supplemented by an engaging play of fancy on all questions of the day, by a culture and imagination which brightened his personal exchange of views on literature, past or present. The spare figure and reflective eyes had a place of their own at the club’s dinner table, to whose conversation his presence brought sententious wisdom with a dash of kindly humor.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1927 Century Association Yearbook