Essays in War-Time | Page 6

time it is incomparably more injurious to Society. In savagery little is
risked by war, for the precious heirlooms of humanity have not yet
been created, and war can destroy nothing which cannot easily be
remade by the people who first made it. But civilisation possesses--and
in that possession, indeed, civilisation largely consists--the precious
traditions of past ages that can never live again, embodied in part in
exquisite productions of varied beauty which are a continual joy and
inspiration to mankind, and in part in slowly evolved habits and laws of
social amenity, and reasonable freedom, and mutual independence,
which under civilised conditions war, whether between nations or
between classes, tends to destroy, and in so destroying to inflict a
permanent loss in the material heirlooms of Mankind and a serious
injury to the spiritual traditions of civilisation.
It is possible to go further and to declare that warfare is in contradiction
with the whole of the influences which build up and organise
civilisation. A tribe is a small but very closely knit unity, so closely
knit that the individual is entirely subordinated to the whole and has
little independence of action or even of thought. The tendency of
civilisation is to create webs of social organisation which grow ever
larger, but at the same time looser, so that the individual gains a
continually growing freedom and independence. The tribe becomes
merged in the nation, and beyond even this great unit, bonds of
international relationship are progressively formed. War, which at first
favoured this movement, becomes an ever greater impediment to its
ultimate progress. This is recognised at the threshold of civilisation,
and the large community, or nation, abolishes warfare between the
units of which it is composed by the device of establishing law courts

to dispense impartial justice. As soon as civilised society realised that it
was necessary to forbid two persons to settle their disputes by
individual fighting, or by initiating blood-feuds, or by arming friends
and followers, setting up courts of justice for the peaceable settlement
of disputes, the death-blow of all war was struck. For all the arguments
that proved strong enough to condemn war between two individuals are
infinitely stronger to condemn war between the populations of
two-thirds of the earth. But, while it was a comparatively easy task for
a State to abolish war and impose peace within its own boundaries--and
nearly all over Europe the process was begun and for the most part
ended centuries ago--it is a vastly more difficult task to abolish war and
impose peace between powerful States. Yet at the point at which we
stand to-day civilisation can make no further progress until this is done.
Solitary thinkers, like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and even great practical
statesmen like Sully and Penn, have from time to time realised this fact
during the past four centuries, and attempted to convert it into actuality.
But it cannot be done until the great democracies are won over to a
conviction of its inevitable necessity. We need an international
organisation of law courts which shall dispense justice as between
nation and nation in the same way as the existing law courts of all
civilised countries now dispense justice as between man and man; and
we further need, behind this international organisation of justice, an
international organisation of police strong enough to carry out the
decisions of these courts, not to exercise tyranny but to ensure to every
nation, even the smallest, that measure of reasonable freedom and
security to go about its own business which every civilised nation now,
in some small degree at all events, already ensures to the humblest of
its individual citizens. The task may take centuries to complete, but
there is no more urgent task before mankind to-day.[3]
These considerations are very elementary, and a year or two ago they
might have seemed to many--though not to all of us--merely academic,
chiefly suitable to put before schoolchildren. But now they have ceased
to be merely academic; they have indeed acquired a vital actuality
almost agonisingly intense. For one realises to-day that the
considerations here set forth, widely accepted as they are, yet are not
generally accepted by the rulers and leaders of the greatest and

foremost nations of the world. Thus Germany, in its present
Prussianised state, through the mouths as well as through the actions of
those rulers and leaders, denies most of the conclusions here set forth.
In Germany it is a commonplace to declare that war is the law of
Nature, that the "struggle for existence" means the arbitration of
warfare, that it is by war that all evolution proceeds, that not only in
savagery but in the highest civilisation the same rule holds good, that
human war is the source of all virtues, the divinely inspired method