Never Again! | Page 8

comfortable cottage
and an acre of land;
When further one thinks of all the mass of human material there is,

such as we have already described -- of the very finest quality, and fit
to build the most splendid races and cities "the sun ever shone upon" --
and then that it is being used for these utterly senseless purposes;
How heart-rending the waste and the folly! How disgusting the sin of
those who are responsible!
But to-day surely the armies themselves of these three countries are
beginning to see through the illusions which have been dangled before
then so long by those in power -- the "My-country -- right-or-wrong"
kind of Patriotism which has so often been evoked only in order to
serve the plots of private schemers;
They are surely beginning to see that the directing of State-policy and
foreign relations must no longer be left in the hands of a few highborn
diplomats (mostly ignorant of the actual modern world amid which
they live), but must be subject to the severest scrutiny and surveillance
by the people at large and their representatives;
They are beginning to see that if courage, devotion to an Idea, love of
the Father- or Mother-land, Fidelity of comrade to comrade, Efficiency,
daring in Adventure, exactness in Organization, and so forth, are the
qualities which in the past have made the profession of arms great and
glorious, it is these very qualities which will be demanded and evoked
for all future time in the great free armies of Industry.
For with the cessation of Militarism as the leading principle of national
life must inevitably come the liberation of Industry -- else the last state
of our societies will indeed be worse than the first.
Truly there is nothing very exhilarating about Industry as it has in
modern times been conceived, and one does not altogether wonder that
all down the centuries the man with the sword has despised the man
with the hoe, since the latter has generally been little better than a slave.
But when once Labour is freed -- or rather when once it frees itself --
from the thraldom, of the old Feudal system, and finally from the
fearful burden of modern Capitalism -- when once it can lift its head
and see the great constructive vision of the new society which awaits it
-- then surely it will perceive that all the great qualities we have named
as exhibited in the past in the old destructive Warfare, and now become
the splendid heritage of the peoples of Europe, will be necessary and
will have a field for their exercise in the beneficent constructive
conquests of Nature and the building up on Earth of that great City of

the Sun which for so many ages has been the dream and inspiration of
Man.
And of the old mad Warfare it will then say This odious and inhuman
Thing must never be again!
In conclusion, and to look to the future:
I think we may see that the new conception of life will only come
through the peeling off in the various nations of the old husks of the
diplomatic, military, legal, and commercial classes, with their
antiquated, narrow-minded and profoundly. irreligious and inhuman
standards -- those husks which have so long restricted and strangulated
the growing life within.
It will only come with the determination of the workers (that is, of
everybody) to produce things useful, profitable, and beautiful, in free
and rational co-operation -- things useful because deliberately made for
use, things profitable for all because not made for the gain of the few,
and things beautiful because of the joy and gladness wrought into their
very production.
Simultaneously with this peeling off, of the Old, and disclosure of the
New, will of necessity appear -- indeed it is taking shape already the
blossom of international solidarity and federation -- the common cause
of Humanity and of Labour liberated over the world.
Naturally such process will not mature all at once. It may, bit that the
four Western nations, England, France, Italy and Belgium, combining
with some of the neutral States, will constitute the first European
Federationor at any rate the nucleus of a Federation destined, as it
expands to absorb within its borders Germany herself (of course when
she shall have taken on her true republican form) and the other States in
due succession.
Such Federation when firmly consolidated might, it is not unlikely, still
retain for a long period a military system, of some kind, if only for its
own protection against outlying and non European dangers; but that
military system would be small and secondary. It right reasonably be
no more dominant or meddlesome than the military system of China
has been during the last thousand years in