The World in Chains | Page 9

does not
change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs
and vileness and scum. War does not change any one's nature; and that
is why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will
love their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot
create it may at least be supposed to discover and test the existent
patriotism of the nation. And this supposition is corroborated at first
sight by the realisation that hundreds of thousands, that actually
millions of previously ordinary young men have implied by enlisting
their willingness to die for England. One might, of course, reason that
no individual recruit really believes he is going to be killed, that each
boy thinks he will be one of the lucky ones who escape all the bullets
unhurt to enjoy an honoured return, that recruiting would have failed
entirely if the barracks were explicitly a grave and enlistment the
certainty of violent death or mutilation. But somehow I don't think that
would be a fair argument. It is more pertinent if less easy to remember
that a readiness to die for one's country is not the highest form of
political virtue. If it be, as it is, a solemn and wonderful thing to be
willing to die for the salvation (ex hypothesi) of England, it must be
much more wonderful and solemn to be willing to die in order slightly

to increase the income of one's family. And every schoolboy knows
that the Chinaman of the old regime was willing to have his head cut
off for the payment of a few dollars to his next of kin. Let no one ever
deny our soldiers the honour of their courage and nobility; but the fact
remains that the readiness to die for England is a less adequate test of
patriotism than a readiness to live for England; and if the readiness to
live for the State rather than for private interests had been for a hundred
years a social virtue whose votaries could be numbered by the million,
then indeed England would be to-day a nation worth dying for.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 14: If anyone were to suggest that this is disproved by the
unparalleled nobility of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and
Indians in the present campaign, I should reply that they are actuated by
devotion not to the Empire but to England, not to the Company but to
the Chairman of the Company. This may be a quibble, but I think the
distinction is real. Anyhow, I leave it at that, as the point has no
primary relevance.]
[Footnote 15: See below, Chapter IV, § 5.]
[Footnote 16: The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W.
N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control,
has explained that the report which we published of his speech is unfair,
and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith. This is
disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated the
correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the danger of
British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing 'Rule
Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which
the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think that
Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the country?"--The
Evening Standard, July 26, 1915.]
§ 4
The "Moral Test"

The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which
character is proved--ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum--is that
generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without
disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique
reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something
fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some
psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform
advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and
Ruskin were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War,
that such a militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in Kim, in
Puck of Pook's Hill and the intercalated poems, in the most successful
of his short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious
mystic; and that in France the very active Clerical party, one
consequence of a disestablished Church, is always closely supported by
the Chauvinists. In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious
Christian, finding himself confronted with war, and not having the
moral courage or the political detachment to condemn it, only applies
automatically to its justification the arguments which he habitually uses
to explain the existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the
theories of war as a Moral Test or