GIFT OF 
 JEROME B. HANDHELD 
 
WAR 
 
 AND ITS ALLEGED BENEFITS 
 
 By 
 J. NOVICOW 
 
 i\ 
 
 Vice-President of the Internationa] Institute of Sociology 
 
 Translated by 
 THOMAS SELTZER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1911 
 
Copyright, 191 x, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published. February, 1911 
 
 / 
 
 J^Y { 
 
 OiAC 
 
 1)10 
 
 55 
 
 -w£/% Q*t*v*<c /?„ <£u^cJ*ie $ 
 
 THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS 
 HAHWAY, N. J. 
 
Hi 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 War has its very convinced advocates, who 
 attribute numerous benefits to it. The opin- 
 ions of the apologists of brute force should 
 be examined with the utmost care. They 
 should be combated with an energy pro- 
 portional to the evils they produce. 
 
 We shall consider these opinions one by 
 one to show how little they can withstand 
 criticism, how they fall not only before sound 
 reasoning, but even before the mere say-so 
 of ordinary common sense. 
 
 M275271 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 I. War an End in Itself 
 
 II. One-sided Reasoning . 
 
 III. War a Solution . 
 
 IV. Physiological Effects 
 V. Economic Effects 
 
 VI. Political Effects 
 
 VII. Intellectual Effects 
 
 VIII. Moral Effects 
 
 IX. Survivals, Routine Ideas, and Sophistries 75 
 
 X. The Psychology of War . 
 
 XI. War Considered as the Sole Form of 
 Struggle 
 
 XII. The Theorists of Brute Force 
 XIII. Antagonism and Solidarity 
 
 7 
 
 13 
 20 
 
 31 
 
 37 
 48 
 60 
 
 89 
 
 102 
 112 
 122 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 WAR AN END IN ITSELF 
 
 A German author, Max Jahns, in a work 
 ardently apologizing for war, 1 says: " War 
 regenerates corrupted peoples, it awakens 
 dormant nations, it rouses self-forgetful, self- 
 abandoned races from their mortal languor. 
 In all times war has been an essential factor 
 in civilization. It has exercised a happy in- 
 fluence upon customs, arts, and science. " 2 
 Some French authors hold the same views. 
 At bottom, G. Valbert agrees with Max 
 Jahns, and the great Ernest Renan says 
 somewhere: " Let us cling with love to our 
 custom of fighting from time to time, because 
 
 1 Ueber Krieg, Frieden und Kultur, Berlin, 1893. 
 2 G. Valbert in the Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 
 1894, p. 695. 
 
2 WAR AN END IN ITSELF 
 
 war is the necessary occasion and place for 
 manifesting moral force." x 
 
 Another writer, Dr. Le Bon, says : " One of 
 the chief conditions for the upliftment of an 
 enfeebled nation is the organization of a very 
 strong military force. It must always hold 
 
 { up the threat of a disastrous war." 2 
 
 According to these authors, war has bene- 
 ficial results. If war should be suppressed, 
 those benefits would likewise disappear. War, 
 then, is an end in itself. 
 
 .Now, here we have the great, fundamental 
 error from which innumerable other fallacies 
 
 / logically proceed. War never has been an 
 end, whether for animals or man. Since liv- 
 ing beings have peopled our sphere, they have 
 killed one another without cease, every hour, 
 every minute, every second. But massacre 
 has always been a means, not an end. When 
 a lion strangles a deer, he does so for the 
 sake of food. When he is satiated, he sleeps 
 
 1 Quoted by P. Lacombe, De Vhistoire consideree 
 comme science, Paris, Hachette, 1894, p. 83. 
 
 2 Les lots psychologiques de revolution des peuples, 
 Paris, F. Alcan, 1894, P- I ^o, 
 
WAR AN END IN ITSELF 3 
 
 stretched in the sun. A hunter shoots birds 
 that make a good dish. He disdains others, 
 even if they come within reach of his gun. 
 To waste his cartridges on them is to lose 
 time and money. 
 
 Since the remotest periods men went to 
 war only with some particular object in view. 
 The goal striven for by every human being 
 is enjoyment. If the death of one of his 
 kind can procure him that, he will sacrifice 
 him without pity. 1 1 But if such is not the 
 case, he will not take the trouble to kill him, 
 since purposeless work is the worst suffering. 
 
 War is carried on from one of the follow- 
 ing motives : to kill one's fellow-men for the 
 sake of using them as food; to deprive them 
 of their women; to obtain booty from them; 2 
 to impose a religion, certain ideas, or a type 
 of culture upon them. , 
 
 If a territory does not supply enough ani- 
 
 1 Thus, Napoleon I caused two million Frenchmen to 
 be massacred in order in a degree to satisfy his self- 
 love. 
 
 2 The German word for war, Krieg, is derived from 
 the word kriegen, which means to take, to carry off, 
 
 ^ _, 
 
4 WAR AN END IN ITSELF 
 
 mal food, war is sometimes made to take 
 prisoners and eat them. 
 
 As for the rape of women, it is now a very 
 infrequent practice, and I need not dwell 
 upon it. 
 
 Wars undertaken to obtain chattels have 
 been, and still are, rather general. But the 
 practice of redemption proves that in this 
 case, as in all others, fighting is solely a 
 means. Often to keep from being pillaged, 
 certain nations consented to pay a tribute. If 
 the sum seemed sufficient to the aggressors, 
 they accepted it, well content not to have to 
 go to battle. 
 
 Caesar invaded Gaul. His aim was to 
 make himself master of that country for the 
 sake of a number of advantages, which it 
 would take too long to enumerate here. It 
 was a severe war. But if the Gauls had sub- 
 mitted at once, Caesar would not have taken 
 the trouble to go on a single campaign or 
 kill a single man. 
 
 In the sixteenth century the Flemings em- 
 braced Protestantism. Philip II wanted to 
 
WAR AN END IN ITSELF 5 
 
 force them to become Catholics again. If 
 at the first threat from the king of Spain 
 the Flemings had returned to the religion of 
 their ancestors, Philip would , not have sent 
 a single soldier to the Netherlands. 
 
 The Austrian government centralized all 
 the provinces of its empire. That offended 
 the nationalism of the Magyars. If when 
 Francis Joseph ascended the throne he had 
 consented to grant their wishes, they would 
 not have gone to war in 1848. 
 
 I have heard the following opinion ex- 
 pressed: "At this time retrogressive ideas 
 are triumphing. If that continues, Europe 
 is lost. A general war is needed to set us 
 on a better path. The conquered nations 
 will be obliged to mend their ways. Enlight- 
 ened by defeat, they will reform their ancient 
 institutions. The conquerors will of neces- 
 sity do the same, and liberalism will carry the 
 day." The person who so expressed himself 
 was ready to see a million men sacrificed (a 
 general war in Europe would result in that 
 number of victims at the very least) for the 
 
6 WAR AN END IN ITSELF 
 
 triumph of his ideas. A rather cruel method 
 of propaganda, it must be admitted, but here, 
 as in every other case, carnage is a means, not 
 an end. ) 
 
 Thus, the object of war has been in turn, 
 cannibalism, spoliation, intolerance, and des- 
 potism; none of which have ever been held 
 to be beneficial. Then, how the means by 
 which those objects have been attained, that 
 is, war, can be beneficial, is an incomprehensi- 
 ble mystery. 
 
 As we now see, all we need do is abandon 
 nebulous metaphysics and take our stand for 
 an instant on the ground of concrete reali- 
 ties to see all the alleged benefits of war van- 
 ish away like smoke. 
 
 War might be an end in itself, it might 
 produce results favorable to mankind, but 
 that only if suffering and death were enjoy- 
 able. And everybody knows they are not. 
 
 / 
 
CHAPTER II 
 ONE-SIDED REASONING 
 
 Those who attribute moral benefits to war 
 are guilty of an astonishing fallacy. They 
 think merely of defense, never of attack. 
 ( " It is necessary to overcome some repug- 
 nance, " says Sismondi, 1 " to venture to say 
 that war is necessary to humanity, that even 
 those private battles called duels preserve 
 some of our virtues. Nevertheless, we have 
 seen that when nations renowned of old for 
 their valor have been freed from all danger, 
 when they have been forbidden the use of 
 arms, when they have lost that standard of 
 honor which makes them brave death — we 
 have seen them lose, along with their military 
 courage, the very strength that keeps up the 
 domestic virtues. We have seen them de- 
 
 1 Histoires des republigues italiennes, Paris, Fume, 
 1840, vol. ii, p. 172. 
 
 7 
 
 1/ 
 
8 ONE-SIDED REASONING 
 
 based in peace by the very cause that exposed 
 them to defeat. And we have convinced our- 
 selves that to be worthy to live man must 
 learn to brave danger and death. 'V 
 
 These words are typical. Without doubt, 
 to defend one's rights at peril of death is 
 a most generous deed; without doubt, the 
 communities unwilling to bring themselves to 
 do so soon fall into the lowest state of degra- 
 dation ; only — we forget the other side of the 
 question. That the A's should be obliged to 
 defend their rights with their lives, there 
 must perforce be B's who violate those rights 
 also at the risk of their lives. Defense neces- 
 sarily involves attack. 
 
 Another example : " Max Jahns finds noth- 
 ing to say against wars of expansion, but the 
 wars that he prefers to all others are those 
 waged in self-defense. They are the noblest 
 and most glorious." x ' 
 
 Mr. Jahns's blindness is truly surprising. 
 How is a defensive war possible without an 
 offensive war? The weakest house of cards 
 
 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, loc. cit., p. 693. 
 
ONE-SIDED REASONING 9 
 
 will not fall unless it is blown upon. The 
 timidest man in the world can live in tran- 
 quillity if nobody violates his rights; in other 
 words, if nobody attacks him. 
 
 Mr. Jahns's book contains another pearl 
 of one-sided reasoning. He justifies war on 
 the ground that it is a right. He says, " The 
 first and most evident right of all is the right 
 to live." * Assuredly. But it is not the right 
 to kill. Now, without murderers, there never 
 would be any murdered. 
 
 We see some races fallen into deep de- 
 basement; the Bengalis, for instance. Since 
 time immemorial they have submitted to con- 
 quest without the faintest protest. Who- 
 ever the invader that possessed himself of 
 their country, they obeyed him without offer- 
 ing resistance. The degradation of the Ben- 
 galis is heartrending. They utterly lack 
 virile energy. They are fawners, liars, 
 cheats; in a word, the scum of humanity. 
 
 The Bengalis are said to have fallen so 
 low because they never knew how to conduct 
 
 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, loc. cit., p. 699. 
 
io ONE-SIDED REASONING 
 
 war and defend their country. Nobody re- 
 flects that the Bengalis fell so low because 
 other people attacked them and made war 
 upon them, though that is the correct way of 
 viewing the question. Suppose Bengal had 
 never been invaded by a number of crowned 
 brigands bearing the pompous name of con- 
 querors; suppose the inhabitants of Bengal 
 had never been obliged by the knife at their 
 throat to give up nine-tenths of their rev- 
 enues to the aggressors; suppose their rights 
 had never been violated and they had not 
 been tyrannized over in the most infamous 
 fashion. They would have held their heads 
 higher; they would have been proud and dig- 
 nified, and perhaps might have taken for 
 their motto, Dieu et mon droit. If nobody 
 had oppressed the Bengalis, there would have 
 been no need for them to resort to lying, 
 cheating, fawning. Man acquires those vices 
 because he thinks them profitable. In a coun- 
 try in which all rights are respected nobody 
 is tempted to commit base deeds, which are 
 absolutely useless and always troublesome. 
 
ONE-SIDED REASONING n 
 
 Why did the Bengalis become the scum of 
 humanity? Because they were unable to de- 
 fend themselves, say the short-sighted who 
 think by rote. Not at all. It is because they 
 were attacked. That is the first and fore- 
 most reason. 
 
 It is only by the fallacy of one-sided rea- ^ 
 soning that moral benefits can be attributed 
 to war. 
 
 When within a civil community one man 
 makes an attempt upon the rights of an- 
 other, our sympathies go to the victim, our 
 hatred and contempt to the aggressor. X 
 tried to murder Y. Y is wounded. We take 
 care of him, we show the greatest solicitude 
 on his behalf. As for X, society places its 
 ban upon him. He is a criminal. Every 
 honorable man is ashamed to associate with 
 him. He is condemned and put to death. 
 But our morals take a sudden turn when in- 
 ternational relations enter into the question. 
 By the strangest aberration, all our sympathy 
 and admiration go to the one that trans- 
 gresses the rights of his fellow-creatures, to 
 
12 ONE-SIDED REASONING 
 
 the glorious conqueror. Our hatred and con- 
 tempt go to the victims. But for the suc- 
 cession of brigands that invaded Bengal, the 
 people of that country would never have 
 taken on their present vices. Strange — we 
 scorn the unfortunate corrupt, but not the 
 vicious corrupters. 
 
 In short, to risk one's life in defending 
 one's rights, to prefer death to disgrace, is 
 great, beautiful, generous. But it is base and 
 vile to violate the rights of others, to steal, 
 pillage, despoil, and tyrannize over people's 
 consciences. Now, every aggressor of neces- 
 sity commits those misdeeds. Since there can 
 be no war without an aggressor, war is one 
 of the principal causes of the degradation 
 of the human race, i 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WAR A SOLUTION 
 
 Some years ago the world's disarmament 
 was being discussed. The king of Denmark 
 expressed himself emphatically in favor of 
 it. The Moscow Gazette, 1 commenting upon 
 his opinion, said: " Is disarmament possible? 
 We think not. Too much gall has gathered 
 among the European nations. ... War is ^ 
 the one method of deciding international 
 questions." At the western end of the con- 
 tinent in Paris, the ville-lumiere, the very 
 same view finds expression. "A secret in- 
 stinct informs people," says Mr. Valbert, 
 " that gross evils require gross remedies, and 
 great crises, violent solutions, that the word 
 does not always work miracles, that force has 
 its role to play in human affairs, that in the 
 
 1 March 30 or 31, 1894. 
 13 
 
i 4 WAR A SOLUTION 
 
 long run certain evils become intolerable, that 
 an end must be made of those evils at all 
 costs, and that an end cannot be made of 
 them except by war." l 
 
 It is difficult to decide what is more re- 
 volting in these sentiments, their cold cru- 
 elty or their illogicality. 
 
 The Moscow Gazette cites facts in sup- 
 port of its opinions. " From the year 1496 
 B.C. to 1861 A.D., in 3,358 years, there were 
 227 years of peace and 3,130 years of war, 
 or thirteen years of war to every year of 
 peace. Within the last three centuries there 
 have been 286 wars in Europe. ,, And Mr. 
 Valbert says: " From the year 1500 B.C. to 
 i860 a.d. more than 8,000 treaties of peace 
 meant to remain in force forever were con- 
 cluded. The average time they remained in 
 force is two years." 2 
 
 I put this categoric question to the advo- 
 cates of war: " If war is able to decide dif- 
 ferences, how is it that 8,000 wars have set- 
 
 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, loc. c\t. s p. 696. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 692. 
 
WAR A SOLUTION 15 
 
 tied nothing, and that in this year of our 
 Lord we feel the necessity for the eight thou- 
 sand and first war? If more than 8,000 
 wars have settled nothing, what probability 
 is there that the eight thousand and first 
 as if by magic, will suddenly decide all 
 questions in dispute? By what surprising 
 change, by what incomprehensible miracle 
 will that eight thousand and first war possess 
 such extraordinary virtues? " I should really 
 like an explanation. It is worth the while 
 to try to get one. 
 
 The illogicality of these backward think- 
 ers is as prodigious in each particular case as 
 in the general question. In France one con- 
 stantly hears: " War is the only solution of 
 the Alsace-Lorraine question. " If that is so, 
 why did not the war of 1870 solve it? Now, 
 if the war of 1870 did not solve the Alsace- 
 Lorraine question, then war cannot solve that 
 or any other question. Indeed, let the Ger- 
 mans be completely defeated and the situa- 
 tion will remain the same as in 1871. The 
 Germans would then have lost a province 
 
16 WAR A SOLUTION 
 
 which in their opinion was " flesh of their 
 flesh and bone of their bone." They would 
 forge new weapons and await a favorable op- 
 portunity for recapturing Alsace-Lorraine, as 
 they have done since 1648. Where would 
 the solution be? 
 
 In 1 87 1 the Germans thought they had 
 settled their differences with their neighbors 
 on the west. By levying the indemnity of 
 five milliards of francs they thought they had 
 drained France of her last drop of blood. 
 Napoleon I also thought he had done with 
 Prussia after the battle of Jena, when he took 
 half its territory and reduced its army to 
 40,000 men. Vain illusions of rou- 
 tine thinking, chimeras of human blindness! 
 We might as well make up our minds that 
 it will be just as ineffectual in the future as 
 it has been in the past, to " drain a country 
 of its last drop." \ 
 
 Speaking of the factions in the Italian 
 cities in the middle ages, Massimo d'Azeglio 
 says: " Each time a party came into power, 
 it foolishly thought it could keep its position 
 
WAR A SOLUTION 17 
 
 by unjust and violent methods. As a matter 
 of fact, injustice and violence were the very 
 causes that prevented any party from remain- 
 ing in power for a length of time." 1 
 
 The same is true of international ques- 
 tions. They will never be decided so long 
 as violence is resorted to; that is to say, so 
 long as wars are carried on. The past is a 
 guarantee of the future. If 8,000 wars have 
 produced no result, one must be utterly de- 
 void of reason to think that battles are a 
 means of deciding international differences. 
 
 A question is decided only if it is adjusted 
 in a way that the contending parties consider 
 equitable. For example, when the English 
 took Canada, they wanted to impose their 
 language upon the French there. They used 
 the most brutal means. 2 The armed revolt, 
 in other words, the war, ended in a final out- 
 burst in 1857. It was followed by the mili- 
 
 1 Niccolo de y Lapi, Florence, le Monnier, 1866, p. 63. 
 
 2 One of the most horrible chapters in the history of 
 England is the expulsion of the unhappy French Aca- 
 diens, which has remained in the memory of the people 
 as the grand derangement. 
 
1 8 WAR A SOLUTION 
 
 tary repression of the gallows. But soon Eng- 
 land abandoned that absurd, superannuated 
 policy. It gave up its efforts to denationalize 
 the Canadians, realizing that they had the 
 right to be French, and it established in 
 America an order of things just and equitable 
 to all. Thus, at the banquet of A the Alliance 
 franqaise held on April 16, 1891, Mercier, 
 governor of the province of Quebec, could 
 say with truth : " Now our liberties are as- 
 sured by a wise, generous constitution, under 
 the enlightened direction of the statesmen of 
 England. Our struggles are over." l Re- 
 spect for others' rights, justice, mutual con- 
 cessions, these are the means of settling dis- 
 putes. Bloodshed never will succeed. Since 
 the beginning of history wholesale murder 
 has been committed thousands and thousands 
 of times without solving anything. It will be 
 committed thousands and thousands of times 
 again without yielding a better result. Each 
 war merely sows the seed of a future war. 
 
 1 Bulletin de V Alliance Frangaise, April-June, 1891, p. 
 43' 
 
WAR A SOLUTION 19 
 
 One thing about wars deceives us. After 
 frightful carnage, the belligerents are some- 
 times exhausted. They long for tranquillity, 
 and they appoint plenipotentiaries to settle 
 their differences. Since each side desires a 
 cessation of hostilities, each makes mutual 
 concessions. An adjustment is reached and a 
 modus vivendi is found equally acceptable to 
 all the parties involved. It is this good will, 
 this feeling for justice that leads to solutions, 
 it is not the hecatombs, it is not the war pre- 
 ceding. If the same spirit of concord 
 had been displayed beforehand, an agree- 
 ment would undoubtedly have been reached. 
 But since the establishment of a more 
 or less equitable order of things as- 
 suring justice and peace too often fol- 
 lows, the bloodiest wars, the mind is mis- 
 led by a false association of ideas. The regu- 
 lation of international differences is attributed 
 to the war, whereas, on the contrary, it is 
 due solely to respect for the rights of others, 
 to the spirit of equity, to good will, and mu- 
 tual concessions. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 
 
 One of the principal benefits attributed to 
 war is that it operates for a selection fa- 
 vorable to the species. War, it is alleged, 
 eliminates the degenerate races, assures the 
 empire of the earth to vigorous, well-endowed 
 races, and so constantly improves mankind. 
 
 There are few more egregious errors. It 
 is easy to show that the selection resulting 
 from war has always been the very reverse. 
 It has invariably eliminated individuals 
 physiologically the most perfect, and has al- 
 lowed the weakest to survive. War has not 
 hastened mankind's improvement, but re- 
 tarded it. Improvement has taken place not 
 as a result of, but in spite of, war. 
 
 Since the most ancient times men of the 
 soundest constitutions, the most vigorous 
 
 20 
 
PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 21 
 
 men, have gone off to fight. The weak, the 
 sick, the deformed have remained at home. 
 So, every battle carried away some of the 
 select, leaving behind the socially unpro- 
 ductive. Besides, in the army itself there 
 are brave men and cowards. The brave are 
 certainly the more perfect physiologically. 
 Since they go to the front, more of them fall. 
 Thus a second selection is added to the first 
 to contribute to the elimination of the phys- 
 ically superior. 
 
 It is said that in savage times war was 
 carried on between the tribes without pity. 
 The victors killed off the defeated to the very 
 last man, and married the women. In that 
 way a cross-breeding favorable to the race 
 took place. That would be true but for one 
 condition, if there had been no killed among 
 the victors; which, we know from history, 
 never was the case. Certain encounters were 
 so desperate that the number of killed on 
 each side was equal; sometimes, in fact, 
 greater on the side of those that remained 
 masters of the field. Hence the number of 
 
22 PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 
 
 handsome men who could win women was 
 less after a battle than before. War, there- 
 fore, has always produced a selection for 
 the worse instead of for the better. 
 
 Besides, to kill all the defeated was impos- 
 sible. A number saved themselves by flight. 
 And soon the victors, instead of killing the 
 vanquished people, reduced them to slavery. 
 The slaves married and brought forth chil- 
 dren. War, after eliminating the braver, 
 permitted the weaker to live. It did not 
 bring about a favorable selection. 
 
 In our days the conquerors do not marry 
 the wives of the conquered. On the con- 
 trary, the hatred excited by conflicts prevents 
 marriage between the belligerents. The num- 
 ber of marriages between Frenchmen and 
 Germans is certainly less since 1870 than 
 before. Thus, the alleged benefit attrib- 
 uted to war in the period of savagery is 
 entirely absent in the period of civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 "The stronger, the healthier, the more 
 normally constituted a young man is," says 
 
PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 23 
 
 Ernst Haeckel, 1 " the more likely he is to be 
 killed by rifles, cannons, and similar engines 
 of civilization. " The recruiting officers are 
 pitiless. If a young man has the least phys- 
 ical defect, even so slight a thing as bad teeth 
 or poor sight, they reject him. The very 
 flower of each generation are chosen for the 
 butcheries. Wherein lies the favorable selec- 
 tion here? One must be quite prejudiced to 
 maintain that war nowadays improves the 
 race. 
 
 Napoleon caused the killing of 3,700,000 
 men. Who dares assert that those men had 
 the poorest constitutions? Everybody knows 
 they were the pick of Europe. After the 
 Paraguayan war " the virile population dis- 
 appeared almost completely. None remained 
 but the sick and the disabled." 2 Would it be 
 right to say that such a condition improved 
 the Paraguayan race? 
 
 One more point. In man the procreative 
 
 1 Natiirltche Schopfungsgeschichte, 4th ed., Berlin, 
 
 1873, P. 154. 
 
 2 E. Reclus, Nowvelle geographie universelle, vol. xix, 
 p. 503. 
 
\ 
 
 24 PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 
 
 passion reaches its culmination during the 
 very years he spends in the barracks. Surely 
 no one would say that the soldier in the army 
 has the same opportunity for bringing forth 
 children as the citizen at home. As a result, 
 at the very time when the select in a gen- 
 eration desire the most strongly to insure 
 progeny, they are prevented from doing so. 
 Those whom the recruiting officers reject, on 
 the contrary, have every opportunity to 
 propagate their kind. Their offspring be- 
 come more and more numerous, and through 
 militarism the races tend to degenerate not 
 only in times of war, but even in times of 
 absolute peace. 
 
 Other factors counteract and, in a large 
 degree, weaken the disastrous effects of war. 
 That is why we do not see the process of 
 degeneration in its general outline. 
 
 If wars perfect the races, then the most bel- 
 ligerent nations should be the handsomest. 
 But such is not the case. In fact, the con- 
 trary is true. The English are most cer- 
 tainly one of the handsomest people on earth. 
 
PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 25 
 
 They are also the least warlike, since they 
 alone, of all the European nations, have abol- 
 ished compulsory military service. 
 
 It cannot be denied that athletic exercise, 
 sports of all kinds, contribute to the improve- 
 ment of the animal man. They give strength 
 to the muscles and suppleness to the body, and 
 develop energy and endurance. In short, 
 they tend to perfect the individual physio- 
 logically. Now, in our days, a strange phe- 
 nomenon may be observed. The practice of 
 athletics may be said to be in inverse ratio 
 to militarism. In England sports are car- 
 ried on on an immense scale — the boat races 
 between the Oxford and Cambridge crews 
 are a national event — less so in the western 
 countries of the European continent, and al- 
 most not at all in Russia. When physical 
 exercise has been imposed upon a young man 
 by the brutal officer-teachers of our modern 
 armies, it inspires a disgust which clings to 
 him the rest of his life. 
 
 So we see that from a physiological point 
 of view war has never contributed to the im- 
 
26 PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS 
 
 provement of the human race. It has always 
 had the opposite tendency. If, nevertheless, 
 improvement has taken place, it was pro- 
 duced, not thanks to, but in spite of, war. The 
 principal factors of improvement are love 
 and death. 
 
 The handsomest men and women are most 
 likely to excite sexual passion, the ugly and 
 deformed less soy FVom this proceeds a fa- 
 vorable selection. \ In addition, the incapable 
 are thrown bajbk mto the lower classes of 
 society. \ Upon them are imposed the hard- 
 est, the tnost dangerous, and the least re- 
 munerative work. Since they have less com- 
 fort, mortality among them is greater than 
 among those who are better off. These two 
 factors constantly operate to eliminate the 
 physically inferior. The limited extent of the 
 present book prevents me from enlarging upon 
 this point. I will write of it in detail in a 
 special work. 
 
 J* ** * 
 
 » 
 
CHAPTER V 
 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 The greater number of wars have arisen 
 
 from a desire to app ropriate the wealth of 
 
 —— — ^ 
 
 others. Expeditions were conducted for ob- 
 taining chat tels^ then for obtaining land, fi- 
 nally for obtaining the jg roee ecU from taxes 
 levied upon entire nations. (The idea that 
 we can enrich ourselves more speedily by 
 seizing the possessions of our neighbors than 
 by working ourselves is one of the notions 
 most deeply embedded in the human mindi 
 It is so persistent that in our own days it is 
 accepted even by highly distinguished econo- 
 mists. " Since men are unequal in strength," 
 says Mr. de Molinari, 1 " the stronger 
 can seize upon the product of the weaker 
 men's work with less expenditure of labor 
 
 1 Science et religion, Paris, Guillaumin, 1894, p. 17. 
 
 27 
 
28 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 and energy than they would have to employ 
 if they themselves were to produce. " This 
 has never been so, or, rather, it has been so 
 in appearance, but not in reality. War has 
 always cost more effort than has direct pro- 
 duction. Besides, the trouble connected with 
 it easily vies with the nuisance of working. 
 (The profession of a soldier involving danger, 
 suffering, and fatigue, clearly, is one of the 
 hardest professions. So, since ancient times, 
 it has been held in horror by all men. As coon 
 as a man could get out of performing military 
 service he did so. Often nowadays people 
 mutilate themselves in order not to have to 
 become soldiers. Do we ever see a man cut 
 off a finger that he should not have to be a 
 locksmith, or a mason, or an engineer, or 
 a painter? Those trades and nearly all oth- 
 ers, we may then infer, are considered pleas- 
 anter than the soldiering profession. 
 
 But the annoyances produced by war do 
 not stop with the cessation of hostilities. The 
 dajL after the victory is harder, perhaps, than 
 the day of battle. Of old, one of the great - 
 
ECONOMIC EFFECTS 29 
 
 est advantages attached to ronquest seemed 
 to be the possibility of making slaves. Then, 
 thanks to the labor of the vanquished, the 
 master could live in idleness and pomp. 
 What, ostensibly, could be pleasanter? But 
 the reality was entirely different. In the first 
 place, sla ve la boris.less productive than free 
 l abon Experience a thousand times repeated 
 has proved that countries into which slavery 
 has been introduced do not prosper so well 
 as countries employing free labor. Our en- 
 joyment comes in the largest measure from 
 public wealth, that is, from the general wealth 
 of the country. Therefore, if the general 
 wealth increases less quickly, we suffer per- 
 sonal damage. But more than that. A 
 slave-master can do nothing all day, and his 
 life is none the pleasanter on that account. 
 The harder the work he imposes, the more 
 hate and resentment he inspires. Oppression 
 provokes private revenge and general re- 
 volts. From Pliny's letters we know that the 
 great Roman lords, even those who treated 
 their slaves humanely, lived in perpetual ter- 
 
30 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 ror of their lives. At any moment, they 
 feared, they might be assassinated. The 
 same condition prevailed in Russia in slave 
 times. Often when proprietors went on an 
 excursion in the country, they had to take an 
 escort along to guard them against their 
 peasants. Such an existence, it must be ad- 
 mitted, can have little delight. The feudal 
 lords of the middle ages were no more fortu- 
 nate. They lived in constant warfare and 
 despoiled their neighbors with the most 
 charming unrestraint. But, alas ! their lives 
 were none the gayer for that. They were 
 compelled to shut themselves up in strong 
 castles, which to us seem veritable dungeons. 
 When they sallied forth they had to be ac- 
 companied by an armed guard. They were 
 exposed to the constant threat of assault and 
 death. In my opinion, I confess, there must 
 have been slight enjoyment in an existence 
 of that sort. Nowadays a man would deem 
 himself profoundly miserable to live in the 
 same circumstances. Think of what a night- 
 mare it must have been not to be able to cross 
 
ECONOMIC EFFECTS 31 
 
 the threshold of one's home without seeing 
 death lift its head and stalk before. 
 
 Wealth 13 nothing but a means, enjoyment 
 the end. But, as we see, even if by war we 
 can get possession of the wealth of others 
 " with the least expenditure of labor and en- 
 ergy," we thereby obtain only a moderate 
 amount of enjoyment. 
 
 But the very assumption that by war we 
 wrest wealth with the least expenditure of 
 effort will not stand criticism. 
 
 Every enterprise presupposes an outlay; in 
 other words, capital. Capital represents ac- 
 cumulated work. If $20,000 are invested in 
 a factory, it means that previously men 
 worked a sufficient number of hours to earn 
 that amount of money, which they saved and 
 employed in the new undertaking. If the 
 capital needed for the factory is $10,000, 
 instead of $20,000, the smaller sum repre- 
 sents the work of half the number of hours. 
 
 Now, it is easy to prove that the jcapital 
 used in military enterprises always has been 
 greater tha n the capital for other enterprises. 
 
32 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 The more firmly men believed that war could 
 enrich with " the least expenditure of labor 
 and energy," the more they were drawn to 
 practise that industry, consequently, to or- 
 ganize it thoroughly, to provide it with the 
 most perfect equipment, in brief, to sink a 
 larger and larger capital in it. That is what 
 actually happened. In 1869 Laroque esti- 
 mated at 19,500,000,000 francs, that is, 
 $3,900,000,000, the value of the property, 
 real and personal, appropriated to war in Eu- 
 rope alone. 1 It is without doubt no exag- 
 geration to assume that that sum has been 
 tripled at the very least since 1871. But let 
 us be content to admit that it has merely been 
 doubled; in which case the amount would be 
 $8,000,000,000. But that is nothing. At 
 present the maintenance of European armies 
 costs $1,063,000,000 a year. 2 The money 
 must come from somewhere. It is produced 
 in the last analysis by the help of capital. 
 So it is right to regard it as interest. Capi- 
 
 1 La guerre et les armees permanentes, Paris, C. Levy, 
 1870, p. 246. 
 
 2 See the Riforma sociale, April, 1894, p. 251. 
 
ECONOMIC EFFECTS 33 
 
 talizing it, we obtain a principal approxi- 
 mating $21,200,000,000. Thus, the aggre- 
 gate of capitals used in military enterprises 
 amounts to $29,200,000,000. There is only 
 one other undertaking in the world that has 
 required a larger sum, the railways. War, 
 therefore, cannot enrich " with the least ex- 
 penditure of labor and energy," since the 
 capital employed in war is greater than that 
 employed in nearly all other undertakings. 
 
 This has always been so. Military equip- 
 ment diminished with the increase of security. 
 Toulouse no longer needs to defend itself 
 against Paris. So it is useless for Toulouse 
 to fortify itself against Paris, or Paris against 
 Toulouse. But of old, military equipment 
 was indispensable. Assu redly, wh en Italy 
 wa s divided up among a few dozen inde- 
 pendent states engaged in constant warfar e 
 with one another, the capital used for mili - 
 tary equipment mus t have b een greater in 
 proportion to the general wealth than it is 
 to-day. If to-morrow Europe were to unite 
 in a federation, the capital appropriated fqr 
 
34 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 war would be reduced in an enormous de- 
 gree. 
 
 Thus, not only has war never enriched 
 u with the least expenditure of labor and en- 
 ergy," but i tjias even decreased man's wel^ 
 fare. Wealth does not proceed from the pos- 
 session of precious metals or any other com- 
 modity, but from the degree of the earth's 
 adaptation to mankind's needs. Since 1648 
 war has cost the European nations alone 
 SS cooOiOOOiOdo. 1 It would not be exag- 
 gerating to say that in the entire historic 
 period war has cost at least ten times that 
 amount. Then, at the very lowest estimate, 
 war has cost in all $800,000,000,000. What 
 does that mean? It means that a certain 
 number of days of work, the money value of 
 which is equal to that sum, were employed by 
 men in killing one another. Suppose the 
 same effort had been expended in cultivating 
 the soil, irrigating the fields, weaving cloth, 
 building houses, leveling roads, channeling 
 harbors, and so on, is it not perfectly clear 
 
 1 §ee my Gas pillages des societes modernes, p. 165. 
 
ECONOMIC EFFECTS 35 
 
 that the world's face would be entirely dif- 
 ferent to-day? We should be at least ten 
 times as prosperous, or, in other words, the 
 sum of suffering would have been perceptibly 
 less for us unhappy beings. 
 
 Fortunately, one great point has already 
 been won. Nobody nowadays asserts that 
 
 * ' ' " ■*-- ■ i rr 
 
 war is lucrative. Formerly the opinion 
 
 i _ - — - "- i «» " *• ' ' * x 
 
 that war brought material benefits to 
 the victors was universally accepted. But 
 for two centuries the economists have 
 been fighting with indomitable energy to 
 prove that this notion is erroneous. They 
 have won their cause. Even Mr. de Mo- 
 linari's assertion, quoted at the beginning of 
 this chapter, has reference to the past and 
 not to the present. The Belgian economist 
 labors under a delusion: war never has been 
 lucrative, no more in the age of bronze than 
 in this year of our Lord. However, though 
 he makes this mistake in regard to the past, 
 no one has demonstrated more clearly how 
 ruinous war is in the present, despite the 
 most brilliant victories. No one denies this 
 
36 ECONOMIC EFFECTS 
 
 truth, not even Mr. Valbert, who takes pleas- 
 ure in enumerating the disasters produced by 
 the military spirit. It is just because par- 
 tisans of war have been beaten in this field 
 that they seek another. They fall back on 
 morality. I should really like to know what 
 there is in common between fierce, pitiless 
 butchery and morality. Yet, it appears, there 
 is something in common. Mr. Valbert says 
 so with truly praiseworthy assurance. " The 
 moralist is ready to grant all that [economic 
 losses], yet, no matter how great his respect 
 for figures, he reserves his judgment. The 
 question seems to him complex. Has it been 
 proved that certain plagues have not had 
 beneficial results? If it depended upon the 
 moralist to suppress war, he might hesitate, 
 perhaps." 1 He might hesitate, perhaps! 
 There you have it, black on white 1 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 695. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 One of the benefits attributed to war is 
 that it founded those great nations, England, 
 France, and Germany, which are such shin- 
 ing centers of civilization. 
 
 In the middle ages it was said that God 
 ruled the world through the intermediation 
 of the Franks, Gesta Dei per Francos. Now- 
 adays we believe that without the powerful 
 states of modern Europe science, the arts, 
 and literature would never have undergone 
 their magnificent development. Suppose war 
 in the past had been suppressed, what would 
 the world be? Nothing but a dust-pile of 
 little states, without cohesion, or force, or 
 elasticity, or consistency of ideas. Such a 
 formless chaos would mean primitive savag- 
 ery in all its hideousness and degradation. 
 
 Here we have a fallacy more monstrous 
 
 37 
 
38 POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 than any of the others. It is so foolish and 
 presupposes so complete an absence of logic 
 that one is positively stupefied to see it main- 
 tained for more than a day. 
 
 In the first place, what does national unity 
 mean — the national unity of France, for exam- 
 ple? It means that 38,000,000 men in- 
 habiting 536,000 square kilometres have 
 found a way of adjusting their differences 
 other than the beastly murder of one another 
 on fields of battle. Nowadays Paris, Lyons, 
 Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lille, and Toulouse no 
 longer wage war one against the other. If 
 they were to do so to-morrow, France's unity 
 would instantly cease. Until 1861 Virginia, 
 Kentucky, Ohio, and Massachusetts lived in 
 peace. When the Southerners raised the 
 standard of revolt and began hostilities, the 
 American Union was ruptured. It was re- 
 established and continued because the differ- 
 ences of the forty-six states, extending from 
 the Atlantic to the Pacific, are adjusted by 
 the Supreme Court at Washington, and not 
 by carnage on battlefields. 
 
POLITICAL EFFECTS 39 
 
 National unity, therefore, is established on 
 the day on which war ends. 
 
 Very well, you say, unity once established 
 implies a state of peace, but was not war the 
 instrument of its establishment? Never! 
 War has always prevented unity, has thwarted 
 and retarded it. 
 
 In the fourteenth century there were five 
 to six hundred independent states in Ger- 
 many, which constantly made war upon one 
 another, and Germany's unity disappeared al- 
 together. To restore it, it was necessary by 
 force of arms to compel all the petty poten- 
 tates to submit to a legal order, that is, to 
 live in peace. This benefit is attributed to 
 war. But no attention is paid to the fact that 
 it is precisely because those petty potentates 
 wanted to retain the right to wage war that 
 Germany's unity was unattainable for so 
 long a time. If after the tenth century the 
 different fractions of the German race had 
 not offered resistance to the establishment in 
 common of really efficacious institutions, 
 Germany's unity might have begun under 
 
4 o POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 Henry the Fowler and might have lasted to 
 the present. Hence, it was not war that pro- 
 duced Germany's unity. War prevented it for 
 nearly nine centuries. 
 
 That is true of all other communities. 
 11 No country," says Mr. Lacombe, 1 " had so 
 little militarism in the middle ages as Eng- 
 land." Consequently it was the first to unify, 
 while Germany's unity was the slowest of 
 all in forming, because even as late as i860 
 the kings of Hanover, Bavaria, and Saxony 
 wished to be free to declare war on their 
 neighbors when it seemed good to them to 
 do so. 
 
 There is another side to the question. The 
 French of northern France took forcible 
 possession of the land of the nation speaking 
 the langue d'oc. Finally they assimilated 
 them. The various southern dialects degen- 
 erated into the people's patois, and the langue 
 d'oil became the modern French, and was 
 raised to the dignity of a literary language. 
 French unity, then, was composed of two ele- 
 
 1 L'histoire consideree comme science, p. 349. 
 
POLITICAL EFFECTS 41 
 
 ments. It is thought it would never have 
 been formed without the crushing of the 
 southern element, and for that reason the ex- 
 istence of French unity is attributed to war. 
 
 To do justice to this point we must make 
 a slight digression. Let us suppose that 
 the Languedocian nationality had survived. 
 Where would be the harm forsooth? Euro- 
 pean civilization, the source of our chief en- 
 joyments, does not proceed from the fact that 
 English is now spoken by 110,000,000 men, 
 Russian by 80,000,000, German by 60,000,- 
 000, and French by 45,000,000. The pro- 
 portion might have been different without al- 
 tering the brilliancy of European civilization 
 for the better or the worse. Civilization is 
 not made by the relative number of spoken 
 languages, but by the sum of the scientific 
 knowledge and artistic treasures accumulated 
 by mankind. Europe is now divided into 
 eighteen main principalities. It might have 
 been divided into fifteen or, twenty-five, and 
 civilization would in no wise have been af- 
 fected. If, then, instead of five great Latin 
 
42 POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 nations we should have had six with the ad- 
 dition of the Languedocian, our wealth, our 
 prosperity, and our intellectual development 
 would not have suffered the least setback. 
 
 But the French are still deluded by the 
 belief that linguistic boundaries of necessity 
 follow political boundaries. The Hapsburg 
 dynasty founded the Austrian Empire at the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century by the ac- 
 quisition of Hungary and Bohemia. Never- 
 theless, in neither Hungary nor Bohemia is 
 German spoken as French is spoken in the 
 Provence. National assimilation is governed 
 by special factors. It is an intellectual phe- 
 nomenon that has its special laws. This, 
 however, is not the place to enter into an 
 examination of them. 1 Suffice it to say that 
 a language and a culture may be propagated 
 without the conquest of territories. Martin 
 Canal, in 1275, wrote a history of Venice in 
 French, because, he said, that language " est 
 mult delectable a lire et a oir " (is very pleas- 
 
 1 1 refer the reader to my Polittques Internationales 
 and my Luttes entre societes humaines. 
 
POLITICAL EFFECTS 43 
 
 ant to read and to hear) . But a little more, 
 and the whole of northern Italy would have 
 done the same as Canal. Dante's genius, 
 Petrarch's, and Boccaccio's assured pre-emi- 
 nence to the Italian language. Tuscany 
 never widened its boundaries beyond the con- 
 ventional limits, yet its language has be- 
 come the literary language of the Apennine 
 peninsula. Likewise Saxony never conquered 
 Germany, yet its dialect became the literary 
 language of that great country. On the 
 other hand, the Turks ever since the four- 
 teenth century have imposed their dominion 
 on the Balkan peninsula without succeeding 
 in imposing their language upon the Servians 
 or Bulgarians. So nothing shows that even 
 if southern France had not been conquered, 
 French would not have been spoken to-day at 
 Toulouse and Marseilles, just as it is at Brus- 
 sels and Geneva, cities which have not formed 
 a part of the kingdom of the Capets. 
 
 Brute conquest does not always result in 
 linguistic expansion, and even from this point 
 of view war is useless. It is not to 
 
44 POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 wholesale slaughter on fields of battle that 
 we owe the existence of those glorious 
 historic entities called England, Germany, 
 France, and Italy. It is to a galaxy of gen- 
 iuses and talents of all kinds, to Dante, to 
 Shakespeare, to Descartes, to Goethe, and 
 the rest. 
 
 Thus, not only has war not formed the 
 great national unities, but, on the contrary, 
 it has even retarded their political organiza- 
 tion by several centuries. 
 
 I call the attention of routine partizans of 
 brutality to another fact of infinitely greater 
 importance. Suppress war, and the unity of 
 the human race in its entirety is instantly re- 
 alized. Universal unity does not exist now 
 because Germany, France, Russia, and the 
 other states wish to remain free to declare 
 war whenever it seems good to them to do 
 so, like Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover within 
 the German nation, who not so long ago 
 wished the same thing for themselves. Let 
 the sovereign states renounce that liberty, let 
 them find a way of adjusting their differences 
 
POLITICAL EFFECTS 45 
 
 other than massacre — in brief, let them sup- 
 press war — and the unity of mankind is ac- 
 complished. 
 
 War, we see, for long centuries has pre- 
 vented the formation of the great national 
 unities. For more centuries to come it will 
 prevent the unity of all mankind. Conse- 
 quently, from a political point of view, as 
 well as from all others, it produces evil and 
 does not produce good. 
 
 In the preceding chapter we found that 
 wars must in all have cost $800,000,000,000 
 at the very least. That probably represents 
 approximately 4,000,000,000,000 days of 
 work. All that prodigious effort went to give 
 our continent the political boundaries now ex- 
 isting : that is, twenty- four independent states, 
 a France of 536,000 square kilometres, a 
 Germany of 540,000 square kilometres, a 
 Servia of 48,000 square kilometres, etc. 
 Now, all that effort has been as completely 
 lost as if it had gone to the rolling of the 
 rock of Sisyphus, or to filling the sieves of 
 the Danai'des. Man's welfare is not the 
 
46 POLITICAL EFFECTS 
 
 work of political divisions. Whether Europe 
 is divided into ten or into fifty states, it will 
 not be the more civilized or the more bar- 
 barous. Enjoyment proceeds from wealth, 
 which, in its turn, is nothing other than the 
 adaptation of the globe to our needs. Men 
 will remain poor and undergo infinite suf- 
 fering as long as they apply the greater part 
 of their efforts to a purely metaphysical task. 
 The idea that our happiness is in direct ratio 
 to the number of square kilometres in our 
 state is a pure abstraction. But our happi- 
 ness certainly does depend upon the amount 
 of international security we enjoy. It is a 
 common belief that the larger a state is, the 
 more powerful it is and the more able to pro- 
 vide security. That would be true if, while 
 our own state increased, the others remained 
 stationary. But such is not the case. They, 
 too, increase. Then, instead of diminishing, 
 the risks increase, because the encounter of 
 two enormous states like France and Ger- 
 many will certainly cause more disasters and 
 massacres than the encounter of two minor 
 
POLITICAL EFFECTS 47 
 
 states. Security, therefore, does not increase 
 in direct ratio to square kilometres, and 
 the prodigious effort expended for centu- 
 ries upon the aggrandizement of states, the 
 4,000,000,000,000 days of work devoted to 
 that end are absolutely and entirely lost. Se- 
 curity never will be obtained by war. It 
 will be obtained only by the suppression of 
 wan 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 " If the philanthropists were to succeed in 
 suppressing war, they would, with the best 
 intentions in the world, be rendering but a 
 poor service to mankind. They would by 
 no means be working for the ennoblement of 
 our race. Unending peace would plunge the 
 nations into dangerous lethargy." Thus Mr. 
 Valbert. 1 Melchior de Vogue says : " The cer- 
 tainty of peace (I do not say an actual state of 
 peace) would, before the expiration of half a 
 century, engender a state of corruption and 
 decadence more destructive of men than the 
 worst wars." This quotation is taken from 
 an article in the Almanack Hachette of 1894, 
 entitled " Our Future." The appearance of 
 this article is a very remarkable phenomenon. 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 692. 
 
 48 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 49 
 
 In their preface the editors say they wished 
 the Almanack to be of service to everybody, 
 and to be so useful as to become indis- 
 pensable. They wanted it to have the char- 
 acter of a small, popular encyclopedia. So 
 a great many copies were published. Evi- 
 dently the editors quoted De Vogue be- 
 cause they considered the opinion he ex- 
 pressed to be one of the truths that cannot be 
 disseminated too widely among the people. 
 From the mere fact of its publication in the 
 Almanack it acquires great importance for us. 
 
 It will not do to rest satisfied with words. 
 Let us examine facts, and see if they confirm 
 the opinion that war favors the development 
 of human intelligence and prevents mental 
 lethargy. 
 
 Men have always tried to improve their 
 condition. They have pursued agriculture 
 in order not to suffer hunger, they have built 
 houses to protect them against cold. Briefly, 
 they have constantly tried to adapt their en- 
 vironment to their needs. When certain in- 
 dividuals have been freed from concern for 
 
50 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 their daily bread, they have turned to the 
 arts, or literature, or science, or philosophy. 
 A natural inclination leads from economic 
 production to intellectual production, that is, 
 to civilization. This evolution presupposes 
 a sufficient degree of security. For if man 
 had been perpetually despoiled by his neigh- 
 bor, wealth could not have accumulated, and 
 intellectual needs could not have arisen. 
 Thanks to certain fortuitous circumstances, 
 it has come about that some countries have 
 enjoyed sufficient security for a sufficient 
 length of time for civilization to progress 
 and, in some places, to become brilliant. But 
 all the nations did not advance at an equal 
 pace. While some made great progress in 
 technical knowledge, in literature, science, 
 and the arts, others lived in savagery or bar- 
 barism. The latter, consumed with envy at 
 the sight of the enjoyments of the civilized 
 peoples, often attacked and slaughtered them 
 without mercy. This happened time and 
 again in both hemispheres. In America, in 
 regions now occupied by entirely savage In- 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 51 
 
 dians, we find the remains of monuments 
 showing that of old a civilized people had 
 lived in the country. 
 
 If there had been no war, it is clear, such 
 events would never have come to pass. How 
 can the periodic massacre of more educated 
 and cultivated people by the more savage and 
 ignorant people favor the development of the 
 human mind? I for my part do not see how 
 it possibly can. Why should there have been 
 more light in Europe after a stupid Ro- 
 man soldier murdered Archimedes than there 
 had been before? I should like the partizans 
 of slaughter to answer that question. As a 
 matter of fact, human civilization grew, not 
 because of, but in spite of, war. 
 
 Reduce war to its simplest expression. X 
 and Y have a dispute. X does not succeed 
 in convincing Y. X gets angry, attacks Y, 
 and kills him. Recourse to murder is per- 
 force a reaction of the brute against the mind. 
 This is true, and will continue to be true, of 
 all wars. Barbarians see the life of a 
 civilized people. They desire the same ad- 
 
52 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 vantages. The intellectual procedure would 
 be for them to produce wealth and educate 
 themselves. The brutal procedure consists 
 in practising spoliation by violence, that is, 
 in practising war. On the instant that war 
 breaks out, instead of two groups working 
 to acquire a superior civilization, only one 
 pursuing that end remains. Therefore, be- 
 ginning with the moment that hostilities com- 
 mence, the sum of intelligence in humanity 
 decreases. 
 
 War has always produced selection for the 
 worse, not for the better. Its tendency has 
 been to destroy communities more especially 
 devoted to mental pursuits. Like the north 
 wind, it has blown away some of the most 
 delicate and sweetest-swelling flowers of man- 
 kind, Athens and Florence. Those marvelous 
 centers perished from the blows of a base, 
 brutal soldiery. Here we have an instance 
 of how war furthers the development of the 
 intelligence ! 
 
 "It would seem," says Mr. E. Perrier, 1 
 
 1 Philosophic zoologique, Paris, Alcan, 1884, p. 17. 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 53 
 
 " that after Aristotle, science, which he had 
 set upon the right path, had nothing to do 
 but to continue along that path. We should 
 expect to see a marvelous scientific efflores- 
 cence follow upon the appearance of that 
 great man. Unfortunately, the political di- 
 visions, the wars, the invasions would not 
 allow the continuation of the work begun in 
 the East." The same is true of all times. 
 The wars of the Revolution and the Empire 
 caused a period of considerable arrestment 
 to the intellectual development of Europe. 
 The impulse given by the encyclopedists was 
 weakened. Peace was needed before any ad- 
 vance could be made again. 
 
 If war favored the activity of the mind, 
 the most warlike people would be endowed 
 with the most advanced scientific spirit. His- 
 tory demonstrates that the very reverse is 
 true. War produces a selection for the worse. 
 It has never favored the intellectual devel- 
 opment of humanity. No more has it pre- 
 vented mental lethargy. On the contrary, it 
 has always increased it. 
 
54 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 In the sixteenth century the Flemings 
 embraced Protestantism. The Spaniards 
 thought that abominable. Suppose they had 
 sent forth a multitude of preachers to Bel- 
 gium to bring back the stray sheep. What 
 activity, what an intellectual ebullition would 
 have taken place there! The Spaniards 
 would have preached in the churches, they 
 would have held lectures, debates, great mass- 
 meetings. They would have published nu- 
 merous writings. The Flemings would have 
 done the same. Discussion would have 
 sharpened their wits. And the Spaniards 
 either would have been able to convince the 
 Flemings of the falseness of Protestantism, 
 or they themselves would have gone over to 
 the new ideas. Both events would doubtless 
 have arisen, and theological discussions would 
 have kept the people in a lively mental state 
 for many years. The study of one science 
 brings in its train the knowledge of others. 
 To find arguments for or against Catholicism 
 one must have made profound historic and 
 philosophic investigations. Briefly, a great 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 55 
 
 intellectual blossoming would have taken 
 place in the Netherlands, and the country 
 would have become the arena of immense in- 
 tellectual activity. 
 
 But Philip II did not for a single instant 
 think of using persuasion. In a dispute in 
 regard to something intellectual he did not 
 wish to employ intellectual methods. He 
 sent out troops, and carried on a war. 
 Thanks to the defection of the Walloon no- 
 bility, the old Spanish troops beat the Flem- 
 ings in the open country. Then the Duke of 
 Alba came. He massacred, hung, tortured, 
 and exiled thousands of persons. Terror 
 hovered over those wretched provinces. The 
 whole country sank into a state of dismal 
 mental lethargy. The generous Flemish folk 
 fell into so heavy a sleep that they have 
 scarcely succeeded in rousing themselves even 
 to this day. From this we can see how war 
 prevents people from succumbing to " dan- 
 gerous lethargy." The apologists of slaugh- 
 ter should be satisfied with that proof. We 
 know, alas ! that what took place in the Neth- 
 
56 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 erlands in the sixteenth century has been re- 
 peated on a thousand other occasions. 
 
 In our day war is still one of the most 
 powerful causes of mental stagnation. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the more costly war 
 becomes, the more necessary large political 
 unities are to bear the expense. In our days 
 a state with fewer than 30,000,000 to 40,- 
 000,000 inhabitants survives only by the tol- 
 erance and rivalry of its more powerful 
 neighbors. A country cannot have a truly 
 independent policy unless it has a yearly 
 budget of $400,000,000. Now, many tax- 
 payers are needed for such a huge sum to be 
 raised annually. So we are forced to draw 
 together into large states of at least 500,000 
 square kilometres. What happens then? A 
 vast capital attracts all the living forces of 
 a nation. It becomes a disproportionate, 
 monstrous head. The rest of the country is 
 drained of its blood. The provinces! The 
 very word evokes in France the idea of un- 
 bearable boredom, of a torpidity resembling 
 vegetable existence. Lately a French scholar 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 57 
 
 complained of not being able to live in even 
 the largest provincial cities. They offered 
 him none of the resources indispensable to 
 the study of his specialty. The same is the 
 case in many other countries. Now, it is to 
 war that we owe that adorable lethargy. 
 Without war the leviathan states would 
 have been useless. As long as Italy and Ger- 
 many were divided into petty sovereignties, 
 they were the sport of their powerful neigh- 
 bors, France, Austria, Russia. Italy and 
 Germany had to swim with the current; they 
 unified themselves. Without war federations 
 of little states would have been formed, in 
 which a wise and harmonious balance would 
 have been established between the institu- 
 tions maintained in common and the local 
 autonomy. But war intervened to disturb 
 all that. Two things happened: either the 
 petty potentates refused to give up the right 
 to declare hostilities — in which case national 
 unification was not achieved — or the danger 
 from the outside and the royal power were 
 the incentives to the establishment of a cen- 
 
58 INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 
 
 tralized government, which wiped out all 
 traces of life in the minor centers. Lethargy 
 was in direct ratio to international insecurity. 
 
 Moreover, when the army becomes a na- 
 tion's chief organ, it naturally absorbs the 
 most of its best nutritive substance. Com- 
 pare the army budget with the public edu- 
 cation budget. In France the proportion is 
 890,000,000 to 227,000,000 francs; in Rus- 
 sia, 736,000,000 to 58,000,000. At present 
 armed peace costs the Europeans $2,000,- 
 000,000 a year. Free the Europeans from 
 that burden and they will doubtless devote 
 a very much greater sum to their intellectual 
 development. 
 
 Ceaseless warfare must certainly engender 
 hatred between the combatants. Since the 
 alien was always the one who harmed us, he 
 was always treated with hostility. He was 
 refused legal protection and civil privileges. 
 That state of things in a great degree pre- 
 vented men from living outside their father- 
 lands. War, therefore, set up the most diffi- 
 cult obstacles to a mixture of populations. 
 
INTELLECTUAL EFFECTS 59 
 
 Now, as we know, the crossing of races is 
 a most powerful agent for their improve- 
 ment, and the spread of ideas is a chief pre- 
 ventive of intellectual stagnation. Since war 
 in a large measure hindered migrations, it has 
 contributed here also to the retardation of 
 humanity's progress. 
 
 To sum up, war is a selection for the 
 worse, which destroys the more cultivated 
 and leaves the more barbarous. It has al- 
 ways held back mental progress, and at this 
 very day it increases mental stagnation. So 
 I do not see how it can " ennoble " our kind 
 by preventing us from " falling into dan- 
 gerous lethargy." 
 
$JW 
 
 
 t* 
 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 The apologists of war extol its moral 
 benefits above any of the others. 
 
 11 Peace would produce corruption," says 
 De Vogue. Mr. Valbert is more explicit: 
 " In peace man belongs to himself. He 
 knows no other law than his personal in- 
 terest. He no longer has any other occupa- 
 tion than to seek his own good. The* great- 
 est virtue is self-abnegation, the spirit of self- 
 sacrifice, and it is in armies during war that 
 that virtue is practised. It is not only the indi- 
 viduals whom war ennobles, but also the en- 
 tire nation." * 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 696. The motive dictating these words is 
 perfectly comprehensible. There are individuals in 
 France who from sheer epicureanism would be quite 
 willing to give up Alsace-Lorraine. They say: "Pro- 
 vided we have a good dinner and all sorts of pleasure, 
 nothing else counts for much." All the dithyrambs in 
 
 60 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 61 
 
 Errors so manifest cannot be maintained 
 except by the one-sided fallacy. Let 
 us take the assailant's point of view. As a 
 matter of fact, it is always the assailant who 
 must be considered, since without attack there 
 is no need for defense. As soon as we do 
 this, the falsity of Mr. Valbert's proposition 
 becomes apparent. 
 
 Say to a nation: " Arm yourselves to your 
 teeth. Invade the country of your peaceful 
 neighbors. Murder a goodly number of them 
 on the battlefield. Then, after having con- 
 quered them, seize booty, impose heavy trib- 
 utes, confiscate their lands, lay hold of the 
 revenues from their taxes, live like parasites 
 on the product of their toil. If the van- 
 quished speak a language different from your 
 own, stunt their intellectual development by 
 
 favor of war are a reaction against such tendencies. 
 I am entirely of the same opinion as Mr. Valbert. If 
 those dastards were to triumph, if France gave up Alsace- 
 Lorraine, she would soon share Poland's fate. The 
 French (and all other people) should vindicate their 
 rights with their last drop of blood. So, what I write 
 does not refer to those who defend their rights, but to 
 those who violate the rights of others, in this case, not 
 the French, but the Prussians. 
 
62 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 the most violent despotism. If your new 
 subjects profess a religion different from your 
 own, treat them with intolerance. Deprive 
 the heterodox of their civil and political 
 rights, inflict the severest trials upon them, 
 expel them en masse. Then we shall see all 
 the virtues flourish in your midst, self-abne- 
 gation and the spirit of self-sacrifice. You 
 will be regenerated and ennobled." 
 
 Who would venture to uphold a proposi- 
 tion so paradoxical ? All the acts I just men- 
 tioned are the consequence of war. How can 
 robbery, parasitism, intolerance, despotism 
 ennoble communities? How can the practice 
 of those crimes develop all the virtues? 
 
 Let us abandon metaphysics and a priori 
 reasoning. Let us use the empirical method 
 in regard to social phenomena, just as it has 
 been used for so many years in regard to 
 physical phenomena. If war ennobles, then 
 the most warlike nations should be the most 
 moral, the peaceful nations the most corrupt- 
 Do facts confirm that proposition ? Nowhere 
 and never. From 1494 to 1559 almost con- 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 63 
 
 stant warfare reddened Italy with blood. Do 
 we find, as a result, that all the virtues flour- 
 ished there? On the contrary, immoral- 
 ity and licentiousness assumed more dread- 
 ful proportions than ever. It was then 
 that such monsters as Pope Alexander 
 VI and his noble son Caesar Borgia lived. 
 Those wars and the awful anarchy that 
 resulted from them degraded the Italian 
 character to so low a level that more than 
 two centuries were needed for dignity, mag- 
 nanimity, and love of country to reassert 
 themselves in even a slight degree. That is 
 how war ennobles the nations. In the Orient 
 the same causes produced the same effects. 
 In the eighteenth century India was in a 
 state similar to that of Italy in the sixteenth 
 century. It was divided into a number of 
 principalities, the chiefs of which had no 
 other concern than to increase their terri- 
 tory. Complete anarchy prevailed. There 
 were perpetual wars, and military expeditions 
 for spoil were an organized industry. Ac- 
 cording to Mr. Valbert, India must have pre- 
 
64 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 sented the spectacle of all the virtues. Alas ! 
 with all due respect to Mr. Valbert, it was, 
 on the contrary, a sink of all the vices. In- 
 dian society had been so corrupted by the 
 ceaseless wars that, after a hundred years of 
 the wise, healing administration of the Eng- 
 lish, scarcely any individuals out of a popu- 
 lation of 287,000,000 to-day possess the feel- 
 ing of honor or loyalty. Examples could be 
 multiplied. What happened in India has also 
 taken place in other countries in similar cir- 
 cumstances. 
 
 Now, as to the effect of peace. There 
 are four European nations which have com- 
 pletely renounced the idea of conquest on the 
 European continent: the English, the Dutch, 
 the Belgians, and the Swiss. Since they no 
 longer think of conducting offensive warfare, 
 they are absolutely pacific. According to Mr. 
 Valbert and those who believe like him, they 
 should constitute the scum of humanity. But 
 with all due regard to the gentlemen, the very 
 reverse is the case. The Swiss even offer an 
 extreme example in proof of this. In the six- 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 65 
 
 teenth century no war took place in the Oc- 
 cident without the participation of the Swiss. 
 They were the most bellicose people of Eu- 
 rope. Everybody knows they were also the 
 most corrupt. 
 
 Let us now take up another of Mr. Val- 
 bert's propositions. " War gives communi- 
 ties salutary instruction. A great German 
 moralist defined war as ' a cure by iron which 
 strengthens humanity/ and through the gen- 
 erosity of fate, this cure is more beneficial 
 to the conquered than to the conquerors, who, 
 infatuated by their glory, readily imagine 
 that everything is permissible and possible 
 to them." 
 
 Here again Mr. Valbert falls into the mis- 
 take of one-sided reasoning, which is all the 
 more curious, since he himself notes it. 
 
 If a nation undergoes a defeat, another na- 
 tion, necessarily, carries off a victory. If 
 war regenerates the first, it corrupts the sec- 
 ond. So the devil loses nothing. Sedan 
 obliged the French u to pass judgment upon 
 themselves, to see themselves as they are, to 
 
66 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 reproach themselves for their mistakes, to 
 examine their own conscience, in order to 
 prepare themselves for useful penitence and 
 upliftment." * Jena produced the same ef- 
 fect upon Prussia. But, on the other hand, 
 a result of Jena was to " infatuate " the 
 French, and of Sedan to infatuate the Prus- 
 sians. After 1806 we have a virtuous Prus- 
 sia and a degenerate France. After 1871 we 
 have a virtuous France and a degenerate 
 Prussia. Where is the gain to humanity? 
 
 But neither does the assertion that defeat 
 always regenerates communities withstand 
 criticism. 2 The Byzantine Empire attained 
 the culmination of its power under Herac- 
 lius, who conducted a brilliant campaign 
 against Persia. He penetrated to countries 
 where the legions of Crassus and Trajan had 
 never set foot. Soon after, the Arabs ap- 
 peared. The Byzantines were beaten. At 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 696. 
 
 2 Strange reasoning forsooth ! According to this we 
 should always desire defeat. Sometimes after typhoid 
 fever, it is said, a man feels better than he did before. 
 Is that a reason for desiring typhoid fever? It may re- 
 generate, but, we forget, it often kills the patient, 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 67 
 
 a stroke they lost half their empire, all of 
 Syria and Africa. Since that time until the 
 taking of Constantinople by Mohammed II 
 the balance-sheet of the Byzantine wars 
 shows a deficit. The Greeks of the Eastern 
 Empire underwent frightful defeats. Has 
 Greece been elevated on that account? Has 
 it given itself a better organization? Has it 
 subjected itself to that self-examination 
 which prepares them " for useful penitence 
 and upliftment "? We scarcely hear any- 
 thing at all of Greece since the fall of the 
 Eastern Empire. 
 
 The same may be said of the Turks. From 
 John Sobieski to the present they have re- 
 ceived the hardest lessons. It is difficult to 
 count the number of battles in which they 
 were soundly beaten. Nevertheless, the or- 
 ganization of the Turkish empire is as 
 wretched to-day as it was in the seventeenth 
 century; in fact, in many respects more 
 wretched. Then, where is the " great uplift- 
 ment " ? And Louis XV's government, was 
 it any better after than before the battle of 
 
68 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 Rosbach? Who would venture to say it 
 was? 
 
 The truth is, certain nations rise after a 
 defeat as others continue to progress after 
 a victory — a fact depending upon extremely 
 numerous and complex causes which it is im- 
 possible to enter into in this short work. 
 Sometimes defeat may be a factor of prog- 
 ress, but it is very foolish and superficial rea- 
 soning to attribute the upliftment of nations 
 to war alone. 
 
 The apologists of bloodshed forget a 
 further extremely important fact. There are 
 not only partial defeats, but also total de- 
 feats. In 1856 Russia lost 1/1840 of her 
 territory, in 1871 France 1/38 of hers. 
 Those wounds were bearable. Regeneration 
 was possible. But the Greek nation passed 
 entirely under the Ottoman yoke; the Irish, 
 under the English yoke. The whole of Po- 
 land was divided among its three neighbors. 
 Now, as has long been admitted, political 
 servitude develops the greatest defects in the 
 subjugated peoples — hypocrisy, treachery, 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 69 
 
 mendacity, baseness. The Bengalis, whom 
 we discussed in Chapter II, were completely 
 corrupted as a result of the successive inva- 
 sions of their country. If the upliftment of 
 a few nations may be posted on the debit side 
 of war's ledger, we must post the complete 
 demoralization of many other nations on the 
 credit side, and the balance-sheet will cer- 
 tainly show a loss. The elevation of senti- 
 ments in humanity is equal to a sum X, 
 from which the degradation produced by 
 violence and tyranny, that is, by war, 
 must be deducted. The subtraction is 
 formidable. 
 
 After a conquest the selection for the 
 worse continues to operate with redoubled en- 
 ergy. Upon this point Mr. Vaccaro speaks 
 very discerningly. " The victor, to assure 
 himself of the obedience of the vanquished, 
 persecutes and maltreats them. He even exe- 
 cutes the strongest, the bravest, and most in- 
 domitable, while he allows the weaker, the 
 more cowardly, the more obedient to live. 
 Since these, to the exclusion of the others, 
 
70 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 beget children, the sentiments of baseness and 
 servility become fixed in the race." 1 
 
 Here we note an illogicality to which the 
 nations said to be civilized, unfortunately, 
 are well accustomed. The subjugated peo- 
 ple are scorned because of their vices, and 
 because they are scorned they come to be 
 hated. The Russians profess profound con- 
 tempt for the Poles, similarly all Christians 
 profess profound contempt for the unfortu- 
 nate Jews. Nevertheless, there was so simple 
 a way of not degrading them — to respect 
 the independence of the Poles, and not to 
 refuse civil and political rights to the Jews. 
 But no, for eighteen centuries we have been 
 maltreating the Jews most barbarously. They 
 have fallen into disgrace. We hate them for 
 that, instead of hating ourselves for having 
 disgraced them. What admirable logic ! To 
 be angry with the victims and not with the 
 executioners ; with the corrupted and not with 
 the corrupters. 
 
 1 La lutte pour V existence dans rhumanite, Paris, 
 Chevalier-Maresq, 1892, p. $1. 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 71 
 
 From Buddha's times to ours we have 
 preached a great deal on morality by book 
 and by word of mouth. The precepts have 
 always been formulated, as it were, in the 
 active voice: " Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt 
 not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, 
 etc." The moralists have always had in eye 
 the man who performs an act, not the man 
 who is the object of that act; which is wholly 
 logical, since the conduct of the object is con- 
 ditioned by the conduct of the performer. 
 But as soon as international relations come 
 into question, common sense disappears as by 
 magic. War is collective murder. Never- 
 theless, it is overwhelmed with encomiums, 
 wonderful virtues are attributed to it, solely 
 because, thanks to an incomprehensible fal- 
 lacy, only those nations are had in mind which 
 are the victims of attack, not those which com- 
 mit them. We willingly concede to the apol- 
 ogists of war that to defend one's rights at 
 the risk of one's life, or even to lose one's 
 life in doing so, is the most admirable con- 
 duct imaginable. My warmest sympathy 
 
72 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 goes out to those noble victims who preferred 
 death to disgrace. Yes, war might produce 
 morality, but on the one condition that com- 
 munities could defend themselves without be- 
 ing attacked. 
 
 Another argument. If the 8,000 wars of 
 the historic period could not make us moral, 
 what chance is there that the eight thousand 
 and first will effect that result? 
 
 Can the apologists of war deny that blood- 
 shed produces international hatred, and in- 
 ternational hatred produces the most baleful 
 evils? Does it not set the greatest obstacle 
 in the way of a mixture of races and the 
 propagation of ideas? Is it not the most ac- 
 tive cause of our backwardness and mental 
 stagnation? Is it not war that has turned 
 Europe into an intrenched camp and a mine 
 of dynamite ? Is it not war that has plunged 
 us into the sad state in which we are to- 
 day? " Too much gall has gathered among 
 the European nations for them to be able 
 to think of disarmament," says the Moscow 
 Gazette. 
 
MORAL EFFECTS 73 
 
 Such reasoning is really remarkable! Ac- 
 cording to the Moscow journalist, disarma- 
 ment is impossible because a new war is in- 
 evitable. It will be the crudest war that his- 
 tory has ever noted in its annals, the horrible 
 encounter of 12,000,000 men, armed with 
 the most powerful engines of destruction. 
 The victims will be numberless. If hostili- 
 ties continue only a few months, it will be by 
 the hundreds of thousands that they will have 
 to be counted. 
 
 But no matter how awful the carnage, 
 there will be conquerors and conquered. The 
 latter will nurse vengeance in their hearts. 
 Does the Moscow journalist seriously think 
 that after the hideous butchery of the future 
 war, passions will by an incomprehensible 
 miracle subside forever? No, they will be 
 livelier than ever. After each defeat hatred 
 becomes stronger and bitterer. The Ger- 
 mans have not forgotten the burning of the 
 Palatinate. Then what is the meaning of the 
 sentence, " Too much gall has gathered to 
 permit disarmament " ? Ten times as much 
 
 \ 
 
 A 
 
74 MORAL EFFECTS 
 
 gall will gather after another war, cruder 
 than all preceding. What sort of a future 
 do the conservatives dream of? Pitiless, end- 
 less bloodshed? And is it by bloodshed that 
 they count upon regenerating the human race 
 and making it moral? As well count upon 
 petroleum to extinguish a conflagration. 
 
 To sum up, war, an appeal to brute force, 
 is always a degradation, a descent into the 
 animalism that demoralizes the victors, as 
 well as the vanquished. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 SURVIVALS, ROUTINE IDEAS, AND 
 SOPHISTRIES 
 
 It is necessary to kill a living being for 
 food, and man has had to make war upon 
 plants and animals. Sometimes, when those 
 sources of supply failed him, he attacked his 
 own kind, and practised cannibalism. Some- 
 times, too, he had to kill in order not to be 
 eaten himself, and he therefore conducted 
 long wars of extermination against animals 
 to whom he might serve as prey. During the 
 period of the struggle for food massacre is 
 indispensable, since it is the very aim and 
 purpose of the fight. Now, that period 
 lasted hundreds of thousands of years, dur- 
 ing which man grew accustomed to think of 
 killing as the one procedure of fight. 
 
 Later, when foodstuffs became more abun- 
 
 75 
 
76 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 dant as a result of cattle-raising and agricul- 
 ture, man began to covet the possessions of 
 his neighbors. From that time date our eco- 
 nomic and political wars, the razzias, the per- 
 manent tributes, the conquests. Because from 
 the remotest periods man was accustomed to 
 procure food by war, he thought war the 
 quickest and most effective way of increas- 
 ing his wealth. The day came when needs 
 of an intellectual sort asserted themselves, 
 and since all men could not think alike, dif- 
 ferences of opinion arose. As a result of an 
 acquired habit, they fancied that massacre 
 was the best means of conversion, as they 
 had thought it the best means of obtaining 
 food. 
 
 We no longer share the delusions of our 
 coarse ancestors. We know war does not 
 enrich the victors, we know we cannot work 
 on man's conscience by material means, we 
 know that in order to combat an opinion we 
 must set up another opinion in opposition to 
 it. We know all that, but, alas! the ancient 
 ideas imbedded in our brains for long gen- 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 77 
 
 erations are not easily uprooted. The ineffi- 
 cacy of war for settling economic, political, 
 and spiritual questions is evident; but we per- 
 sist in our timeworn ways, and continue from 
 tradition to use that method. 
 
 In reality the civilized peoples to-day con- 
 duct wars simply because their savage an- 
 cestors did so of old. There is no other rea- 
 son. It is a case of pure atavism, a survival, 
 a routine. From sheer spiritual laziness they 
 will not abandon their accustomed habits. 
 Then, because the idea of carrying on war 
 without any motive is revolting to them, they 
 erect theory on theory, system on system to 
 justify it. 
 
 With war it is the same as with the classic 
 languages. Latin used to be the literary and 
 scientific instrument of Europe. People 
 learned it for the same reason that a Celt 
 in Brittany now learns French. Greek litera- 
 ture contained a mine of delights and scien- 
 tific information. In the fifteenth century 
 Greek was studied for the same reason that 
 a Russian to-day studies French. All that is 
 
78 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 past, but the routine remains. Averse to 
 change our old methods of instruction, we 
 have tried to justify them by the most extraor- 
 dinary sophistries. Thus, one fine day, we 
 discovered that the study of Greek and Latin 
 is an excellent intellectual exercise, that it de- 
 velops the reasoning faculty, and is a power- 
 ful instrument of culture. Of old, Greek 
 and Latin were means to an end. As soon 
 as they ceased to fulfil that function, they 
 were raised to the dignity of ends in them- 
 selves. 
 
 The same in the case of war. For centu- 
 ries men waged war to acquire wealth and 
 honor. When it became evident that war 
 impoverished the victors as well as the van- 
 quished, the most remarkable virtues were 
 ascribed to it. Sophistries fairly rained down 
 — war makes nations moral, bloodshed pre- 
 vents intellectual stagnation, and so on. It 
 is noteworthy that all the benefits attributed 
 to war were discovered after the event, ex- 
 actly when public opinion turned away from 
 it. The very same thing happened as with 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 79 
 
 Latin. When the study of Latin became 
 superfluous, its magical virtues were dis- 
 covered. 
 
 Thus, these sophistries ring hollow and so 
 can ill resist criticism. 
 
 War is analogous to crime, and crime is 
 a desire become a passion, which does not 
 recoil even before murder. If crime is an 
 evil, why should war be a good? Murder 
 is war between individuals. Unfortunately, 
 private murder, it is to be feared, will 
 never cease. But no one extols it, no one 
 discovers in it a means for making people 
 moral. Similarly, civil wars are not recom- 
 mended, though they, too, are inevitable. It 
 is simply in the case of the foreigner that 
 massacre is productive of all the virtues. But 
 that word foreigner is absolutely conven- 
 tional. In the fourteenth century the in- 
 habitants of the 650 states of Germany con- 
 sidered one another foreigners. A prince had 
 two sons, and divided his realm between 
 them. Thenceforward the subjects of the 
 elder became foreigners to the subjects of 
 
80 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 the younger. If the prince had had only 
 one son, they would have remained compa- 
 triots. Then, how can collective murder be 
 rendered beneficial by a mere chance of suc- 
 cession? Of old, the Germans of Austria, 
 the Czechs, and the Magyars regarded one 
 another as foreigners. In 1526 Ferdinand I 
 was selected king of Bohemia and Hungary, 
 and forthwith those races became fellow- 
 countrymen. To-day the French and the 
 English are foreigners to each other. If to- 
 morrow it would please them to form a po- 
 litical union, they would instantly become 
 compatriots. Do differences in language 
 make foreigners? If so, a Breton would not 
 be a Frenchman. There is not a single great 
 state in Europe in which several languages 
 are not spoken, languages sometimes widely 
 remote in origin from one another, like the 
 Basque and the Spanish. The Basque is not 
 even an Aryan tongue. There is more kin- 
 ship between Spanish and Russian than be- 
 tween Spanish and Basque. This example 
 shows that various languages may be spoken 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 81 
 
 without the compulsion arising for men to 
 fall upon one another like wild beasts. 
 
 I repeat, the word foreigner is purely con- 
 ventional, and when the apologists of war 
 assert that war produces all the virtues be- 
 cause it is waged against the foreigner, I 
 ask, then, first of all for an absolutely clear 
 and precise definition of that word. 
 
 With war it is the same as with another 
 fallacy of the human mind, protection. If 
 duties increase wealth, why not establish 
 them, for example, between New York and 
 Pennsylvania just as they are established be- 
 tween New York and Germany? Similarly, 
 if war is beneficial, if it " gives men the op- 
 portunity to perform feats of heroism, self- 
 denial, and devotion," why not wage war be- 
 tween subjects of the same country? Civil 
 war can develop all those virtues as well as 
 international war. 
 
 Now let us consider the sophistries of the 
 apologists of bloodshed from a strictly moral 
 point of view. 
 
 Folly, crime, and vice exist. Therefore, 
 
82 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 they " conform to the order of things estab- 
 lished by God," as Von Moltke said. Never- 
 theless, nobody delights in, nobody honors, 
 and nobody covers with blessings folly, crime, 
 and vice. Nobody tries to prove that they 
 maintain the human virtues. On the contrary, 
 people try to fight them down in every con- 
 ceivable way. X does not succeed in con- 
 vincing Y. He attacks Y, and kills him. 
 We consider that act hideous so long as it 
 occurs between individuals. But if it were 
 a collective act, we should fall into a delirium 
 of admiration. What enthusiasm the cru- 
 sades of the Spaniards against the Moham- 
 medans arouse in us ! 
 
 War, the apologists say, evokes heroism 
 and great devotion. They do not perceive, 
 in arguing in that way, that the necessity for 
 heroism, like the necessity for charity, is 
 highly regrettable. It would be a thousand 
 times better if all men were rich and provi- 
 dent and never had need of help. Who 
 would be so silly as to recommend that each 
 year several thousand individuals be ruined 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 83 
 
 in order that saintly charity should have the 
 opportunity to perform its admirable minis- 
 trations? Has any one ever recommended 
 that cholera or diphtheria germs be spread 
 so that physicians should have the chance to 
 give proof of their devotion to humanity? 
 What fool would suggest that a few hundred 
 houses be set on fire every year for the fire- 
 men to be able to show their heroism and 
 not let that virtue atrophy among them? 
 
 Those compassionate persons who deprive 
 themselves of many joys to help their fel- 
 low-men, the Sisters of Charity, the physi- 
 cians, the firemen, who save the lives of oth- 
 ers by sometimes sacrificing their own, de- 
 serve our liveliest gratitude and admiration. 
 But we should wish that they never had the 
 occasion to perform their services. For a 
 long time we have been doing everything to 
 render their work needless. This line of ar- 
 gument unqualifiedly applies to war. The 
 soldier who dies for his country commits a 
 most praiseworthy deed. But we should wish 
 that he never had the opportunity to do so. 
 
84 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 To preach war in order to secure that op- 
 portunity to him is folly, pure and simple. 
 
 Another virtue has been attributed to war, 
 that of preventing over-population. Of all 
 the sophistries this is the most upside-down. 
 A woman brings a child into the world, 
 suckles him at her breast, rears him in love. 
 He receives a good education, to defray the 
 expenses of which his family does its ut- 
 most. At the age of twenty-one he and the 
 other finest young men of the generation are 
 chosen for war and sent to be butchered in 
 order to prevent over-population. Is not that 
 pure madness? If we actually were suffering 
 from over-population, would it not be bet- 
 ter to abstain from having children than to 
 kill off the flower of each generation in that 
 barbarous fashion? 
 
 Some years ago, anarchists threw bombs 
 in several European cities. They said they 
 were angry at our rotten society and would 
 regenerate it with dynamite. What chiefly 
 outraged the world in theis savage deeds is 
 the fact that innocent persons were in- 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 85 
 
 jured. But war has always had the same 
 effect. 
 
 Napoleon III, his satellites, his low, servile 
 legislature were corruption personified. Ac- 
 cording to Mr. Jahns, Mr. Valbert, and their 
 like, Sedan was a means of regenerating all 
 of them. 1 But, alas! how many thousands 
 of victims, the bravest men in the land, fell 
 in that battle! Peasants who had worked 
 from morning to evening, good fathers who 
 had loved their children, who had econo- 
 mized every penny, and had prepared the 
 true greatness of the country. The vulgar 
 herd of courtiers, who had instigated the 
 butcheries, suffered no harm, and after the 
 signing of the peace they again took up their 
 life of pleasure and dissipation. That is how 
 war makes the people moral. It sacrifices the 
 innocent, and spares the culpable. If the 
 apologists of bloodshed find this means ef- 
 ficacious, we congratulate them upon it with 
 perfect sincerity. 
 
 1 Upon the mere formulation of such a statement we 
 see its absolute fallaciousness. 
 
86 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 According to Mr. Valbert, if it depended 
 upon a moralist to suppress war, he might hesi- 
 tate perhaps. Strange ! Why not say the same 
 of plagues, epidemics, cholera, earthquakes, 
 cyclones, droughts ? There is not a man alive 
 in his good senses, the most ordinary man, 
 who would not, if he could, suppress all those 
 evils at one blow. War is the privileged 
 plague. While we curse the others, we bless 
 war and find great virtues in it. When na- 
 ture destroys men and wealth, we deem it a 
 calamity. When men rabidly annihilate and 
 impoverish one another we deem it a fortu- 
 nate event. The reader may say I am ob- 
 tuse, but I frankly admit I am utterly in- 
 capable of grasping that point of view. It 
 is the same with war as with protection. 
 When high prices are natural, they are an 
 evil, and everything is done to fight them. 
 Roads, canals, railroads, and machines of 
 every sort are constructed. But when high 
 prices are artificially produced by customs 
 duties, they are considered good. 
 
 Let any one who wishes explain such cu- 
 
SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 87 
 
 rious logic. As for myself I am completely 
 at a loss. With my natural candor I 
 aver I have a very individual way of re- 
 garding the plagues that torment humanity. 
 We may call upon the earth not to quake, 
 the volcanoes not to belch their lava, the 
 winds not to blow away the fertilizing rain- 
 clouds. But to what purpose? Cruel na- 
 ture is deaf to our adjurations. So we bow 
 our heads and patiently endure the inevitable 
 scourges. But when scourges are produced 
 by creatures endowed with reason, who could 
 perfectly well prevent the infliction of them, 
 I can only feel thoroughly indignant and dis- 
 gusted. Yes, forsooth, war deserves a privi- 
 leged place among the plagues that torment 
 humanity, but a place at the very opposite 
 end from the one it has been assigned. It 
 should be a hundred times more execrated 
 than drought, or cholera, or tuberculosis, be- 
 cause on the very day we take measures to 
 suppress it, it will disappear. 
 
 Civil law punishes instigation to murder. 
 Those who vaunt the benefits of war insti- 
 
88 SURVIVALS AND SOPHISTRIES 
 
 gate to murder. Without doubt, they do so 
 in good faith, and we do not ask the law to 
 punish them. But they are vicious persons 
 and should be pinned in the pillory of pub- 
 lic opinion, exposed to execration and shame. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 The external world produces sensations in 
 us which in our nerve centers turn into per- 
 ceptions, images, ideas, sentiments, desires, 
 and passions. When the phase of desire is 
 reached, an action generally takes place. 
 In the phase of desire the mind is for a time 
 still master of itself. It chooses its means, 
 takes present attendant circumstances into 
 consideration (for instance, the interests of 
 human beings), or future circumstances an- 
 ticipated. But if the external sensation 
 reaches the phase of passion, the mind is car- 
 ried away completely and annuls all resist- 
 ance. Then man, in order to realize a de- 
 sired end, recoils before no means, not even 
 the sacrifice of his fellow-beings. To kill is 
 
 both an individual and a collective act — in 
 
 89 
 
9 o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 the first case being called murder; in the sec- 
 ond, war. 
 
 There are three critical moments in a mur- 
 der — the desire, whatever it may be; the con- 
 viction that the desire can be realized only 
 by a man's death, and the accomplishment of 
 the deed. 
 
 The same phases exist in collective mur- 
 der — a lust for something enkindled in a 
 group (the desire to acquire wealth, land, 
 honors, and so on), the conviction that 
 the end desired can be attained only by 
 battles, and, finally, the commencement of 
 hostilities. 
 
 But in collective murder matters are con- 
 siderably complicated. Each man at each 
 instant has his own special desires. To pro- 
 duce an act in common those desires must be 
 co-ordinated. Hence the initiative of an in- 
 dividual is indispensable to the origin of 
 every collective act. A man conceives an un- 
 dertaking for spoliation. He looks about for 
 companions to help him. He becomes the 
 head of a band and recruits troops for a mili- 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 91 
 
 tary expedition. During a certain phase of 
 society war is always a private affair. 
 
 But how is it that the chief always finds 
 companions? Every living creature dreads 
 death. How is it that persons will expose 
 themselves to it quite willingly? Here an- 
 other factor enters, hope. Each person be- 
 fore a fight knows that inevitably somfc will 
 fall, even among the victors. But who will 
 fall? Each man thinks his fellows will, not 
 himself, and so enlists under the standard of 
 the chief. In other words, he does not sac- 
 rifice his life, but risks it for the sake of 
 obtaining certain advantages. If volunteers 
 were all as certain of being killed as a con- 
 vict is of being executed, the number of wars 
 would be infinitely less. 
 
 When the modern states were organized 
 and the standing armies established, wars 
 ceased to be private enterprises. The right 
 to declare war became the monopoly of the 
 governments. 
 
 Far-reaching changes then took place in 
 the play of interests. The soldier who had 
 
92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 quite voluntarily enrolled under a chief's 
 standard had had the consciousness of advan- 
 tages to be derived from doing so. He some- 
 times stipulated in advance what the advan- 
 tages should be. But when war came to be 
 monopolized by the heads of a state, the ad- 
 vantages to a soldier ceased to be apparent. 1 
 To get men to decide to fight it is necessary 
 to employ an amount of complex measures 
 which Tolstoy very accurately describes as 
 the hypnotization of the masses. A number 
 of institutions — the Church, the school, and 
 many others — lay hold of a man when he 
 leaves the cradle, and impress certain special 
 ideas upon him. He is made to believe that 
 it is to his interest to be ready at any mo- 
 ment to throw himself upon his fellow-beings 
 and massacre them. He is made to believe 
 that his happiness is in direct ratio to the size 
 of the state. One of the most effectual ways 
 of keeping up the military spirit is to repre- 
 
 1 Because they no longer exist in reality. Some in- 
 dividuals may derive benefits from a war, but entire 
 nations never. On this point see my Gaspillages, chap- 
 ter xiii. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 93 
 
 sent to people that they are always on the 
 defensive and their neighbors alone are ag- 
 gressors. That illusion has taken hold of 
 all the nations. 
 
 A few examples: — Several years ago an 
 anonymous writer very clearly showed the 
 French point of view in an article in the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes of February 1, 
 1894, La paix armee et ses consequences. 
 " In 1 863," the writer says, "Europe was 
 happy. It seemed to be on the eve of the 
 era of international fraternity. People saw 
 the time when all the nations of Europe 
 would vow unalterable affection for one an- 
 other. The state of things was truly idyllic. 1 
 But Bismarck appeared! He treacherously 
 attacked Denmark, next Austria, and finally 
 France. Then Europe became an armed 
 camp, a mine of dynamite. Farewell to the 
 
 1 One fact will show how fanciful this picture is. At 
 that time a number of French patriots were dreaming 
 of the conquest of the Rhine frontier lands. Ger- 
 many and Belgium were living in a state of perpetual 
 fright. The hegemony of France under Napoleon III 
 weighed as heavily as that of Prussia to-day. 
 
94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 beautiful dreams of love! Farewell to the 
 idyll ! Prussia, whose ' national industry is 
 war,' was the great disturber of peace, the 
 great criminal." 
 
 Let us cross the Rhine into Germany. 
 Here we hear a different tune. " We Ger- 
 mans are the most peaceable people in the 
 world. We do not want to take anybody's 
 land [except Alsace-Lorraine]. If it de- 
 pended upon us, Europe would be enjoying 
 absolute peace. But, then, there's the Gallic 
 Cock and the Russian Bear. Neither will 
 keep quiet, and we are forced every year to 
 equip new regiments." Some time ago a Ger- 
 man author showed that France was the eter- 
 nal obstacle to disarmament, and he proposed 
 to divide it into several states forming a fed- 
 eration. 1 In that event alone could our un- 
 fortunate continent finally draw its breath in 
 peace. 
 
 The author of a pamphlet published in 
 
 1 The clever journalist forgets "to light his lantern," 
 like the monkey in the fable. He does not once stop to 
 consider whether the French would consent to such a 
 combination. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 95 
 
 Germany * asks if peace is possible in Europe 
 so long as a Russia exists. Many Germans de- 
 clare that in order to obtain peace the bar- 
 barous Muscovites must be thrust back to the 
 steppes of Siberia. 2 
 
 Now let us cross the Niemen. " We are 
 gentleness personified," say the Russians. 
 " But the road to Constantinople leads 
 through Berlin. Germany prevents us from 
 accomplishing our historic mission. Through 
 sheer jealousy it thwarts the realization of 
 our national program, and infringes upon our 
 most sacred rights. It is Germany that at- 
 tacks, we merely defend ourselves." 
 
 Thus, everywhere we see the same thing. 
 Each nation imagines itself to be the per- 
 sonification of virtue. Each nation, as Mr. 
 Jahns would have it, pretends it wages none 
 but defensive wars. 
 
 It is time to eradicate such fatal errors. 
 The great European nations should subject 
 
 1 Was will das Volk? Weder Krieg noch Militarismus. 
 
 2 To obtain this result it would be necessary to form 
 a European federation without Russia. The Germans, we 
 must realize, would hardly take that step. 
 
96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 their consciences to a severe examination. 
 They would then perceive that they are all 
 equally violent and equally brutal. 1 The pol- 
 icy of each one of them prevents the happi- 
 ness of millions of human beings. 
 
 No, our neighbor is not the sole aggressor. 
 We, too, are aggressors. It is not true that 
 we confine ourselves to self-defense. No, we 
 violate the rights of others, just as others 
 violate our rights. 
 
 When these truths will have penetrated 
 into the minds of the masses, militarism will 
 have seen its last days. At present, in fact, 
 war can possess advantages — I refer, also, 
 even to purely imaginary advantages — for 
 only a very small number of individuals. If 
 the masses agree to wage war, it is because 
 they think it is simply a defensive war. Dis- 
 pel that illusion, and no one would go to 
 battle. 
 
 The people hate war. There is not a man 
 
 1 Except France at present. In demanding a plebiscite 
 in Alsace-Lorraine the French merely upheld their rights 
 and made no attack upon the rights of any one else. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 97 
 
 in ten thousand who would willingly, for 
 pleasure, enter a campaign. This has always 
 been so. To be sure, the Romans may be 
 considered to have been a warlike nation. 
 Augustus was the first to close the Temple of 
 Janus. But even in the time of the Repub- 
 lic the vacatio militaris, exemption from mili- 
 tary service, was granted as a reward. Be- 
 ginning with Marius, conscription (dilectus) 
 had to be given up. The rich refused to 
 serve. So, we see, war was dreaded even by 
 the most warlike people on earth. In the 
 early middle ages all free men were soldiers. 
 But, it seems, that did not greatly amuse them, 
 because after the fifteenth century standing 
 armies had to be created. If war had been a 
 pleasure, men would have been enthusiastic to 
 rally about the royal standards. That such 
 was not the case is evident from the fact that 
 conscription was introduced. 
 
 As for modern times, it may be stated 
 without fear of error that from the Ural 
 Mountains to the Atlantic, the Europeans 
 have the utmost horror of conscription and 
 
98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 war. Nobody would consent to be a soldier 
 if he were not certain of being punished for 
 refusing to serve. It is less vexatious to be 
 a soldier in England than anywhere else ; yet, 
 since the Crimean War, " the average num- 
 ber of deserters from the English army has 
 never been less than one-fifth of the recruits. 
 Sometimes as many as one-half have de- 
 serted." * 
 
 No person on awaking in the morning 
 thinks of going to break his fellow-men's 
 heads. A man merely tries to increase his 
 prosperity according to his ability. I can 
 give material proof of this. Have we ever 
 seen a people petition for war? They accept 
 it because they think it inevitable, but they 
 always go against their will. 
 
 Thanks to the perfected organization of 
 modern societies, an order emanating from 
 the cabinet can in a few hours set a nation 
 of 100,000,000 souls astir. Sometimes or- 
 ders are given odious to the great majority of 
 
 *E. Reclus, Nouvelle geographie universelle, vol. iii, 
 p. 881, 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 99 
 
 citizens, who nevertheless obey them as a re- 
 sult of social reflexes. The custom of obey- 
 ing the head of the state has become so much a 
 matter of second nature that the idea of re- 
 sistance has completely disappeared. 
 
 The social organization permits certain in- 
 dividuals, very few in number, to decide the 
 fate of the largest states. To obtain mate- 
 rial advantages or to satisfy their self-love, 
 those individuals sometimes bring about the 
 bloodiest wars. Assuredly the French never 
 had a thought of making the expedition into 
 Russia in 1812. 1 But Napoleon wanted it. 
 The German producers and laborers cer- 
 tainly never thought of invading France in 
 1870. But the three boon companions — 
 Moltke, Von Roon, and Bismarck — wanted 
 to invade France. 
 
 A happy combination of circumstances has 
 been produced and still exists. No minister 
 is great enough to create his own policy. The 
 
 1 The intention to wage this war was kept a secret. 
 When the emperor left Paris to begin the campaign, the 
 Moniteur merely announced that he was going to inspect 
 the Grande Armee, then assembled at the Vistula. 
 
ioo THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 
 
 monarchs of the large European nations are 
 too imbued with humanitarian sentiments to 
 start the most awful wars in order to expe- 
 rience some of those delicious emotions that 
 victory bestows. None of them is selfish 
 enough to inflict horrible sufferings upon mil- 
 lions of human beings for the satisfaction of 
 his self-love. 1 
 
 Since neither the people nor the monarchs 
 desire war, it would seem that the nations 
 could disarm and form the United States of 
 Europe. Why do they not? There is only 
 one reason, but that a powerful one — ROU- 
 TINE, convention. 
 
 This, I know, will seem paradoxical to 
 many of my readers. But it is upon mature 
 reflection that I am led to propound that 
 proposition, and I think, sooner or later, it 
 will be accepted by all enlightened minds. 
 
 Yes, alas ! War will be waged in the fu- 
 
 1 Emperor William II said to Jules Simon in March, 
 I890: "Your army is prepared. It has made great 
 progress. . . . That is why I should regard any one 
 who would drive the two nations to war as a simpleton 
 or a criminal," 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 101 
 
 ture simply because it was waged in the past. 
 The future battles of the Europeans will be 
 frightful holocausts offered to SAINT 
 ROUTINE. 
 
 At present many questions are still unde- 
 cided. But every man endowed with ordi- 
 nary common sense understands perfectly 
 well that they can be settled without the least 
 difficulty by arbitration or the plebiscite. If 
 we reject these means and prefer battle, we 
 do so, I repeat, for only one reason — because 
 in the same circumstances our ancestors de- 
 clared war, and we have to do the same that 
 they did. Our ancestors considered it shame- 
 ful to give a country its independence with- 
 out shedding blood. So we must also con- 
 sider it shameful. A still small voice cries 
 to us from every corner that it is not shame- 
 ful, that the oppression of foreign nations is 
 shameful, base, contrary to our interests. Yet 
 we stifle that blessed voice of healthy rea- 
 son to listen to the voice of our preferred 
 fetich, SAINT ROUTINE. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 WAR CONSIDERED AS THE SOLE 
 FORM OF STRUGGLE 
 
 The apologists of war are quite right in 
 this, that struggle is life. Struggle is the ac- 
 tion of the environment upon the organism 
 and the reaction of the organism upon the 
 environment, therefore a perpetual combat. 
 Absolute peace would be the suppression of 
 that motion: that is, it would be a pure ab- 
 straction, since matter is one and the same 
 thing as motion, or dynamics, and we distin- 
 guish between them by a subjective operation 
 of the mind. 
 
 Man will cease to struggle the day his de- 
 sires cease, which is tantamount to saying the 
 day he dies. As soon as conflict stops, stag- 
 nation and death set in. " Cemeteries are 
 really the one place in the world where per- 
 petual peace reigns." * 
 
 1 Valbert, ibid., p. 69a. 
 102 
 
WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 103 
 
 Without struggle and antagonisms socie- 
 ties would indeed fall into a state of som- 
 nolency, of most dangerous lethargy. That 
 is perfectly true, but the great mistake con- 
 sists in considering war the sole form in which 
 humanity's struggle manifests itself. 
 
 Confusions of the same sort are numerous. 
 The most eminent philosophers declare that 
 some day the universe will reach absolute 
 equilibrium. That state of things is repre- 
 sented as the absence of all motion. Now, 
 equilibrium merely signifies constancy of the 
 trajectories. If to-morrow the earth began 
 to revolve at the rate of 50 kilometres a 
 second, the day after at the rate of 10 kilo- 
 metres, and the third day at the rate of 100 
 kilometres, the solar system would be in a 
 state of non-equilibrium. But if it continues 
 to revolve with its normal velocity of 29 
 kilometres per second, the system remains in 
 equilibrium. Equilibrium may be a quality 
 of any degree of velocity, no matter how 
 great. 
 
 Similarly, the most heated conflicts may 
 
104 WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 
 
 agitate humanity. Activity, feverish doings 
 may go on everywhere all the time, every 
 moment of the day, and yet it is unnecessary 
 for men to kill one another on fields of bat- 
 tle, like wild beasts. It is easy to demon- 
 strate that the intensity of motion would be 
 in direct ratio to the infrequency of blood- 
 shed. In fact, war produces anarchy and dis- 
 order, which bring on intellectual stagnation, 
 and intellectual stagnation is the mini- 
 mum of cerebral motion, or cerebral dy- 
 namics. In a state of order and justice — 
 that is, in a state of peace — the mind soars 
 on its highest flights; which means that the 
 velocity of cerebral action increases. 
 
 The main error, then, arises in a confusion 
 of war with struggle, whereas war is merely 
 a means, a procedure for attaining certain 
 ends. Now, this truth long ago took form in 
 customary modes of expression, in which the 
 loftiest intellectual speculations of a given 
 community manifest themselves. 
 
 I shall take a few phrases at random, the 
 first my eyes fall upon. " When Mr, 
 
WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 105 
 
 Casimir-Perier descends from the tribune, the 
 government will have won the battle, and 
 Mr. Millerand will enter only to cover the 
 retreat." * Speaking of the government of 
 the radicals, Mr. de Marcere says that " it 
 produced in the relations between the citizens 
 and the state, or between the representatives 
 of the state and the citizens, and even among 
 families, a condition of intestine war and an 
 unwillingness to make mutual concessions, 
 which caused France to resemble a multitude 
 of hostile camps." 2 Recently Mr. Philippe 
 Gill published a book entitled La bataille 
 litterahe ("The Literary Battle "). " Each 
 chapter deals with one of the forms of the 
 struggle in which we take part — the fight of 
 the idealists against the naturalists, the fight 
 of the spiritualists against the romanticists, 
 of paradox against reason." 3 The reader 
 knows without my saying so that in all the 
 contests mentioned in these quotations not a 
 single drop of blood was shed. 
 
 1 Journal des Debats, May 9, 1894. 
 
 2 Nouvelle Revue, May i, 1894, p. 8. 
 z Ibid., May 15, 1894, P- 453* 
 
106 WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 
 
 Twenty times a day we use similar expres- 
 sions. What does that show? Simply that 
 the wisdom of the nations long ago discov- 
 ered the elementary truth that war aiming at 
 the conquest of territory is not the sole form 
 of struggle in human groups. It takes on 
 a great number of other forms. But, the 
 reader will say, your axiom is the asses' 
 bridge. Exactly. That is the very point I 
 wished to reach. Is it not strange that so 
 simple an idea, one so widely spread, should 
 not have struck the apologists of war? 
 
 The idea of diversity in struggle is as trite 
 as the idea of the division of labor. Division 
 of labor began in the remotest periods, in 
 the age of stone, when man went hunting and 
 marauding, and woman cooked. Besides, 
 man need merely look upon his own body to 
 see division of labor practised on an immense 
 scale. The hands and feet perform distinctly 
 different functions. The ears cannot see, 
 nor the eyes hear. All that should be sug- 
 gestive, should it not? Nevertheless, the 
 first thinker who realized the importance of 
 
WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 107 
 
 division of labor and studied it scientifically 
 was Adam Smith in the second half of the 
 eighteenth century. Thus, a fact observed 
 thousands and thousands of times in the 
 course of ages was not fully comprehended 
 and did not become part of our con- 
 scious thought until the year 1776 of our 
 era. 
 
 Man is a very complex being. He feels 
 the need for food, the desire to reproduce, 
 he feels economic, political, intellectual, and 
 moral needs. Each of these needs impels 
 him to act. When he encounters resistance, 
 arising either from his physical environment 
 or from causes of a different sort, or from 
 his fellow-men, he feels like overcoming 
 them. To do so most rapidly and effectu- 
 ally, the employment of different methods is 
 expedient, work, violence, persuasion, etc. 
 
 Now, the routine thinkers of the school of 
 Mr. Jahns and Mr. Valbert do not under- 
 stand that elementary truth. They fancy 
 that the one struggle there is in society aims 
 at the annexation of one's neighbor's lands, 
 
108 WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 
 
 and that the sole method of fighting is to 
 murder on battlefields. 
 
 Such narrow-mindedness is all the more as- 
 tonishing in the French author, because his 
 country is now a center of extremely heated 
 contests which are not carried on by the 
 method of butchery. In the first place, there 
 is the economic struggle, which Socialism 
 has made so serious. Then there is the 
 conflict of free thought with the Catholic 
 Church, which assumed so acute a form 
 under the radical government. Finally, 
 there is the question of assimilating the 
 12,000,000 Languedocians, Flemings, Celts, 
 etc., with the dominant nationality. In Al- 
 geria, besides, the French are striving to 
 Gallicize the Arabs. How is it that Mr. 
 Valbert does not see all those facts? 
 
 Conquest, then, is not the sole object of 
 struggle, and war is not the one method. It 
 may even be said that war, or murder, is not 
 really effectual except in the physiological, or 
 food, struggle. X is hungry. He can find 
 no food. He throws himself upon Y, and 
 
WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 109 
 
 kills and eats him. That is a cruel, but a 
 rational act. If we did not wage war upon 
 the vegetables and animals, if we did not 
 murder them, it would be impossible for us 
 to live. But once the physiologic stage has 
 been passed, war is an ineffectual method. 
 The economic struggle has wealth for its ob- 
 ject. As soon as w r ar is employed, so far 
 from increasing we diminish wealth. The 
 aim of the intellectual struggle is to lead 
 other men to think like myself. As soon as 
 war is used as a method of conviction, so far 
 from hastening we retard the spread of 
 ideas. 1 
 
 When the idea of the diversity of social 
 struggles will have formed part of our con- 
 scious thought, when it will have become 
 public property, men will be amazed to see 
 how it remained unrecognized so long. Alas ! 
 the asses' bridges are sometimes the hardest 
 to cross. We may say that all scientific en- 
 
 1 The limitations of the present work do not allow of 
 the elaboration of this point. I refer the reader to my 
 Luttes entre societes humaines. 
 
no WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE 
 
 deavor is directed toward bringing certain 
 truths to be classed among those of the cele- 
 brated Monsieur de La Palisse. 
 
 La Palisse lacked prosperity, 
 
 He barely kept alive. 
 
 But when he had things in plenty, 
 
 He then began to thrive. 
 
 That seems undeniable, does it not? I 
 shall proceed to present to the reader an- 
 other, still more amazing truth, also unrec- 
 ognized for thousands of years and still de- 
 nied by a very large number of people, 
 u wealth cannot be increased by being de- 
 stroyed." Most assuredly Monsieur de La 
 Palisse would turn in his grave if he heard 
 this. As I showed in a previous chapter, 
 within historic times man destroyed the value 
 of $800,000,000,000, always in the delusion 
 that the destruction would increase his 
 wealth. If men were only to regulate their 
 conduct according to La Palisse's truth, that 
 wealth cannot be increased by destroying it, 
 nobody would again wage a war of conquest, 
 since men would understand that wars im- 
 
WAR AS SOLE FORM OF STRUGGLE in 
 
 poverish the victors as well as the vanquished. 
 When will that happy moment come? 
 
 The same conditions prevail in the other 
 human struggles. They have many objects, 
 and the effectualness of methods of fighting 
 vary according to the end in view. When 
 men adjust their conduct to that elementary 
 truth, the face of the world will be com- 
 pletely changed. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 
 
 Darwin's genius produced a profound 
 revolution in all the sciences. A veil fell 
 from before our eyes. Facts observed for 
 centuries over and over again were for the 
 first time interpreted in a scientific way. We 
 saw that each tree, each blade of grass fights 
 with its neighbor for the nourishing elements 
 of the earth and the sun's light. We realized 
 that each insect, each animal can live only by 
 destroying other living beings. The idea of 
 struggle was soon transferred from biologic 
 phenomena to all others. We saw that strug- 
 gle was the universal law of nature. Atoms 
 contend with one another to form chemical 
 substances. The nebulae and the stars vie 
 for the matter spread in the celestial spheres. 
 The cells of our body are engaged without 
 
 112 
 
THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 113 
 
 cease in a furious conflict. The ideas in our 
 brain struggle for ascendency one over the 
 other. In short, we find tension and effort, 
 the manifestation of eternal energy, every- 
 where. Through Darwin our conception of 
 the universe has been entirely changed. From 
 something static it has become dynamic. 
 
 As every political reaction runs beyond 
 its goal, so every new theory leads some 
 minds too far in one direction. The truer it 
 is, the more impetuous its current. It sub- 
 merges everything. It prevents us from tak- 
 ing account of certain phenomena which are 
 of the utmost importance. 
 
 Social phenomena are not absolutely iden- 
 tical with biologic phenomena. They present 
 a number of new factors not to be neglected. 
 Because massacre is the method most fre- 
 quently employed in the struggles between ani- 
 mal species, it does not necessarily follow that 
 it must be employed by the human species, 
 too. Besides the physiological struggle, hu- 
 manity has economic, political, and intellec- 
 tual struggles, which do not exist among ani- 
 
ii4 THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 
 
 mals. It may even be stated that the physio- 
 logical struggle, the dominant form in the 
 animal kingdom, has ended among men, since 
 they no longer eat one another. 
 
 This is something that certain theorists 
 have not understood. Fascinated by the Dar- 
 winian ideas, they have accepted them blindly 
 without perceiving the modifications they un- 
 dergo in the social environment. 
 
 The " Origin of Species " was first pub- 
 lished in 1859. A few years later, thanks to 
 the appearance of the great political " gen- 
 ius," Bismarck, Europe underwent a period 
 of comparative barbarization. That narrow- 
 minded Prussian provincial, stony-hearted 
 and ambitious as Napoleon, adored nothing 
 but brute force. He knew of no other way 
 to fight than with the sword. He proclaimed 
 that the bayonet exceeds the law and that 
 everything in the world should be accom- 
 plished by blood and iron. His prestige in 
 Germany was immense. He was idolized like 
 a demi-god. The tokens of servile adulation 
 with which he was overwhelmed in his coun- 
 
THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 115 
 
 try show better than anything else the degra- 
 dation of a vast number of the German 
 people. 
 
 Darwin incorrectly interpreted on the one 
 side, and Bismarck's prestige on the other, 
 combined to produce a new school of theo- 
 rists who have remade history after their 
 fashion. In order to undertake an investi- 
 gation, men must necessarily have a precon- 
 ceived idea. As a result they see things not 
 as they actually are, but as they would have 
 them. That is why the confirmation of the 
 oddest systems hatched by the most grotesque 
 imaginations is read into history. 
 
 A professor of the University of Gratz, 
 Mr. Gumplowicz, in 1883, published a work 
 entitled Der Rassenkampf (" Race Wars "), 
 in which the tendencies of the theorists of 
 brute force are very clearly shown up. Ac- 
 cording to Mr. Gumplowicz, mankind has a 
 polygenist origin. Each race comes from a 
 distinct stock. Consequently, antagonism and 
 hatred have always existed among the human 
 races, and will continue to divide them to the 
 
u6 THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 
 
 end of time. " The perpetual struggle of 
 the races is the law of history," Mr. Gumplo- 
 wicz concludes, " while perpetual peace is 
 nothing but the dream of the idealists." A 
 disciple of his, Mr. Ratzenhofer, condenses 
 his theory to a single proposition, " The con- 
 tact of two hordes produces rage and terror. 
 They throw themselves upon one another in 
 a fight to exterminate, or else they avoid 
 contact." x 
 
 Until now it was believed that men fought 
 their fellows in order to obtain food, women, 
 wealth, the profits derived from the posses- 
 sion of the government, or in order to impose 
 a religion or a type of culture. In all these 
 circumstances war is a means to an end. The 
 new theorists proclaim that this is all wrong. 
 Men must of necessity massacre one an- 
 other because of polygeny. Savage car- 
 nage is a law of nature, operating through 
 FATALITY. 
 
 That is very fine. But let us see if these 
 
 1 We sen und Zweck der Politik, Leipsic, Brockhaus, 
 1893, vol. i, p. 9. 
 
THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 117 
 
 grim theories can hold their own when con- 
 fronted with facts. 
 
 In 1865, 132 Welsh disembarked at Golfo 
 Nuevo in Patagonia. They set to work, but 
 the crops were poor, and the little colony came 
 near starving. " Fortunately, on their first 
 meeting with the native Indians, the Tehuel- 
 Che, they had entered into friendship with 
 them, and the Indians gave them food, bring- 
 ing them game, fish, and fruits in exchange 
 for some small articles of English manufac- 
 ture." 1 Can one imagine two more dissim- 
 ilar races than the Celts from Wales and the 
 Tehuel-Che of Patagonia? And I ask Mr. 
 Ratzenhofer how it is that upon their first 
 meeting the two races did not throw them- 
 selves upon one another and fight " a fight 
 to exterminate " ? I answer, because the al- 
 leged fatality of such a conflict is a purely 
 metaphysical creation. Every living being 
 pursues joy and not struggle. The contact 
 of two hordes may produce the most dis- 
 
 1 E. Reclus, Nouvelle geographic universelle, vol. xix, 
 P- 753. 
 
n8 THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 
 
 similar results, hostility as well as amity. 
 That depends upon the interests involved and 
 thousands of fortuitous circumstances. 
 
 If I were not afraid of wearying the 
 reader, I should cite facts to prove that on 
 numerous occasions the first contact of two 
 very different races has been peaceful, like 
 that of the Welsh and the Tehuel-Che. It 
 could not be otherwise. If the theories of 
 Mr. Gumplowicz and Mr. Ratzenhofer were 
 true, the very foundations of psychology 
 would be overturned. We should have to 
 concede that there are actions unaccompanied 
 by volition. When man attacks a creature of 
 his own or of a different kind, he always does 
 so in obedience to a desire to acquire some 
 good or defend himself against some evil. 
 But the " fight to exterminate " of two hordes 
 would be an act without an object, therefore 
 a psychologic impossibility. The mere ap- 
 pearance of an alien does not always consti- 
 tute an injury in itself. Without doubt 
 misoneism, the tendency to consider every- 
 thing new as disagreeable, is undeniably a 
 
THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 119 
 
 trait of human beings. But, on the other 
 hand, the existence of philoneism, the very 
 opposite tendency, is also not to be denied. 
 It, too, is an essential trait. Monotony pro- 
 duces boredom, genuine suffering. The cases 
 in which foreigners are well received are just 
 as numerous as those in which they are not. 
 
 That is why, I must repeat, the contact of 
 two social groups may produce the most un- 
 like consequences, alliance as well as conflict. 
 No grim FATALITY obliges us to massacre 
 one another eternally like wild beasts. All 
 the theories based on that alleged fatality are 
 pure phantasmagorias absolutely devoid of 
 all positive reality. 
 
 At this point I must bring up another 
 error which has been the cause of much abuse 
 lately — the alleged race wars. They, too, 
 are mere creations of the fancy. Until now 
 there have been no race wars, for the simple 
 reason that the races have not been conscious 
 of their individuality. When the wars for 
 political domination took place between two 
 linguistic groups, they became race wars by 
 
120 THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 
 
 chance. The Germans did not fight the Slavs 
 on their eastern boundary because they hated 
 them, but in order to acquire territory which 
 they coveted. 1 The French made conquests 
 along the Rhine, not from hatred of the Ger- 
 mans, but to increase the size of their state. 
 They fought the Spaniards for the same pur- 
 pose, though the Spaniards like themselves 
 are Latins. 
 
 The idea of nationality, which is more con- 
 crete, is of very recent origin, that of race all 
 the more so. The Slavs have had the con- 
 sciousness of the unity of their race only since 
 the works of Safarik and his emulators, that 
 is, for only about sixty years. The Swedes, 
 the Danes, and the Germans are Teutons. 
 That has not prevented them from fighting 
 one another furiously, and it did not impel 
 them to adopt common institutions. Noth- 
 ing is more conventional than the idea of 
 race. Where can the boundary lines between 
 
 1 The wars Charlemagne waged against the Saxons were 
 just as cruel as the wars of the Germans against the 
 Slavs. Yet Charlemagne and the Saxons both belonged 
 to the Teutonic race. 
 
THE THEORISTS OF BRUTE FORCE 121 
 
 races be drawn? We settle them arbitrarily 
 from purely subjective considerations. 1 Hence, 
 racial differences have had but a slight influ- 
 ence upon political history. The Arabs and 
 Spaniards, it would seem, formed two quite 
 distinct races between whom an alliance was 
 impossible. Yet what do we find in fact? 
 That the famous Cid Campeador, Spain's na- 
 tional hero, sometimes allied himself with 
 Mohammedan emirs and fought Christian 
 princes. The object of the wars in the mid- 
 dle ages was to obtain possession of as much 
 territory as possible, and until the present 
 time that has been the chief cause of wars. 
 I challenge any one to cite a single campaign 
 consciously undertaken for the purpose of up- 
 holding the interests of a race. 
 
 1 If the physiologic differences that divide a Frenchman 
 from a German constitute the limits of a race, why 
 should not the same hold for the physiologic differences 
 between a Norman and a Provencal? They are just as 
 great. But where draw the line? It may just as well 
 be said that the Bavarians and the Prussians form dif- 
 ferent races. As a matter of fact, the boundaries do not 
 exist in nature, but are pure subjective categories of our 
 mind. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 
 
 Happily the theories of Mr. Gumplowicz 
 and Mr. Ratzenhofer are as false as they are 
 unmerciful. At first man is guided by no in- 
 comprehensible FATALITY, but simply by 
 his interests. Assuredly, a social group is 
 not impelled to go massacre another social 
 group because humanity has a polygenist 
 origin. Little care I who my ancestor was a 
 thousand generations ago. What I care 
 about is to have the maximum of enjoyment 
 with the minimum of work. 
 
 But what is more, the authors just men- 
 tioned have entirely neglected another side 
 of the question. They have seen conflict 
 alone; they have not seen, or have not laid 
 stress upon, the phenomenon of alliance. 
 
 122 
 
ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 123 
 
 What sort of a chemist would he be who 
 merely saw the forces driving chemical bodies 
 apart and failed to study those that produce 
 cohesion? These are the two sides of the 
 same phenomenon. The atoms cannot dis- 
 appear from the universe. If they leave one 
 body, they must necessarily join another. 
 Chemistry is properly the science of atomic 
 composites. The same is true of communi- 
 ties. Conflict and alliance are two simulta- 
 neous and parallel phenomena characterizing 
 social groups. u Let several murderers," 
 says Mr. Lacombe, " who have decided to 
 war upon society unite and form a union of 
 their own, there will soon be an expressed 
 [or tacit] agreement among them not to 
 kill one another." * In order that one 
 social group may undertake a fight against 
 another, an alliance among the unities of 
 which it is composed must necessarily be 
 established. 
 
 Mr. Gumplowicz well knows that in the 
 Quaternary Age hordes of several hundreds 
 
 1 De I'histoire consideree comme science, p. 77. 
 
124 ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 
 
 of persons composed the social group and 
 fought against similar groups. In 1870, 
 38,000,000 Frenchmen fought an equal num- 
 ber of Germans. If the hordes had always 
 11 thrown themselves upon one another in a 
 fight to exterminate, " or if they had always 
 11 avoided contact," how could such immense 
 associations as that ever have been organ- 
 ized? In fact, the alliances among hordes, 
 tribes, cities, and states have been just as nu- 
 merous and frequent as conflicts. Always, 
 when hostilities begin, allies are sought. His- 
 tory mentions as many coalitions of states 
 as wars against them. To-day Europe is di- 
 vided into two camps — the triple alliance 
 forming the one, France and Russia the 
 other. Here, too, then, we see alliance go- 
 ing hand in hand with antagonism. More- 
 over, how is it that Mr. Gumplowicz does 
 not see that association has no limits? Noth- 
 ing would prevent 1,480,000,000 men in- 
 habiting 135,000,000 square kilometres from 
 forming an alliance to-morrow, just as noth- 
 ing prevented 381,000,000 men inhabiting 
 
ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 125 
 
 25,000,000 square kilometres from forming 
 one to-day. 1 
 
 The Darwinian law in no wise prevents 
 the whole of humanity from joining in a fed- 
 eration in which peace will reign. 
 
 But, you will say, how reconcile that with 
 the perpetual struggle which is the universal 
 law of nature? The answer is simple. You 
 need merely recollect that massacre is not the 
 sole form in which struggle manifests itself. 
 Within the federation of humanity the same 
 will take place as takes place within each 
 state. Here struggle has by no means dis- 
 appeared, but goes on under the form of eco- 
 nomic competition, lawyers' briefs, judges' 
 sentences, votes, party organizations, parlia- 
 mentary discussions, meetings, lectures, ser- 
 mons, schools, scientific associations, con- 
 gresses, pamphlets, books, newspapers, maga- 
 zines, in short, by spoken and written propa- 
 ganda. And we must not suppose that these 
 
 a The first pair of numbers represent all the inhabitants 
 of the globe and the extent of all the continents. The 
 second, the population and the size of the British Empire. 
 
126 ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 
 
 methods have been preferred to bloodshed 
 because men have become better. Idylls 
 play no part in this question. These methods 
 have been preferred simply because they were 
 found to be the most effective, therefore the 
 quickest and easiest. " We shall not give 
 you the satisfaction of shooting us down 
 in the street," Liebknecht once said to 
 Count Caprivi. If the Socialists prefer the 
 vote as a fighting weapon, that is most 
 certainly not from love of the conserva- 
 tives. 
 
 All the methods of struggle just enumer- 
 ated are constantly employed in normal times 
 among 381,000,000 of English subjects in- 
 habiting 25,000,000 of square kilometres. 
 They could be equally well employed by 
 1,480,000,000 men inhabiting 135,000,000 
 square kilometres. Then the federation of 
 the entire globe would be achieved. 
 
 Why do we say that the French form a 
 political unity? Simply because in normal 
 conditions they do not war with one another. 
 But does that mean that they have given up 
 
ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 127 
 
 the other methods of struggle I mentioned? 
 Not at all. The synthesis of antagonism and 
 solidarity is produced in the simplest fashion 
 in the world once people decide to cross the 
 asses' bridge and consciously decide to under- 
 stand what language has already formulated 
 a thousand times : struggles are carried on by 
 most dissimilar methods. In short, economic, 
 political, and intellectual competition will 
 never cease among men. Hence antagonism 
 will always exist, but as soon as men stop 
 butchering one another solidarity among them 
 will be established. 
 
 The coexistence of antagonism and soli- 
 darity may be observed in all human groups. 
 Children in a class, for instance, vie with one 
 another for the place at the head of the class, 
 but they have a feeling of solidarity, and let 
 a difference with another class arise, and they 
 will act as a unit. Let the Chinese arm 36,- 
 000,000 soldiers * to-morrow to destroy 
 
 1 The number of armed Europeans serving in regiments 
 is about one to every ioo inhabitants. If China were as 
 well organized from a military point of view, she could 
 send this number of men to the field. 
 
128 ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 
 
 Occidental civilization, and the Germans, 
 French, English, Italians, and Russians, so 
 widely separated to-day, would immediately 
 form an alliance and make common cause. 
 
 Mr. Gumplowicz and the other apologists 
 of bloodshed commit a further mistake. They 
 are extremely shortsighted. They fancy that 
 man's one enemy is man. That is not so. 
 Man has other infinitely more dangerous and 
 cruder enemies. These are climatic condi- 
 tions and certain animal and vegetable spe- 
 cies. How many millions of our fellow-men 
 are carried off annually by the microbe 
 of tuberculosis, not to mention the microbes 
 of cholera and the bubonic plague! The 
 phylloxera has cost France more than the 
 five milliards of the Prussian indemnity. In- 
 numerable parasites attack our crops and 
 cause thousands of men to die of hunger and 
 poverty. In addition, how much suffering do 
 not the cold of our climate and the heat of 
 the tropics cause ? Count up the many, many 
 victims of those two agents alone, not to 
 speak of storms, hail, floods, and droughts. 
 
ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 129 
 
 The unfortunates who die from those 
 scourges number millions. 
 
 A common enemy produces allies. The 
 Germans fought one another in 1866. Four 
 years later they united against the common 
 enemy, the French. Europe so profoundly 
 divided would be united against China. When 
 we shall cease to be blinder than moles, we 
 shall understand the elementary truth that 
 the questions dividing the civilized nations 
 are mere bagatelles, bits of folly and pu- 
 erility. To shed torrents of blood for the 
 possession of a province is an act of child- 
 ishness. Our awfulest enemies, the elements 
 and germs and insect destroyers, attack us 
 every minute without cease, yet we murder 
 one another as if we were out of our senses. 
 Death is ever on the watch for us, and we 
 think of nothing but to snatch a few patches 
 of land! About 5,000,000,000 days of work 
 go every year to the displacement of bound- 
 ary lines. Think of what humanity could 
 obtain if that prodigious effort were devoted 
 to fighting our real enemies, the noxious spe- 
 
130 ANTAGONISM AND SOLIDARITY 
 
 cies and our hostile environment. We should 
 conquer them in a few years. The entire 
 globe would turn into a model farm. Every 
 plant would grow for our use. The savage 
 animals would disappear, and the infinitely 
 tiny animals would be reduced to impotence 
 by hygiene and cleanliness. The earth would 
 be conducted according to our convenience. 
 In short, the day men realize who their worst 
 enemies are, they will form an alliance 
 against them, they will cease to murder one 
 another like wild beasts from sheer folly. 
 Then they will be the true rulers of the 
 planet, the lords of creation. 
 
 Of old, man was the game hunted by man. 
 In our modern states, immense communities 
 of mutual spoliation, man is more frequently 
 the slave of man. We shall attain the cul- 
 mination of prosperity realizable here below 
 when man becomes the ally of man. 
 
 THE END 
 
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 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 OCT 28 194 
 
 2.T V 
 
 
 NOV 171947 
 
 AY 8 1948 
 
 31AM9'/5C 
 
 
 C 27 195U 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY