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 m iPM
 
 WHY MEN FIGHT
 
 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 A METHOD OF ABOLISHING 
 THE INTERNA TIONAL DUEL 
 
 BY 
 BERTRAND RUSSELL, M.A., F.R.S. 
 
 Sometime Fellow and Lecturer in Trinity 
 College, Cambridge 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1917
 
 Copyright, 1916, by 
 The Century Co. 
 
 Published, January, 1917
 
 iJ 'S 
 
 'KH 
 
 Le soufHe, le rhythme, la vraie force populaire 
 manqua a la reaction. Elle eut les rois, les tresors, 
 les armees; elle ecrasa les peuples, mais elle resta 
 muette. Elle tiia en silence; elle ne put parler 
 qu'avee le canon sur ses horribles champs de 
 bataille. . . . Tuer quinze millions d'hommes par 
 la faim et I'epee, a la bonne heure, cela se pent. 
 Mais faire un petit chant, un air aime de tous, voila 
 ce que nuUe machination ne donnera. . , . Don 
 reserve, beni. . . . Ce chant peut-etre a I'aube jaillira 
 d'un coeur simple, ou I'alouette le trouvera en mon- 
 tant au soleil, de son sillon d'avril. 
 
 MiCHELET. 
 
 lysoosG
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Principle of Growth 3 
 
 II The State 42 
 
 III War as an Institution 79 
 
 IV Property 117 
 
 V Education 153 
 
 VI Marriage and the Population Question 182 
 
 VII Religion and the Churches .... 215 
 
 VIII What We Can Do 245
 
 WHY MEN FIGHT
 
 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 
 
 TO all who are capable of new impressions 
 and fresh thought, some modification of 
 former beliefs and hopes has been brought by 
 the war. What the modification has been has 
 depended, in each case, upon character and cir- 
 cumstance; but in one form or another it has 
 been almost universal. To me, the chief thing 
 to be learnt through the war has been a certain 
 view of the springs of human action, what they 
 are, and what we may legitimately hope that 
 they will become. This view, if it is true, seems 
 to afford a basis for political philosophy more 
 capable of standing erect in a time of crisis than 
 the philosophy of traditional Liberalism has 
 shown itself to be. The following lectures, 
 though only one of them will deal with war, all 
 are inspired by a view of the springs of action 
 
 3
 
 4 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 which has been suggested by the war. And all 
 of them are informed by the hope of seeing such 
 political institutions established in Europe as 
 shall make men averse to war — a hope which I 
 firmly believe to be realizable, though not with- 
 out a great and fundamental reconstruction of 
 economic and social life. 
 
 To one who stands outside the cycle of beliefs 
 and passions which make the war seem neces- 
 sary, an isolation, an almost unbearable separa- 
 tion from the general activity, becomes unavoid- 
 able. At the very moment when the universal 
 disaster raises compassion in the highest de- 
 gree, compassion itself compels aloofness from 
 the impulse to self-destruction which has swept 
 over Europe. The helpless longing to save men 
 from the ruin towards which they are hastening 
 makes it necessary to oppose the stream, to in- 
 cur hostility, to be thought unfeeling, to lose for 
 the moment the power of winning belief. It is 
 impossible to prevent others from feeling hos- 
 tile, but it is possible to avoid any reciprocal hos- 
 tility on one's own part, by imaginative under- 
 standing and the sympathy which grows out of 
 it. And without understanding and sympathy 
 it is impossible to find a cure for the evil from 
 which the world is suffering.
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 5 
 
 There are two views of the war neither of 
 which seems to me adequate. The usual view 
 in this country is that it is due to the wicked- 
 ness of the Germans ; the view of most pacifists 
 is that it is due to the diplomatic tangle and 
 to the ambitions of Governments. I think both 
 these views fail to realize the extent to which 
 war grows out of ordinary human nature. Ger- 
 mans, and also the men who compose Govern- 
 ments, are on the whole average human beings, 
 actuated by the same passions that actuate 
 others, not differing much from the rest of the 
 world except in their circumstances. War is ac- 
 cepted by men who are neither Germans nor 
 diplomatists with a readiness, an acquiescence 
 in untrue and inadequate reasons, which would 
 not be possible if any deep repugnance to war 
 were widespread in other nations or classes. 
 The untrue things which men believe, and the 
 true things which they disbelieve, are an in- 
 dex to their impulses — not necessarily to indi- 
 vidual impulses in each case (since beliefs are 
 contagious), but to the general impulses of the 
 community. We all believe many things which 
 we have no good ground for believing, because, 
 subconsciously, our nature craves certain kinds 
 of action which these beliefs would render reas-
 
 6 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 onable if they were true. Unfounded beliefs 
 are the homage which impulse pays to reason; 
 and thus it is with the beliefs which, opposite 
 but similar, make men here and in Germany be- 
 lieve it their duty to prosecute the war. 
 
 The first thought which naturally occurs to 
 one who accepts this view is that it would be 
 well if men were more under the dominion of 
 reason. War, to those who see that it must 
 necessarily do untold harm to all the combat- 
 ants, seems a mere madness, a collective in- 
 sanity in which all that has been known in time 
 of peace is forgotten. If impulses were more 
 controlled, if thought were less dominated by 
 passion, men would guard their minds against 
 the approaches of war fever, and disputes would 
 be adjusted amicably. This is true, but it is not 
 by itself sufficient. It is only those in whom the 
 desire to think truly is itself a passion who will 
 find this desire adequate to control the passions 
 of war. Only passion can control passion, and 
 only a contrary impulse or desire can check im- 
 pulse. Reason, as it is preached by traditional 
 moralists, is too negative, too little living, to 
 make a good life. It is not by reason alone that 
 wars can be prevented, but by a positive life of 
 impulses and passions antagonistic to those that
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OP GROWTH 7 
 
 lead to war. It is the life of impulse that 
 needs to be changed, not only the life of con- 
 scious thought. 
 
 All human activity springs from two sources : 
 impulse and desire. The part played by desire 
 has always been sufficiently recognized. When 
 men find themselves not fully contented, and 
 not able instantly to procure what will cause 
 content, imagination brings before their minds 
 the thought of things which they believe would 
 make them happy. All desire involves an in- 
 terval of time between the consciousness of a 
 need and the opportunity for satisfying it. 
 The acts inspired by desire may be in them- 
 selves painful, the time before satisfaction can 
 be achieved may be very long, the object de- 
 sired may be something outside our own lives, 
 and even after our own death. Will, as a di- 
 recting force, consists mainly in following de- 
 sires for more or less distant objects, in spite 
 of the painfulness of the acts involved and the 
 solicitations of incompatible but more imme- 
 diate desires and impulses. All this is familiar, 
 and political philosopliy hitherto has been al- 
 most entirely based upon desire as the source of 
 human actions. 
 
 But desire governs no more than a part of
 
 8 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 human activity, and that not the most impor- 
 tant but only the more conscious, explicit, and 
 civilized part. 
 
 In all the more instinctive part of our nature 
 we are dominated by impulses to certain kinds 
 of activity, not by desires for certain ends. 
 Children run and shout, not because of any good 
 which they expect to realize, but because of a 
 direct impulse to running and shouting. Dogs 
 bay the moon, not because they consider that it 
 is to their advantage to do so, but because they 
 feel an impulse to bark. It is not any purpose, 
 but merely an impulse, that prompts such 
 actions as eating, drinking, love-making, quar- 
 reling, boasting. Those who believe that man 
 is a rational animal will say that people boast 
 in order that others may have a good opinion 
 of them; but most of ns can recall occasions 
 when we have boasted in spite of knowing that 
 we should be despised for it. Instinctive acts 
 normally achieve some result which is agreeable 
 to the natural man, but they are not performed 
 from desire for this result. They are per- 
 formed from direct impulse, and the impulse 
 is often strong even in cases in which the normal 
 desirable result cannot follow. Grown men like 
 to imagine themselves more rational than chil-
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 9 
 
 dren and dogs, and unconsciously conceal from 
 themselves how great a part impulse plays in 
 their lives. This unconscious concealment al- 
 ways follows a certain general plan. When an 
 impulse is not indulged in the moment in which 
 it arises, there grows up a desire for the ex- 
 pected consequences of indulging the impulse. 
 If some of the consequences which are reason- 
 ably to be expected are clearly disagreeable, a 
 conflict between foresight and impulse arises. 
 If the impulse is weak, foresight may conquer; 
 this is what is called acting on reason. If the 
 impulse is strong, either foresight will be falsi- 
 fied, and the disagreeable consequences will be 
 forgotten, or, in men of a heroic mold, the con- 
 sequences may be recklessly accepted. When 
 Macbeth realizes that he is doomed to defeat, 
 he does not shrink from the fight; he ex- 
 claims : — 
 
 Lay on, Macduff, 
 And damned be him that first cries, Hold, enough! 
 
 But such strength and recklessness of im- 
 pulse is rare. Most men, when their impulse 
 is strong, succeed in persuading themselves, 
 usually by a subconscious selectiveness of 
 attention, that agreeable consequences will 
 follow from the indulgence of their impulse.
 
 10 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 "Whole philosophies, whole systems of ethical 
 valuation, spring up in this way: they are the 
 embodiment of a kind of thought w^hich is sub- 
 servient to impulse, which aims at providing a 
 quasi-rational ground for the indulgence of im- 
 pulse. The only thought which is genuine is 
 that which springs out of the intellectual im- 
 pulse of curiosity, leading to the desire to know 
 and understand. But most of what passes for 
 thought is inspired by some non-intellectual im- 
 pulse, and is merely a means of persuading our- 
 selves that we shall not be disappointed or do 
 harm if we indulge this impulse.^ 
 
 When an impulse is restrained, we feel dis- 
 comfort or even violent pain. We may indulge 
 the impulse in order to escape from this pain, 
 and our action is then one which has a purpose. 
 But the pain only exists because of the impulse, 
 and the impulse itself is directed to an act, not 
 to escaping from the pain of restraining the im- 
 pulse. The impulse itself remains without a 
 purpose, and the purpose of escaping from pain 
 only arises when the impulse has been momen- 
 tarily restrained. 
 
 1 On this subject compare Bernard Hart's "Psychology of 
 Insanity" (Cambridge University Press, 1914), chap, v, espe- 
 cially pp. 62-5,
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 11 
 
 Impulse is at the basis of our activity, much 
 more than desire. Desire has its place, but not 
 so large a place as it seemed to have. Impulses 
 bring with them a whole train of subservient 
 fictitious desires : they make men feel that they 
 desire the results which w^ill follow from indulg- 
 ing the impulses, and that they are acting for 
 the sake of these results, when in fact their 
 action has no motive outside itself. A man may 
 write a book or paint a picture under the belief 
 that he desires the praise which it will bring 
 him ; but as soon as it is finished, if his creative 
 impulse is not exhausted, what he has done 
 grows uninteresting to him, and he begins a new 
 piece of work. What applies to artistic crea- 
 tion applies equally to all that is most vital in 
 our lives : direct impulse is what moves us, and 
 the desires which we think we have are a mere 
 garment for the impulse. 
 
 Desire, as opposed to impulse, has, it is true, 
 a large and increasing share in the regulation 
 of men's lives. Impulse is erratic and anarch- 
 ical, not easily fitted into a well-regulated sys- 
 tem ; it may be tolerated in children and artists, 
 but it is not thought proper to men who hope to 
 be taken seriously. Almost all paid work is 
 done from desire, not from impulse : the work it-
 
 12 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 self is more or less irksome, but the payment 
 for it is desired. The serious activities that fill 
 a man's working hours are, except in a few for- 
 tunate individuals, governed mainly by pur- 
 poses, not by impulses towards those activities. 
 In this hardly any one sees an evil, because the 
 place of impulse in a satisfactory existence is 
 not recognized. 
 
 An impulse, to one who does not share it 
 actually or imaginatively, will always seem to 
 be mad. All impulse is essentially blind, in the 
 sense that it does not spring from any prevision 
 of consequences. The man who does not share 
 the impulse will form a different estimate as to 
 what the consequences will be, and as to whether 
 those that must ensue are desirable. This dif- 
 ference of opinion will seem to be ethical or in- 
 tellectual, whereas its real basis is a difference 
 of impulse. No genuine agreement will be 
 reached, in such a case, so long as the difference 
 of impulse persists. In all men who have any 
 vigorous life, there are strong impulses such 
 as may seem utterly unreasonable to others. 
 Blind impulses sometimes lead to destruction 
 and death, but at other times they lead to the 
 best things the world contains. Blind impulse 
 is the source of war, but it is also the source of
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 13 
 
 science, and art, and love. It is not the weaken- 
 ing of impulse that is to be desired, but the (^ 
 rection of impulse towards life and growth 
 rather than towards death and decay. 
 
 The complete control of impulse by will, which 
 is sometimes preached by moralists, and often 
 enforced by economic necessity, is not really de- 
 sirable. A life governed by purposes and de- 
 sires, to the exclusion of impulse, is a tiring life ; 
 it exhausts vitality, and leaves a man, in the 
 end, indifferent to the very purposes which he 
 has been trying to achieve. When a whole na- 
 tion lives in this way, the whole nation tends to 
 become feeble, without enough grasp to recog- 
 nize and overcome the obstacles to its desires. 
 Industrialism and organization are constantly 
 forcing civilized nations to live more and more 
 by purpose rather than impulse. In the long 
 run such a mode of existence, if it does not dry 
 up the springs of life, produces new impulses, 
 not of the kind which the will has been in the 
 habit of controlling or of which thought is con- 
 scious. These new impulses are apt to be worse 
 in their effects than those that have been 
 checked. Excessive discipline, especially when 
 it is imposed from without, often issues in im- 
 pulses of cruelty and destruction; this is one
 
 14 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 reason why militarism has a bad effect on na- 
 tional character. Either lack of vitality, or im- 
 pulses which are oppressive and against life, 
 will almost always result if the spontaneous im- 
 pulses are not able to find an outlet. A man's 
 impulses are not fixed from the beginning by his 
 native disposition: within certain wide limits, 
 they are profoundly modified by his circum- 
 stances and his way of life. The nature of 
 these modifications ought to be studied, and the 
 results of such study ought to be taken ac- 
 count of in judging the good or harm that is 
 done by political and social institutions. 
 
 The war has grown, in the main, out of the 
 life of impulse, not out of reason or desire. 
 There is an impulse of aggression, and an im- 
 pulse of resistance to aggression. Either may, 
 on occasion, be in accordance with reason, but 
 both are operative in many cases in which they 
 are quite contrary to reason. Each impulse 
 produces a whole harvest of attendant beliefs. 
 The beliefs appropriate to the impulse of ag- 
 gression may be seen in Bernhardi, or in the 
 early Mohammedan conquerors, or, in full per- 
 fection, in the Book of Joshua. There is first 
 of all a conviction of the superior excellence of 
 one's own group, a certainty that they are in
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 15 
 
 some sense the chosen people. This justifies 
 the feeling that only the good and evil of one's 
 own group is of real importance, and that the 
 rest of the world is to be regarded merely as 
 material for the triumph or salvation of the 
 higher race. In modern politics this attitude is 
 embodied in imperialism. Europe as a whole 
 has this attitude towards Asia and Africa, and 
 many Germans have this attitude towards the 
 rest of Europe. 
 
 Correlative to the impulse of aggression is 
 the impulse of resistance to aggression. This 
 impulse is exemplified in the attitude of the 
 Israelites to the Philistines or of medieval 
 Europe to the Mohammedans. The beliefs 
 which it produces are beliefs in the peculiar 
 wickedness of those whose aggression is feared, 
 and in tlie immense value of national customs 
 which they might suppress if they were vic- 
 torious. When the war broke out, all the re- 
 actionaries in England and France began to 
 speak of the danger to democracy, although un- 
 til that moment they had opposed democracy 
 with all their strength. They were not insin- 
 cere in so speaking: the impulse of resistance 
 to Germany made them value whatever was en- 
 dangered by the German attack. They loved
 
 16 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 democracy because they hated Germany; but 
 they thought they hated Germany because they 
 loved democracy. 
 
 The correlative impulses of aggression and 
 resistance to aggression have both been opera- 
 tive in all the countries engaged in the war. 
 Those who have not been dominated by one or 
 other of these impulses may be roughly divided 
 into three classes. There are, first, men whose 
 national sentiment is antagonistic to the State 
 to which they are subject. This class includes 
 some Irish, Poles, Finns, Jews, and other mem- 
 bers of oppressed nations. From our point of 
 view, these men may be omitted from our con- 
 sideration, since they have the same impulsive 
 nature as those who fight, and differ merely in 
 external circumstances. 
 
 The second class of men who have not been 
 part of the force supporting the war have been 
 those whose impulsive nature is more or less 
 atrophied. Opponents of pacifism suppose that 
 all pacifists belong to this class, except when 
 they are in German pay. It is thought that 
 pacifists are bloodless, men without passions, 
 men who can look on and reason with cold de- 
 tachment while their brothers are giving their 
 lives for their country. Among those who are
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 17 
 
 merely passively pacifist, and do no more than 
 abstain from actively taking part in the war, 
 there may be a certain proportion of whom this 
 is true. I think the supporters of war would be 
 right in decrying such men. In spite of all the 
 destruction which is wrought by the impulses 
 that lead to war, there is more hope for a na- 
 tion which has these impulses than for a na- 
 tion in which all impulse is dead. Impulse is 
 the expression of life, and while it exists there 
 is hope of its turning towards life instead of to- 
 wards death; but lack of impulse is death, and 
 out of death no new life will come. 
 
 The active pacifists, however, are not of this 
 class : they are not men without impulsive force 
 but men in whom some impulse to which war is 
 hostile is strong enough to overcome the im- 
 pulses tliat lead to war. It is not the act of a 
 passionless man to throw himself athwart the 
 whole movement of the national life, to urge an 
 outwardly hopeless cause, to incur obloquy and 
 to resist the contagion of collective emotion. 
 The impulse to avoid the hostility of public opin- 
 ion is one of the strongest in human nature, and 
 can only be overcome by an unusual force of 
 direct and uncalculating impulse ; it is not cold 
 reason alone that can prompt such an act.
 
 18 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Impulses may be divided into those that make 
 for life and those that make for death. The 
 impulses embodied in the war are among those 
 that make for death. Any one of the impulses 
 that make for life, if it is strong enough, will 
 lead a man to stand out against the war. Some 
 of these impulses are only strong in highly 
 civilized men ; some are part of common human- 
 ity. The impulses towards art and science are 
 among the more civilized of those that make for 
 life. Many artists have remained wholh^ un- 
 touched by the passions of the war, not from 
 feebleness of feeling, but because the creative 
 instinct, the pursuit of a vision, makes them 
 critical of the assaults of national passion, and 
 not responsive to the myth in which the impulse 
 of pugnacity clothes itself. And the few men 
 in whom the scientific impulse is dominant have 
 noticed the rival myths of warring groups, and 
 have been led through understanding to neu- 
 trality. But it is not out of such refined im- 
 pulses that a popular force can be generated 
 which shall be sufficient to transform the world. 
 
 There are three forces on the side of life 
 which require no exceptional mental endowment, 
 which are not very rare at present, and might 
 be very common under better social institutions.
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 19 
 
 They are love , the instinct of co nstmc tiveness. 
 and the joy of life. AH three are checked and 
 enfeebled at present by the conditions under 
 which men live — not only the less outwardly for- 
 tunate, but also the majority of the well-to-do. 
 Our institutions rest upon injustice and author- 
 ity: it is only by closing our hearts against 
 sympathy and our minds against truth that 
 we can endure the oppressions and unfairnesses 
 by which we profit. The conventional concep- 
 tion of what constitutes success leads most men 
 to live a life in which their most vital impulses 
 are sacrificed, and the joy of life is lost in list- 
 less weariness. Our economic system compels 
 almost all men to carry out the purposes of 
 others rather than their own, making them feel 
 impotent in action and only able to secure a cer- 
 tain modicum of passive pleasure. All these 
 things destroy the vigor of the community, the 
 expansive affections of individuals , and the 
 power of viewing the world generously. All 
 these things are unnecessary and can be ended 
 by wisdom and courage. If they were ended, 
 the impulsive life of men would become wholly 
 different, and the human race might travel to- 
 wards a new happiness and a new vigor. To 
 urge this hope is the purpose of these lectures.
 
 20 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 The impulses and desires of men and women, 
 in so far as they are of real importance in their 
 lives, are not detached one from another, but 
 proceed from a central principle of growth, an 
 instinctive urgency leading them in a certain di- 
 rection, as trees seek the light.. So long as this 
 instinctive movement is not thwarted, whatever 
 misfortunes may occur are not fundamental dis- 
 asters, and do not produce those distortions 
 which result from interference with natural 
 growth. This intimate center in each human 
 being is what imagination must apprehend if 
 we are to understand him intuitively. It differs 
 from man to man, and detennines for each man 
 the type of excellence of which he is capable. 
 The utmost that social institutions can do for a 
 man is to make his own growth free and vigor- 
 ous : they cannot force him to grow according to 
 the pattern of another man. There are in men 
 some impulses and desires — for example, those 
 towards dmgs — ^which do not grow out of the 
 central principle ; such impulses, when they be- 
 come strong enough to be harmful, have to 
 be checked by self-discipline. Other impulses, 
 though they may grow out of the central prin- 
 ciple in the individual, may be injurious to the 
 growth of others, and they need to be checked in
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 21 
 
 the interest of others. But in the main, the im- 
 pulses which are injurious to others tend to re- 
 sult from thwarted growth, and to be least in 
 those who have been unimpeded in their instinc- 
 tive development. 
 
 Men, like trees, require for their growth the 
 right soil and a sufficient freedom from oppres- 
 sion. These can be helped or hindered by politi- 
 cal institutions. But the soil and the freedom 
 required for a man's growth are immeasurably 
 more difficult to discover and to obtain than the 
 soil and the freedom required for the growth of 
 a tree. And the full growth which may be 
 hoped for cannot be defined or demonstrated; 
 it is subtle and complex, it can only be felt by a 
 delicate intuition and dimly apprehended by 
 imagination and respect. It depends not only 
 or chiefly upon the physical environment, but 
 upon beliefs and affections, upon opportunities 
 for action, and upon the whole life of the com- 
 munity. The more developed and civilized the 
 type of man the more elaborate are the condi- 
 tions of his growth, and the more dependent 
 they become upon the general state of the so- 
 ciety in which he lives. A man's needs and de- 
 sires are not confined to his own life. If his 
 mind is comprehensive and his imagination
 
 22 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 vivid, the failures of the community to which he 
 belongs are his failures, and its successes are 
 his successes: according as his community suc- 
 ceeds or fails, his own growth is nourished or 
 impeded. 
 
 In the modern world, the principle of growth 
 in most men and women is hampered by insti- 
 tutions inherited from a simpler age. By the 
 progress of thought and knowledge, and by the 
 increase in command over the forces of the phys- 
 ical world, new possibilities of growth have 
 come into existence, and have given rise to new 
 claims which must be satisfied if those who make 
 them are not to be thwarted. There is less 
 acquiescence in limitations which are no longer 
 unavoidable, and less possibility of a good life 
 while those limitations remain. Institutions 
 which give much greater opportunities to some 
 classes than to others are no longer recognized 
 as just by the less fortunate, though the more 
 fortunate still defend them vehemently. Hence 
 arises a universal strife, in which tradition and 
 authority are arrayed against liberty and jus- 
 tice. Our professed morality, being traditional, 
 loses its hold upon those who are in revolt. Co- 
 operation between the defenders of the old and 
 the champions of the new has become almost im-
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 23 
 
 possible. An intimate disunion has entered 
 into almost all the relations of life in continually 
 increasing measure. In the fight for freedom, 
 men and women become increasingly unable to 
 break down the walls of the Ego and achieve 
 the growth which comes from a real and vital 
 union. 
 
 All our institutions have their historic basis 
 in Authority. The unquestioned authority of 
 the Oriental despot found its religious expres- 
 sion in the omnipotent Creator, whose glory was 
 the sole end of man, and against whom man 
 had no rights. This authority descended to the 
 Emperor and Pope, to the kings of the Middle 
 Ages, to the nobles in the feudal hierarchy, and 
 even to every husband and father in his deal- 
 ings with his wife and children. The Church 
 was the direct embodiment of the Divine au- 
 thority, the State and the law were constituted 
 by the authoriy of the King, private property 
 in land grew out of the authority of conquering 
 barons, and the family was governed by the au- 
 thority of the pater-familias. 
 
 The institutions of the Middle Ages permitted 
 only a fortunate few to develop freely : the vast 
 majority of mankind existed to minister to the 
 few. But so long as authority was genuinely
 
 24 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 respected and acknowledged even by its least 
 fortunate subjects, medieval society remained 
 organic and not fundamentally hostile to life, 
 since outward submission was compatible with 
 inward freedom because it was voluntary. The 
 institutions of Western Christendom embodied 
 a theory which was really believed, as no theory 
 by which our present institutions can be de- 
 fended is now believed. 
 
 The medieval theory of life broke down 
 through its failure to satisfy men's demands for 
 justice and liberty. Under the stress of oppres- 
 sion, w^hen rulers exceeded their theoretical 
 powers, the victims were forced to realize that 
 they themselves also had rights, and need not 
 live merely to increase the glory of the few. 
 Gradually it came to be seen that if men have 
 power, they are likely to abuse it, and that 
 authority in practice means tyranny. Because 
 the claim to justice was resisted by the holders 
 of power, men became more and more separate 
 units, each fighting for his own rights, not a 
 genuine community bound together by an or- 
 ganic common purpose. This absence of a com- 
 mon purpose has become a source of unhappi- 
 ness. One of the reasons which led many men 
 to welcome the outbreak of the present war was
 
 THE PEINCIPLE OF GROWTH 25 
 
 that it made each nation again a whole com- 
 munity with a single purpose. It did this b}" de- 
 stroying, for the present, the beginnings of a 
 single purpose in the civilized world as a whole ; 
 but these beginnings were as yet so feeble that 
 few were much affected by their destruction. 
 Men rejoiced in the new sense of unity with their 
 compatriots more than they minded the in- 
 creased separation from their enemies. 
 
 The hardening and separation of the indi- 
 vidual in the course of the fight for freedom 
 has been inevitable, and is not likely ever to 
 be wholly undone. What is necessary, if an or- 
 ganic society is to grow up, is that our institu- 
 tions should be so fundamentally changed as to 
 embody that new respect for the individual and 
 his rights which modern feeling demands. The 
 medieval Empire and Church swept away the 
 individual. There were heretics, but they were 
 massacred relentlessly, without any of the 
 qualms aroused by later persecutions. And 
 they, like their persecutors, were persuaded that 
 there ought to be one universal Church: they 
 differed only as to what its creed should be. 
 Among a few men of art and letters, the Renais- 
 sance undermined the medieval theory, without, 
 however, replacing it by anything but skepticism
 
 26 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 and confusion. The first serious breach in this 
 medieval theory was caused by Luther's asser- 
 tion of the right of private judgment and the 
 fallibiUty of General Councils. Out of this as- 
 sertion grew inevitably, with time, the belief 
 that a man's religion could not be determined 
 for him by authority, but must be left to the free 
 choice of each individual. It was in matters of 
 religion that the battle for liberty began, and 
 it is in matters of religion that it has come near- 
 est to a comjDlete victory.^ 
 
 The development through extreme individu- 
 alism to strife, and thence, one hopes, to a new 
 reintegration, is to be seen in almost every 
 department of life. Claims are advanced in the 
 name of justice, and resisted in the name of tra- 
 dition and prescriptive right. Each side hon- 
 estly believes that it deserves to triumph, be- 
 cause two theories of society exist side by side 
 in our thought, and men choose, unconsciously, 
 the theory which fits their case. Because the 
 battle is long and arduous all general theory is 
 gradually forgotten ; in the end, nothing remains 
 but self-assertion, and when the oppressed win 
 
 1 This was written before Christianity had become punish- 
 able by hard labor, penal servitude, or even death, under the 
 Military Service Act (Xo. 2). [Note added in 1916.]
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 27 
 
 freedom they are as oppressive as their former 
 masters. 
 
 This is seen most crudely in the case of what 
 is called nationalism. Nationalism, in theory, 
 is the doctrine that men, by their sympathies and 
 traditions, form natural groups, called "na- 
 tions," each of which ought to be united under 
 one central Government. In the main this doc- 
 trine may be conceded. But in practice the doc- 
 trine takes a more personal form. "I belong," 
 the oppressed nationalist argues, ''by sympathy 
 and tradition to nation A, but I am subject to a 
 government which is in the hands of nation B. 
 This is an injustice, not only because of the gen- 
 eral principle of nationalism, but because nation 
 A is generous, progressive, and civilized, while 
 nation B is oppressive, retrograde, and barbar- 
 ous. Because this is so, nation A deserves to 
 prosper, while nation B deserves to be abased." 
 The inhabitants of nation B are naturally deaf 
 to the claims of abstract justice, when they are 
 accompanied by personal hostility and con- 
 tempt. Presently, however, in the course of 
 war, nation A acquires its freedom. The 
 energy and pride which have achieved freedom 
 generates a momentum which leads on, almost 
 infallibly, to the attempt at foreign conquest, or
 
 28 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 to the refusal of liberty to some smaller nation. 
 ''What? You say that nation C, which forms 
 part of our State, has the same rights against 
 as as we had against nation A ? But that is ab- 
 surd. Nation C is swinish and turbulent, in- 
 capable of good government, needing a strong 
 hand if it is not to be a menace and a disturbance 
 to all its neighbors." So the English used to 
 speak of the Irish, so the Germans and Russians 
 speak of the Poles, so the Galician Poles speak 
 of the Ruthenes, so the Austrians used to speak 
 of the Magyars, so the Magyars speak of the 
 South Slav sympathizers with Serbia, so the 
 Serbs speak of the Macedonian Bulgars. In 
 this way nationalism, unobjectionable in theory, 
 leads by a natural movement to oppression and 
 wars of conquest. No sooner was France free 
 from the English, in the fifteenth century, than 
 it embarked upon the conquest of Italy; no 
 sooner was Spain freed from the Moors than it 
 entered into more than a century of conflict 
 with France for the supremacy in Europe. The 
 case of Germany is very interesting in this re- 
 spect. At the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury German culture was French: French was 
 the language of the Courts, the language in 
 which Leibnitz wrote his philosophy, the uni-
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 29 
 
 versal language of polite letters and learning. 
 National consciousness liardly existed. Then a 
 series of great men created a self-respect in 
 Germany by their achievements in poetry, 
 music, philosophy, and science. But politically 
 German nationalism was only created by Na- 
 poleon's oppression and the uprising of 1813. 
 After centuries during which every disturbance 
 of the peace of Europe began with a French or 
 Swedish or Russian invasion of Germany, the 
 Germans discovered that by sufficient effort and 
 union they could keep foreign armies off their 
 territory. But the effort required had been too 
 great to cease when its purely defensive pur- 
 pose had been achieved by the defeat of Na- 
 poleon. Now, a hundred years later, they 
 are still engaged in the same movement, 
 which has become one of aggression and 
 conquest. Whether we are now seeing the end 
 of the movement it is not yet possible to 
 guess. 
 
 If men had any strong sense of a community 
 of nations, nationalism would serve to define 
 the boundaries of the various nations. But be- 
 cause men only feel community within their own 
 nation, nothing but force is able to make them 
 respect the rights of other nations, even when
 
 30 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 they are asserting exactly similar rights on their 
 own behalf. 
 
 Analogous development is to be expected, 
 with the course of time, in the conflict between 
 capital and labor which has existed since the 
 growth of the industrial system, and in the con- 
 flict between men and women, which is still in its 
 infancy. 
 
 What is wanted, in these various conflicts, is 
 some principle, genuinely believed, w^hich will 
 have justice for its outcome. The tug of w^ar 
 of mutual self-assertion can only result in 
 justice through an accidental equality of force. 
 It is no use to attempt any bolstering up of in- 
 stitutions based on authority, since all such in- 
 stitutions involve injustice, and injustice once 
 realized cannot be perpetuated without funda- 
 mental damage both to those who uphold it and 
 to those who resist it. The damage consists in 
 the hardening of the walls of the Ego, making 
 them a prison instead of a window. Unimpeded 
 growth in the individual depends upon many 
 contacts with other people, which must be of the 
 nature of free cooperation, not of enforced serv- 
 ice. While the belief in authority was alive, 
 free cooperation was compatible with inequality 
 and subjection, but now equality and mutual
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 31 
 
 freedom are necessary. All institutions, if they 
 are not to hamper individual growth, must be 
 based as far as possible upon voluntary com- 
 bination, rather than the force of the law or the 
 traditional authority of the holders of power. 
 None of our institutions can survive the applica- 
 tion of this principle without great and funda- 
 mental changes; but these changes are impera- 
 tively necessary if the world is to be withheld 
 from dissolving into hard separate units each at 
 war with all the others. 
 
 The two chief sources of good relations be- 
 tween individuals are instinctive liking and a 
 common purpose. Of these two, a common pur- 
 pose might seem more important politically, 
 but, in fact, it is often the outcome, not the 
 cause, of instinctive liking, or of a common in- 
 stinctive aversion. Biological groups, from 
 the family to the nation, are constituted by a 
 greater or less degree of instinctive liking, and 
 build their common purposes on this founda- 
 tion. 
 
 Instinctive liking is the feeling which makes 
 us take pleasure in another person's company, 
 find an exhilaration in his presence, wish to 
 talk with him, work with him, play with him. 
 The extreme form of it is being in love, but its
 
 32 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 fainter forms, and even the very faintest, have 
 political importance. The presence of a person 
 who is instinctively disliked tends to make any 
 other person more likable. An anti-Semite 
 will love any fellow-Christian when a Jew is 
 present. In China, or the wilds of Africa, any 
 white man would be welcomed with joy. A 
 common aversion is one of the most frequent 
 causes of mild instinctive liking. 
 
 Men differ enormously in the frequency and 
 intensity of their instinctive likings, and the 
 same man w^ill differ greatly at different times. 
 One may take Carlyle and Walt Whitman as op- 
 posite poles in this respect. To Carlyle, at any 
 rate in later life, most men and women were re- 
 pulsive; they inspired an instinctive aversion 
 which made him find pleasure in imagining them 
 under the guillotine or perishing in battle. This 
 led him to belittle most men, finding satisfaction 
 only in those who had been notably destructive 
 of human life — Frederick the Great, Dr. Fran- 
 cia, and Governor Eyre. It led him to love war 
 and violence, and to despise the weak and the 
 oppressed — for example, the ''thirty thousand 
 distressed needlewomen," on whom he was 
 never weary of venting his scorn. His morals 
 and his politics, in later life, were inspired
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 33 
 
 through and through by repugnance to almost 
 the whole human race. 
 
 Walt Whitman, on the contrary, had a warm, 
 expansive feeling towards the vast majority of 
 men and women. His queer catalogues seemed 
 to him interesting because each item came be- 
 fore his imagination as an object of delight. 
 The sort of joy which most people feel only in 
 those who are exceptionally beautiful or splen- 
 did Walt Whitman felt in almost everybody. 
 Out of this universal liking grew optimism, 
 a belief in democracy, and a conviction that it is 
 easy for men to live together in peace and amity. 
 His philosophy and politics, like Carlyle's, were 
 based upon his instinctive attitude towards ordi- 
 nary men and women. 
 
 There is no objective reason to be given to 
 show that one of these attitudes is essentially 
 more rational than the other. If a man finds 
 people repulsive, no argument can prove to him 
 that they are not so. But both his own desires 
 and other people's are much more likely to find 
 satisfaction if he resembles Walt Whitman 
 than if he resembles Carlyle. A world of 
 Walt Whitmans would be happier and more 
 capable of realizing its purposes than a world of 
 Carlyles. For this reason, we shall desire, if we
 
 34 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 can, to increase the amount of instinctive liking 
 in the world and diminish the amount of in- 
 stinctive aversion. This is perhaps the most 
 important of all the effects by which political in- 
 stitutions ought to be judged. 
 
 The other source of good relations between in- 
 dividuals is a common purpose, especially where 
 that purpose cannot be achieved without know- 
 ing its cause. Economic organizations, such as 
 unions and political parties are constituted al- 
 most wholly by a common purpose ; whatever in- 
 stinctive liking may come to be associated with 
 them is the result of the common purpose, not 
 its cause. Economic organizations, such as rail- 
 way companies, subsist for a purpose, but this 
 purpose need only actually exist in those who 
 direct the organization: the ordinary wage- 
 earner need have no purpose beyond earning his 
 wages. This is a defect in economic organiza- 
 tions, and ought to be remedied. One of the ob- 
 jects of syndicalism is to remedy this defect. 
 
 Marriage is (or should be) based on instinc- 
 tive liking, but as soon as there are children, or 
 the wish for children, it acquires the additional 
 strength of a common purpose. It is this chiefly 
 which distinguishes it from an irregular connec- 
 tion not intended to lead to children. Often, in
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OP GROWTH 35 
 
 fact, the common purpose survives, and remains 
 a strong tie, after the instinctive liking has 
 faded. 
 
 A nation, when it is real and not artificial, is 
 founded upon a faint degree of instinctive liking 
 for compatriots and a common instinctive aver- 
 sion from foreigners. When an Englishman re- 
 turns to Dover or Folkestone after being on 
 the Continent, he feels something friendly in the 
 familiar ways : the casual porters, the shouting 
 paper boys, the women serving bad tea, all warm 
 his heart, and seem more *' natural," more what 
 human beings ought to be, than the foreigners 
 with their strange habits of behavior. He is 
 ready to believe that all English people are good 
 souls, while many foreigners are full of design- 
 ing wickedness. It is such feelings that make 
 it easy to organize a nation into a governmental 
 unit. And when that has happened, a common 
 purpose is added, as in marriage. Foreigners 
 would like to invade our country and lay it 
 waste, to kill us in battle, to humble our pride. 
 Those who cooperate with us in preventing this 
 disaster are our friends, and their cooperation 
 intensifies our instinctive liking. But common 
 purposes do not constitute the whole source of 
 our love of country : allies, even of long stand-
 
 36 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ing, do not call out the same feelings as are 
 called out by our compatriots. Instinctive lik- 
 ing, resulting largely from similar habits and 
 customs, is an essential element in patriotism, 
 and, indeed, the foundation upon which the 
 whole feeling rests. 
 
 If men's natural growth is to be promoted and 
 not hindered by the environment, if as many as 
 possible of their desires and needs are to be 
 satisfied, political institutions must, as far as 
 possible, embody common purposes and foster 
 instinctive liking. These two objects are inter- 
 connected, for nothing is so destructive of in- 
 stinctive liking as thwarted purposes and un- 
 satisfied needs, and nothing facilitates cooper- 
 ation for common purposes so much as instinc- 
 tive liking. When a man's growth is unim- 
 peded, his self-respect remains intact, and he is 
 not inclined to regard others as his enemies. 
 But when, for whatever reason, his growth is 
 impeded, or he is compelled to grow into some 
 twisted and unnatural shape, his instinct pre- 
 sents the environment as his enemy, and he be- 
 comes filled with hatred. The joy of life aban- 
 dons him, and malevolence takes the place of 
 friendliness. The malevolence of hunchbacks 
 and cripples is proverbial; and a similar
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 37 
 
 malevolence is to be found in those who have 
 been crippled in less obvious ways. Real free- 
 dom, if it could be brought about, would go a 
 long way towards destroying hatred. 
 
 There is a not uncommon belief that what is 
 instinctive in us cannot be changed, but must 
 be simply accepted and made the best of. This 
 is by no means the case. No doubt we have a 
 certain native disposition, different in different 
 people, which cooperates with outside circum- 
 stances in producing a certain character. But 
 even the instinctive part of our character is very 
 malleable. It may be changed by beliefs, by 
 material circumstances, by social circumstances, 
 and by institutions. A Dutchman has probably 
 much the same native disposition as a German, 
 but his instincts in adult life are very different 
 owing to the absence of militarism and of the 
 pride of a Great Power. It is obvious that the 
 instincts of celibates become profoundly differ- 
 ent from those of other men and women. Al- 
 most any instinct is capable of many different 
 forms according to the nature of the outlets 
 which it finds. The same instinct which leads to 
 artistic or intellectual creativeness may, under 
 other circumstances, lead to love of war. The 
 fact that an activity or belief is an outcome of
 
 38 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 instinct is therefore no reason for regarding it 
 as unalterable. 
 
 This applies to people's instinctive likes and 
 dislikes as well as to their other instincts. It 
 is natural to men, as to other animals, to like 
 some of their species and dislike others; but 
 the proportion of like and dislike depends on 
 circumstances, often on quite trivial circum- 
 stances. Most of Carlyle's misanthropy is at- 
 tributable to dyspepsia; probably a suitable 
 medical regimen would have given him a com- 
 pletely different outlook on the world. The de- 
 fect of punishment, as a means of dealing with 
 impulses which the community wishes to dis- 
 courage, is that it does nothing to prevent the 
 existence of the impulses, but merely endeavors 
 to check their indulgence by an appeal to self- 
 interest. This method, since it does not eradi- 
 cate the impulses, probably only drives them to 
 find other outlets even when it is successful in 
 its immediate object; and if the impulses are 
 strong, mere self-interest is not likely to curb 
 them effectually, since it is not a very powerful 
 motive except with unusually reasonable and 
 rather passionless people. It is thought to be 
 a stronger motive than it is, because our moods 
 make us deceive ourselves as to our interest, and
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 39 
 
 lead us to believe that it is consistent with the 
 actions to which we are prompted by desire or 
 impulse. 
 
 Thus the commonplace that human nature 
 cannot be changed is untrue. We all know that 
 our ow^n characters and those of our acquaint- 
 ance are greatly affected by circumstances ; and 
 what is true of individuals is true also of na- 
 tions. The root causes of changes in average 
 human nature are generally either purely ma- 
 terial changes — for instance, of climate — or 
 changes in the degree of man's control over the 
 material world. We may ignore the purely ma- 
 terial changes, since these do not much concern 
 the politician. But the changes due to man's 
 increased control over the material world, by 
 inventions and science, are of profound present 
 importance. Through the industrial revolution, 
 they have radically altered the daily lives of 
 men; and by creating huge economic organiza- 
 tions, they have altered the whole structure of 
 society. The general beliefs of men, which are, 
 in the main, a product of instinct and circum- 
 stance, have become very different from what 
 they were in the eighteenth century. But our 
 institutions are not yet suited either to the in- 
 stincts developed by our new circumstances, or
 
 40 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 to our real beliefs. Institutions have a life of 
 their own, and often outlast the circumstances 
 which made them a fit garment for instinct. 
 This applies, in varying degrees, to almost all 
 the institutions which we have inherited from 
 the past : the State, private property, the patri- 
 archal family, the Churches, armies and navies. 
 All of these have become in some degree oppres- 
 sive, in some measures hostile to life. 
 
 In any serious attempt at political recon- 
 struction, it is necessary to realize what are the 
 vital needs of ordinary men and women. It is 
 customary, in political thought, to assume that 
 the only needs with which politics is concerned 
 are economic needs. This view is quite inade- 
 quate to account for such an event as the pres- 
 ent war, since any economic motives that may be 
 assigned for it are to a great extent mythical, 
 and its true causes must be sought for outside 
 the economic sphere. Needs which are nor- 
 mally satisfied without conscious effort remain 
 unrecognized, and this results in a working 
 theory of human needs which is far too simple. 
 Owing chiefly to industrialism, many needs 
 which were formerly satisfied without effort 
 now remain unsatisfied in most men and women. 
 But the old unduly simple theory of human
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH 41 
 
 needs survives, making men overlook the source 
 of the new lack of satisfaction, and invent quite 
 false theories as to why they are dissatisfied. 
 Socialism as a panacea seems to me to be mis- 
 taken in this way, since it is too ready to sup- 
 pose that better economic conditions will of 
 themselves make men happy. It is not only 
 more material goods that men need, but more 
 freedom, more self-direction, more outlet for 
 creativeness, more opportunity for the joy of 
 life, more voluntary cooperation, and less in- 
 voluntary subservience to purposes not their 
 own. All these things the institutions of the 
 future must help to produce, if our increase of 
 knowledge and power over Nature is to bear its 
 full fruit in bringing about a good life.
 
 n 
 
 THE STATE 
 
 UNDER the influence of socialism, most 
 liberal thought in recent years has been 
 in favor of increasing the power of the State, 
 but more or less hostile to the power of private 
 property. On the other hand, syndicalism has 
 been hostile both to the State and to private 
 property. I believe that syndicalism is more 
 nearly right than socialism in this respect, that 
 both private property and the State, which are 
 the two most powerful institutions of the 
 modem world, have become harmful to life 
 through excess of power, and that both are 
 hastening the loss of vitality from which the 
 civilized world increasingly suffers. The two 
 institutions are closely connected, but for the 
 present I wish to consider only the State. I 
 shall trj^ to show how great, how unnecessary, 
 how harmful, many of its powers are, and how 
 enormously they might be diminished without 
 loss of what is useful in its activity. But I shall 
 
 42
 
 THE STATE 43 
 
 admit that in certain directions its functions 
 ought to be extended rather than curtailed. 
 
 Some of the functions of the State, such as 
 the Post Office and elementary education, might 
 be performed by private agencies, and are only 
 undertaken by the State from motives of con- 
 venience. But other matters, such as the law, 
 the police, the Army, and the Navy, belong more 
 essentially to the State : so long as there is a 
 State at all it is difficult to imagine these mat- 
 ters in private hands. The distinction between 
 socialism and individualism turns on the non- 
 essential functions of the State, which the social- 
 ist wishes to extend and the individualist to re- 
 strict. It is the essential functions, which 
 are admitted by individualists and socialists 
 alike, that I wish to criticize, since the others 
 do not appear to me in themselves objection- 
 able. 
 
 The essence of the. State is that it is the 
 repository of the collective force of its citizens. 
 This force takes two forms, one internal and 
 one external. The internal form is the law and 
 the police; the external form is the power of 
 waging war, as embodied in the Army and Navy. 
 The State is constituted by the combination 
 of all the inhabitants in a certain area using
 
 44 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 their united force in accordance with the com- 
 mands of a Government. In a civilized State 
 force is only employed against its own citizens 
 in accordance with rules previously laid down, 
 which constitute the criminal law. But the em- 
 ployment of force against foreigners is not regu- 
 lated by any code of rules, and proceeds, with 
 few exceptions, according to some real or fan- 
 cied national interest. 
 
 There can be no doubt that force employed 
 according to law is less pernicious than force 
 employed capriciously. If international law 
 could acquire sufficient hold on men's alle- 
 giance to regulate the relations of States, a very 
 great advance on our present condition would 
 have been made. The primitive anarchy which 
 precedes law is worse than law. But I believe 
 there is a possibility of a stage to some extent 
 above law, where the advantages now secured 
 by the law are secured without loss of freedom, 
 and without the disadvantages which the law 
 and the police render inevitable. Probably 
 some repository of force in the background will 
 remain necessary, but the actual employment 
 of force may become very rare, and the degree 
 of force required very small. The anarchy 
 which precedes law gives freedom only to the
 
 THE STATE 45 
 
 strong; the condition to be aimed at will give 
 freedom as nearly as possible to every one. It 
 will do this, not by preventing altogether the 
 existence of organized force, but by limiting the 
 occasions for its employment to the greatest 
 possible extent. 
 
 The power of the State is only limited inter- 
 nally by the fear of rebellion and externally 
 by the fear of defeat in war. Subject to these 
 restrictions, it is absolute. In practice, it can 
 seize men's property through taxation, deter- 
 mine the law of marriage and inheritance, pun- 
 ish the expression of opinions which it dislikes, 
 put men to death for wishing the region they 
 inhabit to belong to a different State, and order 
 all able-bodied males to risk their lives in bat- 
 tle whenever it considers war desirable. On 
 many matters disagreement with the purposes 
 and opinions of the State is criminal. Prob- 
 ably the freest States in the world, before the 
 war, were America and England ; yet in Amer- 
 ica no immigrant may land until he has pro- 
 fessed disbelief in anarchism and polygamy, 
 while in England men were sent to prison in 
 recent years for expressing disagreement with 
 the Christian religion ^ or agreement with the 
 
 1 The blasphemy prosecutions.
 
 46 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 teaching of Christ.^ In time of war, all criti- 
 cism of the external policy of the State is crim- 
 inal. Certain objects having appeared desir- 
 able to the majority, or to the effective holders 
 of power, those who do not consider these ob- 
 jects desirable are exposed to pains and penal- 
 ties not unlike those suffered by heretics in the 
 past. The extent of the tyranny thus exer- 
 cised is concealed by its very success : few men 
 consider it worth while to incur a persecution 
 which is almost certain to be thorough and ef- 
 fective. 
 
 Universal military service is perhaps the ex- 
 treme example of the power of the State, and 
 the supreme illustration of the difference be- 
 tween its attitude to its own citizens and its at- 
 titude to the citizens of other States. The State 
 punishes, with impartial rigor, both those who 
 kill their compatriots and those who refuse to 
 kill foreigners. On the whole, the latter is con- 
 sidered the graver crime. The phenomenon of 
 war is familiar, and men fail to realize its 
 strangeness ; to those who stand inside the cycle 
 of instincts which lead to war it all seems nat- 
 ural and reasonable. But to those who stand 
 
 1 The Bvndicalist prosecutions. [The punishment of con- 
 scientious objectors must now be added, 1916.]
 
 THE STATE 47 
 
 outside the strangeness of it grows with famil- 
 iarity. It is amazing that the vast majority of 
 men should tolerate a system which compels 
 them to submit to all the horrors of the battle- 
 field at any moment when their Government 
 commands them to do so. A French artist, in- 
 different to politics, attentive only to his paint- 
 ing, suddenly finds himself called upon to shoot 
 Germans, who, his friends assure him, are a 
 disgrace to the human race. A German mu- 
 sician, equally unknowing, is called upon to 
 shoot the perfidious Frenchman. Why cannot 
 the two men declare a mutual neutrality! Why 
 not leave war to those who like it and bring it 
 on? Yet if the two men declared a mutual neu- 
 trality they would be shot by their compatriots. 
 To avoid this fate they try to shoot each other. 
 If the world loses the artist, not the musician, 
 Germany rejoices; if the world loses the musi- 
 cian, not the artist, France rejoices. No one 
 remembers the loss to civilization, which is 
 equal whichever is killed. 
 
 This is the politics of Bedlam. If the artist 
 and the musician had been allowed to stand 
 aside from the war, nothing but unmitigated 
 good to mankind would have resulted. The 
 power of the State, which makes this impossi-
 
 48 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ble, is a wholly evil thing, quite as evil as the 
 power of the Church which in former days put 
 men to death for unorthodox thought. Yet if, 
 even in time of peace, an international league 
 were founded to consist of Frenchmen and Ger- 
 mans in equal numbers, all pledged not to take 
 part in war, the French State and the German 
 State would persecute it with equal ferocity. 
 Blind obedience, unlimited willingness to kill 
 and die are exacted of the modern citizens of a 
 democracy as much as of the Janizaries of medi- 
 eval sultans or the secret agents of Oriental 
 despots.^ 
 
 The power of the State may be brought to 
 bear, as it often is in England, through public 
 opinion rather than through the laws. By ora- 
 tory and the influence of the Press, public opin- 
 ion is largely created by the State, and a tyran- 
 nous public opinion is as great an enemy to 
 liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young man 
 who will not fight finds that he is dismissed from 
 his employment, insulted in the streets, cold- 
 shouldered by his friends, and thrown over with 
 scorn by any woman who may formerly have 
 
 1 In a democratic country it is the majority who must after 
 all rule, and the minority will be obliged to submit with the 
 best grace possible {Westminster Gazette on Conscription, 
 December 29, 1915).
 
 THE STATE 49 
 
 liked him, lie will feel the penalty quite as hard 
 to bear as a death sentence.^ A free commun- 
 ity requires not only legal freedom, but a tol- 
 erant public opinion, an absence of that instinc- 
 tive inquisition into our neighbors' affairs 
 which, under the guise of upholding a high 
 moral standard, enables good people to indulge 
 
 1 Some very strong remarks on the conduct of the "white 
 feather" women were made by Mr. Reginald Kemp, the Deputy 
 Coroner for West Middlesex, at an inquest at Ealing on Satur- 
 day on Richard Charles Roberts, aged thirty-four, a taxicub 
 driver, of Shepherd's Bush, who committed suicide in conse- 
 quence of worry caused by his rejection from the Army and 
 the taunts of women and other amateur recruiters. 
 
 It was stated that he tried to join the Army in October, 
 but was rejected on account of a weak heart. That alone, said 
 his widow, had depressed him, and he had been worried be- 
 cause he thought he would lose his license owing to the state 
 of his heart. He had also been troubled by the dangerous 
 illness of a child. 
 
 A soldier relative said that the deceased's life had been made 
 "a perfect misery" by women who taunted him and called him 
 a coward because he did not join the Army. A few days ago 
 two women in Maida Vale insulted him "something shocking." 
 
 Tlie Coroner, speaking with some warmth, said the conduct 
 of such women was abominable. It was scandalous that women 
 who knew nothing of individual circumstances sliould be 
 allowed to go about making unbearable the lives of men who 
 had tried to do their duty. It waa a pity they had nothing 
 better to do. Here was a man who perhaps had been driven 
 to death by a pack of silly women. He hoped something would 
 soon be done to put a stop to such conduct {Daily News, 
 July 26, 1915).
 
 50 WPIY MEN FIGHT 
 
 unconsciously a disposition to cruelty and per- 
 secution. Thinking ill of others is not in itself 
 a good reason for thinking well of ourselves. 
 But so long as this is not recognized, and so 
 long as the State can manufacture public opin- 
 ion, except in the rare cases where it is revo- 
 lutionary, public opinion must be reckoned as a 
 definite part of the power of the State. 
 
 The power of the State outside its own bor- 
 ders is in the main derived from war or the 
 threat of war. Some power is derived from the 
 ability to persuade its citizens to lend money or 
 not to lend it, but this is unimportant in com- 
 parison with the power derived from armies 
 and navies. The external activity of the State 
 — with exceptions so rare as to be negligible — 
 is selfish. Sometimes selfishness is mitigated 
 by the need of retaining the goodwill of other 
 States, but this onh^ modifies the methods em- 
 ployed, not the ends pursued. The ends pur- 
 sued, apart from mere defense against other 
 States, are, on the one hand, opportunities for 
 successful exploitation of weak or uncivilized 
 countries, on the other hand, power and pres- 
 tige, which are considered more glorious and 
 less material than money. In pursuit of these 
 objects, no State hesitates to put to death in-
 
 THE STATE 51 
 
 numerable foreigners whose happiness is not 
 compatible with exploitation or subjection, or 
 to devastate territories into which it is thought 
 necessary to strike terror. Apart from the 
 present war, such acts have been performed 
 within the last twenty years by many minor 
 States and by all the Great Powers ^ except Aus- 
 tria ; and in the case of Austria only the oppor- 
 tunity, not the will, was lacking. 
 
 Why do men acquiesce in the power of the 
 State? There are many reasons, some tradi- 
 tional, some very present and pressing. 
 
 The^raditional reason for obedience to the 
 State is personal loyalty to the sovereign. Eu- 
 ropean States grew up under the feudal sys- 
 tem, and were originally the several territories 
 owTied by feudal chiefs. But this source of 
 obedience has decayed, and probably now 
 counts for little except in Japan, and to a lesser 
 extent in Russia. 
 
 Tribal feeling, which always underlay loyalty 
 to the sovereign, has remained as strong as it 
 ever was, and is now the chief support for the 
 power of the State. Almost every man finds 
 
 1 By Enprland in South Africa. Amorioa in the Pliilippinos, 
 France in Morocco, Italy in Tripoli, Germany in Southwest 
 Africa, Russia in Persia and Manchuria, Japan in Manchuria.
 
 52 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 it essential to his liappiness to feel himself a 
 member of a group, animated by common friend- 
 ships and enmities and banded together for de- 
 fense and attack. But such groups are of two 
 kinds : there are those which are essentially en- 
 largements of the family, and there are those 
 which are based upon a conscious common pur- 
 pose. Nations belong to the first kind. 
 Churches to the second. At times when men 
 are profoundly swayed by creeds national di- 
 visions tend to break down, as they did in the 
 wars of religion after the Eeformation. At 
 such times a common creed is a stronger bond 
 than a common nationality. To a much slighter 
 extent, the same thing has occurred in the mod- 
 ern world with the rise of socialism. Men who 
 disbelieve in private property, and feel the cap- 
 italist the real enemy, have a bond which 
 transcends national divisions. It has not been 
 found strong enough to resist the passions 
 aroused by the present war, but it has made 
 them less bitter among socialists than among 
 others, and has kept alive the hope of a Euro- 
 pean community to be reconstructed when the 
 war is over. In the main, however, the uni- 
 versal disbelief in creeds has left tribal feeling 
 triumphant, and has made nationalism stronger
 
 THE STATE 53 
 
 than at any previous period of the world's his- 
 tory. A few sincere Christians, a few sincere 
 socialists, have found in their creed a force ca- 
 pable of resisting the assaults of national pas- 
 sion, but they have been too few to influence 
 the course of events or even to cause serious 
 anxiety to the Governments. 
 
 It is chiefly tribal feeling that generates the 
 unity of a national State, but it is not only 
 tribal feeling that generates its strength. Its 
 strength results principally from two fears, 
 neither of which is unreasonable: the fear of 
 crime and anarchy within, and the fear of ag- 
 gression from without. 
 
 The internal orderliness of a civilized com- 
 munity is a great achievement, chiefly brought 
 about by the increased authority of the State. 
 It would be inconvenient if peaceable citizens 
 were constantly in imminent risk of being 
 robbed and murdered. Civilized life would be- 
 come almost impossible if adventurous people 
 could organize private armies for purposes of 
 plunder. These conditions existed in the Mid- 
 dle Ages, and have not passed away without a 
 great struggle. It is thought by many — espe- 
 cially by the rich, who derive the greatest ad- 
 vantage from law and order — that any diminu-
 
 54 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 tion in the power of the State might bring back 
 a condition of universal anarchy. They regard 
 strikes as portents of dissolution. They are 
 terrified by such organizations as the Confe- 
 deration Generale du Travail and the Interna- 
 tional Workers of the World. They remember 
 the French Eevolution, and feel a not unnat- 
 ural desire to keep their heads on their shoul- 
 ders. They dread particularly any political 
 theory which seems to excuse private crimes, 
 such as sabotage and political assassination. 
 Against these dangers they see no protection 
 except the maintenance of the authority of the 
 State, and the belief that all resistance to the 
 State is wicked. 
 
 Fear of the danger within is enhanced by 
 fear of the danger without. Every State is 
 exposed at all times to the risk of foreign in- 
 vasion. No means has hitherto been devised 
 for minimizing this risk except the increase of 
 armaments. But the armaments which are 
 nominally intended to repel invasion may also 
 be used to invade. And so the means adopted 
 to diminish the external fear have the effect of 
 increasing it, and of enormously enhancing the 
 destructiveness of war when it does break out. 
 In this way a reign of terror becomes univer-
 
 THE STATE 55 
 
 sal, and the State acquires everywhere some- 
 thing of the character of the Comite du Salut 
 Public. 
 
 The tribal feeling out of which the State de- 
 velops is natural, and the fear by which the 
 State is strengthened is reasonable under pres- 
 ent circumstances. And in addition to these 
 two, there is a third source of strength in a na- 
 tional State, namely patriotism in its religious 
 aspect. 
 
 Patriotism is a very complex feeling, built 
 up out of primitive instincts and highly intel- 
 lectual convictions. There is love of home and 
 family and friends, making us peculiarly anx- 
 ious to preserve our own country from invasion. 
 There is the mild instinctive liking for com- 
 patriots as against foreigners. There is pride, 
 which is bound up with the success of the com- 
 munity to which we feel that we belong. There 
 is a belief, suggested by pride but reinforced 
 by history, that one's own nation represents a 
 great tradition and stands for ideals that are 
 important to the human race. But besides all 
 these, there is another element, at once nobler 
 and more open to attack, an element of worship, 
 of willing sacrifice, of joyful merging of the in- 
 dividual life in the life of the nation. This re-
 
 56 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ligious element in patriotism is essential to the 
 strength of the State, since it enlists the best 
 that is in most men on the side of national sac- 
 rifice. 
 
 The religious element in patriotism is rein- 
 forced by education, especially by a knowledge 
 of the history and literature of one's own coun- 
 try, provided it is not accompanied by much 
 knowledge of the history and literature of other 
 countries. In every civilized country all in- 
 struction of the young emphasizes the merits 
 of their own nation and the faults of other na- 
 tions. It comes to be universally believed that 
 one 's own nation, because of its superiority, de- 
 serves support in a quarrel, however the quar- 
 rel may have originated. This belief is so gen- 
 uine and deep that it makes men endure pa- 
 tiently, almost gladly, the losses and hardships 
 and sufferings entailed by war. Like all sin- 
 cerely believed religions, it gives an outlook on 
 life, based upon instinct but sublimating it, 
 causing a devotion to an end greater than any 
 personal end, but containing many personal 
 ends as it were in solution. 
 
 Patriotism as a religion is unsatisfactory be- 
 cause of its lack of universality. The good at 
 which it aims is a good for one's own nation
 
 THE STATE 57 
 
 only, not for all mankind. The desires which 
 it inspires in an Englishman are not the same 
 as the desires which it inspires in a German. A 
 world full of patriots may be a world full of 
 strife. The more intensely a nation believes 
 in its patriotism, the more fanatically indiffer- 
 ent it will become to the damage suffered by 
 other nations. When once men have learnt to 
 subordinate their own good to the good of a 
 larger whole, there can be no valid reason for 
 stopping short of the human race. It is the ad- 
 mixture of national pride that makes it so easy 
 in practice for men's impulses towards sacrifice 
 to stop short at the frontiers of their own coun- 
 try. It is this admixture that poisons patriot- 
 ism, and makes it inferior, as a religion, to be- 
 liefs which aim at the salvation of all mankind. 
 We cannot avoid having more love for our own 
 country than for other countries, and there is 
 no reason why we should wish to avoid it, any 
 more than we should wish to love all individual 
 men and women equally. But any adequate re- 
 ligion will lead us to temper inequality of af- 
 fection by love of justice, and to universalize 
 our aims by realizing the common needs of man. 
 This change was effected by Christianity in 
 Judaism, and must be effected in any merely na-
 
 58 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 tional religion before it can be purged of eviL 
 In practice, patriotism has many other ene- 
 mies to contend with. Cosnropolitanism can- 
 not fail to grow as men acquire more knowledge 
 of foreign countries by education and travel. 
 There is also a kind of individualism which is 
 continually increasing, a realization that every 
 man ought to be as nearly free as possible to 
 choose his own ends, not compelled by a geo- 
 graphical accident to pursue ends forced upon 
 him by the community. Socialism, syndicalism, 
 and anti-capitalist movements generally, are 
 against patriotism in their tendency, since they 
 make men aware that the present State is 
 largely concerned in defending the privileges 
 of the rich, and that many of the conflicts be- 
 tween States have their origin in the financial 
 interests of a few plutocrats. This kind of op- 
 position is perhaps temporary, a mere incident 
 in the struggle of labor to acquire power. 
 Australia, where labor feels its triumph secure, 
 is full of patriotism and militarism, based upon 
 determination to prevent foreign labor from 
 sharing the benefits of a privileged position. It 
 is not unlikely that England might develop a 
 similar nationalism if it became a socialist 
 State. But it is probable that such nationalism
 
 THE STATE 59 
 
 would be purely defensive. Schemes of foreign 
 'aggression, entailing great loss of life and 
 wealth in the nation which adopts them, would 
 hardly be initiated except by those whose in- 
 stincts of dominion have been sharpened 
 through the power derived from private prop- 
 erty and the institutions of the capitalist State. 
 
 The evil wrought in the modern world by the 
 excessive power of the State is very great, and 
 very little recognized. 
 
 The chief harm wrought by the State is pro- 
 motion of efficiency in war. If all States in- 
 crease their strength, the balance of power is 
 unchanged, and no one State has a better chance 
 of victory than before. And when the means of 
 offense exist, even though their original pur- 
 pose may have been defensive, the temptation 
 to use them is likely, sooner or later, to prove 
 ovei'whelming. In this way the very measures 
 which promoted security within the borders of 
 the State promote insecurity elsewhere. It is 
 of the essence of the State to suppress violence 
 within and to facilitate it w^ithout. The State 
 makes an entirely artificial division of mankind 
 and of our duties toward them: towards one 
 group we are bound by the law, towards the 
 other only by the prudence of highwaymen.
 
 60 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 The State is rendered evil by its exclusions, and 
 by the fact that, whenever it embarks upon ag- 
 gressive war, it becomes a combination of men 
 for murder and robbery. The present system 
 is irrational, since external and internal anar- 
 chy must be both right or both wrong. It is 
 supported because, so long as others adopt it, 
 it is thought the only road to safety, and be- 
 cause it secures the pleasures of triumph and 
 dominion, which cannot be obtained in a good 
 community. If these pleasures were no longer 
 sought, or no longer possible to obtain, the prob- 
 lem of securing safety from invasion would not 
 be difficult. 
 
 Apart from war, the modem great State is 
 harmful from its vastness and the resulting 
 sense of individual helplessness. The citizen 
 who is out of sympathy with the aims of the 
 State, unless he is a man of very rare gifts, can- 
 not hope to persuade the State to adopt pur- 
 poses which seem to him better. Even in a 
 democracy, all questions except a very few are 
 decided by a small number of officials and emi- 
 nent men ; and even the few questions which are 
 left to the popular vote are decided by a dif- 
 fused mass-psychology, not by individual initia- 
 tive. This is especially noticeable in a country
 
 THE STATE 61 
 
 like the United States, where, in spite of de- 
 mocracy, most men have a sense of almost com- 
 plete impotence in regard to all large issues. 
 In so vast a country the popular will is like one 
 of the forces of Nature, and seems nearly as 
 much outside the control of any one man. This 
 state of things leads, not only in America but 
 in all large States, to something of the weari- 
 ness and discouragement that we associate with 
 the Eoman Empire. Modern States, as op- 
 posed to the small city States of ancient Greece 
 or medieval Italy, leave little room for initia- 
 tive, and fail to develop in most men any sense 
 of ability to control their political destinies. 
 The few men who achieve power in such States 
 are men of abnormal ambition and thirst for 
 dominion, combined with skill in cajolery and 
 subtlety in negotiation. All the rest are 
 dwarfed by knowledge of their own impotence. 
 A curious survival from the old monarchical 
 idea of the State is the belief that there is some 
 peculiar wickedness in a wish to secede on the 
 part of any section of the population. If Ire- 
 land or Poland desires independence, it is 
 thought obvious that this desire must be strenu- 
 ously resisted, and any attempt to secure it is 
 condemned as ''high treason." The only in-
 
 62 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 stance to the contrary that I can remember is 
 the separation of Norway and Sweden, which 
 was commended but not imitated. In other 
 cases, nothing but defeat in war has induced 
 States to part with territory: although this at- 
 titude is taken for granted, it is not one which 
 would be adopted if the State had better ends 
 in view. The reason for its adoption is that 
 the chief end of almost all great States is power, 
 especially power in war. And power in war is 
 often increased by the inclusion of unwilling 
 citizens. If the well-being of the citizens were 
 the end in view, the question whether a certain 
 area should be included, or should form a sepa- 
 rate State, would be left freely to the decision 
 of that area. If this principle were adopted, 
 one of the main reasons for war would be ob- 
 viated, and one of the most tyrannical elements 
 in the State would be removed. 
 
 The principal source of the harm done by the 
 State is the fact that power is its chief end. 
 This is not the case in America, because Amer- 
 ica is safe against aggression ; ^ but in aU other 
 great nations the chief aim of the State is to 
 possess the greatest possible amount of exter- 
 nal force. To this end, the liberty of the citi- 
 
 1 TMs was written in 1915,
 
 THE STATE 63 
 
 zens is curtailed, and anti-militarist propa- 
 ganda is severely punished. This attitude is 
 rooted in pride and fear: pride, which refuses 
 to be conciliatory, and fear, which dreads the 
 results of foreign pride conflicting with our own 
 pride. It seems something of a historical ac- 
 cident that these two passions, which by no 
 means exhaust the political passions of the or- 
 dinary man, should so completely determine the 
 external policy of the State. Without pride, 
 there would be no occasion for fear: fear on 
 the part of one nation is due to the supposed 
 pride of another nation. Pride of dominion, 
 unwillingness to decide disputes otherwise than 
 by force or the threat of force, is a habit of 
 mind greatly encouraged by the possession of 
 power. Those who have long been in the habit 
 of exercising power become autocratic and quar- 
 relsome, incapable of regarding an equal other- 
 wise than as a rival. It is notorious that head 
 masters' conferences are more liable to violent 
 disagreements than most similar bodies: each 
 head master tries to treat the others as he treats 
 his own boys; they resent such treatment, and 
 he resents their resentment. Men who have the 
 habit of authority are peculiarly unfit for 
 friendly negotiation; but the official relations
 
 64 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 of States are mainly in the hands of men with 
 a great deal of authority in their own country. 
 This is, of course, more particularly the case 
 where there is a monarch who actually governs. 
 It" is less true where there is a governing oli- 
 garchy, and still less true where there is some 
 approach to real democracy. Brt it is true to 
 a considerable extent in all coui-tries, because 
 Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries are 
 necessarily men in authority. The first step 
 towards remedying this state of things is a gen- 
 uine interest in foreign affairs on the part of 
 the ordinary citizen, and an insistence that na- 
 tional pride shall not be allowed to jeopardize 
 his other interests. During war, when he is 
 roused, he is willing to sacrifice everything to 
 pride; but in quiet times he will be far more 
 ready than men in authority to realize that for- 
 eign affairs, like private concerns, ought to be 
 settled amicably according to principles, not 
 brutally by force or the threat of force. 
 
 The effect of personal bias in the men who 
 actually compose the Government may be seen 
 very clearly in labor disputes. French syndi- 
 calists affirm that the State is simply a product 
 of capitalism, a part of the weapons which cap- 
 ital employs in its conflict with labor. Even in
 
 THE STATE 65 
 
 democratic States there is much to bear out this 
 view. In strikes it is common to order out the 
 soldiers to coerce the strikers ; although the em- 
 ployers are much fewer, and much easier to co- 
 erce, the soldiers are never employed against 
 them. When labor troubles paralyze the indus- 
 try of a country, it is the men who are thought 
 to be unpatriotic, not the masters, though 
 clearly the responsibility belongs to both sides. 
 The chief reason for this attitude on the part 
 of Governments is that the men composing them 
 belong, by their success if not by their origin, 
 to the same class as the great employers of 
 labor. Their bias and their associates combine 
 to make them view strikes and lockouts from 
 the standpoint of the rich. In a democracy 
 public opinion and the need of conciliating po- 
 litical supporters partially correct these pluto- 
 cratic influences, but the correction is always 
 only partial. And the same influences which 
 warp the views of Governments on labor ques- 
 tions also warp their views on foreign affairs, 
 with the added disadvantage that the ordinary 
 citizen has much fewer means of arriving at an 
 independent judgment. 
 
 The excessive power of the State, partly 
 through internal oppression, but principally
 
 66 WHY MEN FIGHl^ 
 
 through war and the fear of war, is one of the 
 chief causes of misery in the modern world, 
 and one of the main reasons for the discourage- 
 ment which prevents men from growing to their 
 full mental stature. Some means of curing 
 this excessive power must be found if men are 
 not to be organized into despair, as they were 
 in the Eoman Empire. 
 
 The State has one purpose which is on the 
 whole good, namely, the substitution of law for 
 force in the relations of men. But this purpose 
 can only be fully achieved by a world-State, 
 without which international relations cannot be 
 made subject to law. And although law is bet- 
 ter than force, law is still not the best way of 
 settling disputes. Law is too static, too much 
 on the side of what is decaying, too little on 
 the side of what is growing. So long as law is 
 in theory supreme, it will have to be tempered, 
 from time to time, by internal revolution and 
 external war. These can only be prevented by 
 perpetual readiness to alter the law in accord- 
 ance with the present balance of forces. If this 
 is not done, the motives for appealing to force 
 will sooner or later become irresistible. A 
 world-State or federation of States, if it is to 
 be successful, will have to decide questions, not
 
 THE STAT13 6? 
 
 by the legal maxims which would be applied by 
 the Hague tribunal, but as far as possible in 
 the same sense in which they would be decided 
 by war. The function of authority should be 
 to render the appeal to force unnecessary, not 
 to give decisions contrary to those which would 
 be reached by force. 
 
 This view may be thought by some to be im- 
 moral. It may be said that the object of civ- 
 ilization should be to secure justice, not to give 
 the victory to the strong. But when this an- 
 tithesis is allowed to pass, it is forgotten that 
 love of justice may itself set force in motion. 
 A Legislature which wishes to decide an issue 
 in the same way as it would be decided if there 
 were an appeal to force will necessarily take 
 account of justice, provided justice is so fla- 
 grantly on one side that disinterested parties 
 are willing to take up the quarrel. If a strong 
 man assaults a weak man in the streets of Lon- 
 don, the balance of force is on the side of the 
 weak man, because, even if the police did not 
 appear, casual passers-by would step in to de- 
 fend him. It is sheer cant to speak of a contest 
 of might against right, and at the same time to 
 hope for a victory of the right. If the contest 
 is really between miglit and right, that means
 
 68 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 that right will be beaten. What is obscurely 
 intended, when this phrase is used, is that the 
 stronger side is only rendered stronger by 
 men's sense of right. But men's sense of right 
 is very subjective, and is only one factor in de- 
 ciding the preponderance of force. What is de- 
 sirable in a Legislature is, not that it should de- 
 cide by its personal sense of right, but that it 
 should decide in a way which is felt to make an 
 appeal to force unnecessary. 
 
 Having considered what the State ought not 
 to do, I come now to what it ought to do. 
 
 Apart from war and the preservation of in- 
 ternal order, there are certain more positive 
 functions which the State performs, and certain 
 others which it ought to perform. 
 
 We may lay down two principles as regards 
 these positive functions. 
 
 First : there are matters in which the welfare 
 of the whole community depends upon the prac- 
 tically universal attainment of a certain mini- 
 mum; in such cases the State has the right to 
 insist upon this minimum being attained. 
 
 Secondly : there are ways in which, by insist- 
 ing upon the maintenance of law, the State, if 
 it does nothing further, renders possible vari- 
 ous forms of injustice which would otherwise
 
 THE STATE 69 
 
 be prevented by the anger of their victims. 
 Such injustices ought, as far as possible, to be 
 prevented by the State. 
 
 The most obvious example of a matter where 
 the general welfare depends upon a universal 
 minimum is sanitation and the prevention of 
 infectious diseases. A single case of plague, 
 if it is neglected, may cause disaster to a whole 
 community. No one can reasonably maintain, 
 on general grounds of liberty, that a man suf- 
 fering from plague ought to be left free to 
 spread infection far and wide. Exactly similar 
 considerations apply to drainage, notification 
 of fevers, and kindred matters. The interfer- 
 ence with liberty remains an evil, but in some 
 cases it is clearly a smaller evil than the spread 
 of disease which liberty would produce. The 
 stamping out of malaria and yellow fever by 
 destroying mosquitoes is perhaps the most strik- 
 ing example of the good which can be done in 
 this way. But when the good is small or doubt- 
 ful, and the interference with liberty is great, 
 it becomes better to endure a certain amount of 
 preventable disease rather than suffer a scien- 
 tific tyranny. 
 
 Compulsory education comes under the same 
 head as sanitation. The existence of ignorant
 
 70 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 masses in a population is a danger to the com- 
 munity; wlien a considerable percentage are il- 
 literate, the whole machinery of government has 
 to take account of the fact. Democracy in its 
 modern form would be quite impossible in a na- 
 tion where many men cannot read. But in this 
 case there is not the same need of absolute uni- 
 versality as in the case of sanitary measures. 
 The gipsies, whose mode of life has been ren- 
 dered almost impossible by the education au- 
 thorities, might well have been allowed to re- 
 main a picturesque exception. But apart from 
 such rather unimportant exceptions, the argu- 
 ment for compulsory education is irresistible. 
 
 What the State does for the care of children 
 at present is less than what ought to be done, 
 not more. Children are not capable of looking 
 after their own interests, and parental responsi- 
 bility is in many ways inadequate. It is clear 
 that the State alone can insist upon the children 
 being provided with the minimum of knowledge 
 and health which, for the time being, satisfies 
 the conscience of the community. 
 
 The encouragement of scientific research is 
 another matter which comes rightly within the 
 powers of the State, because the benefits of dis- 
 coveries accrue to the community, while the in-
 
 THE STATE 71 
 
 vestigations are expensive and never individ- 
 ually certain of achieving any result. In this 
 matter, Great Britain lags behind all other civ- 
 ilized countries. 
 
 The second kind of powers which the State 
 ought to possess are those that aim at dimin- 
 ishing economic injustice. It is this kind that 
 has been emphasized by socialists. The law 
 creates or facilitates monopolies, and monopo- 
 lies are able to exact a toll from the commun- 
 ity. The most glaring example is the private 
 o^vnership of land. Railways are at present 
 controlled by the State, since rates are fixed by 
 law; and it is clear that if they were uncon- 
 trolled, they would acquire a dangerous degree 
 of power.^ Such considerations, if they stood 
 alone, would justify complete socialism. But I 
 think justice, by itself, is, like law, too static to 
 be made a supreme political principle: it does 
 not, when it has been achieved, contain any 
 seeds of new life or any impetus to develop- 
 ment. For this reason, when we wish to rem- 
 edy an injustice, it is important to consider 
 whether, in so doing, we shall be destroying the 
 incentive to some form of vigorous action which 
 
 1 This would be as true under a eyndicaliat regime as it is 
 at present.
 
 72 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 is on the whole useful to the community. No 
 such form of action, so far as I can see, is as- 
 sociated with private ownership of land or of 
 any other source of economic rent ; if this is the 
 case, it follows that the State ought to be the 
 primary recipient of rent. 
 
 If all these powers are allowed to the State, 
 what becomes of the attempt to rescue individ- 
 ual liberty from its tyranny ? 
 
 This is part of the general problem which 
 confronts all those who still care for the ideals 
 which inspired liberalism, namely the problem 
 of combining liberty and personal initiative 
 with organization. Politics and economics are 
 more and more dominated by vast organizations, 
 in face of which the individual is in danger of 
 becoming powerless. The State is the greatest 
 of these organizations, and the most serious 
 menace to liberty. And yet it seems that many 
 of its functions must be extended rather than 
 curtailed. 
 
 There is one way by which organization and 
 liberty can be combined, and that is, by secur- 
 ing power for voluntary organizations, consist- 
 ing of men who have chosen to belong to them 
 because they embody some purpose which all 
 their members consider important, not a pur-
 
 THE STATE 73 
 
 pose imposed by accident or outside force. The 
 State, being geographical, cannot be a wholly 
 voluntary association, but for that very reason 
 there is need of a strong public opinion to re- 
 strain it from a tyrannical use of its powers. 
 This public opinion, in most matters, can only 
 be secured by combinations of those who have 
 certain interests or desires in common. 
 
 The positive purposes of the State, over and 
 above the preservation of order, ought as far 
 as possible to be carried out, not by the State 
 itself, but by independent organizations, which 
 should be left completely free so long as they 
 satisfied the State that they were not falling 
 below a necessary minimum. This occurs to 
 a certain limited extent at present in regard to 
 elementary education. The universities, also, 
 may be regarded as acting for the State in the 
 matter of higher education and research, except 
 that in their case no minimum of achievement 
 is exacted. In the economic sphere, the State 
 ought to exercise control, but ought to leave 
 initiative to others. There is every reason to 
 multiply opportunities of initiative, and to give 
 the greatest possible share of initiative to each 
 individual, for if this is not done there will be 
 a general sense of impotence and discourage-
 
 74 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ment. There ought to be a constant endeavor 
 to leave the more positive aspects of govern- 
 ment in the hands of voluntary organizations, 
 the purpose of the State being merely to exact 
 efficiency and to secure an amicable settlement 
 of disputes, whether within or ^\dthout its own 
 borders. And wdth this ought to be combined 
 the greatest possible toleration of exceptions 
 and the least possible insistence upon uniform 
 system. 
 
 A good deal may be achieved through local 
 government by trades as well as by areas. This 
 is the most original idea in syndicalism, and it 
 is valuable as a check upon the tyranny which 
 the community may be tempted to exercise over 
 certain classes of its members. All strong or- 
 ganizations which embody a sectional public 
 opinion, such as trade unions, cooperative so- 
 cieties, professions, and universities, are to be 
 welcomed as safeguards of liberty and oppor- 
 tunities for initiative. And there is need of a 
 strong public opinion in favor of liberty itself. 
 The old battles for freedom of thought and free- 
 dom of speech, which it was thought had been 
 definitively won, will have to be fought all over 
 again, since most men are only willing to accord 
 freedom to opinions which happen to be popu-
 
 THE STATE 75 
 
 lar. Institutions cannot preserve liberty un- 
 less men realize that liberty is precious and 
 are willing to exert themselves to keep it 
 alive. 
 
 There is a traditional objection to every im- 
 perium in imperio, but this is only the jealousy 
 of the tyrant. In actual fact, the modern State 
 contains many organizations which it cannot de- 
 feat, except perhaps on rare occasions when pub- 
 lic opinion is roused against them. Mr. Lloyd 
 George's long fight with the medical profession 
 over the Insurance Act was full of Homeric 
 fluctuations of fortune. The Welsh miners re- 
 cently routed the whole power of the State, 
 backed by an excited nation. As for the finan- 
 ciers, no Government would dream of a conflict 
 with them. When all other classes are ex- 
 horted to patriotism, they are allowed their 4l^ 
 per cent, and an increase of interest on their 
 consols. It is well understood on all sides that 
 an appeal to their patriotism would show gross 
 ignorance of the world. It is against the 
 traditions of the State to extort their money 
 by threatening to withdraw police protection. 
 This is not due to the difficulty of such a meas- 
 ure, but only to the fact that great wealth wins 
 genuine admiration from us all, and we cannot
 
 76 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 bear to think of a very rich man being treated 
 with disrespect. 
 
 The existence of strong organizations within 
 the State, such as trade unions, is not undesir- 
 able except from the point of view of the official 
 who wishes to wield unlimited power, or of the 
 rival organizations, such as federations of em- 
 ployers, which would prefer a disorganized ad- 
 versary. In view of the vastness of the State, 
 most men can find little political outlet for in- 
 itiative except in subordinate organizations 
 formed for specific purposes. Without an out- 
 let for political initiative, men lose their social 
 vigor and their interest in public affairs: they 
 become a prey to corrupt wire-pullers, or to 
 sensation-mongers who have the art of captur- 
 ing a tired and vagrant attention. The cure 
 for this is to increase rather than diminish the 
 powers of voluntary organizations, to give 
 every man a sphere of political activity small 
 enough for his interest and his capacity, and 
 to confine the functions of the State, as far as 
 possible, to the maintenance of peace among 
 rival interests. The essential merit of the 
 State is that it prevents the internal use of force 
 by private persons. Its essential demerits are,
 
 THE STATE 77 
 
 that it promotes the external use of force, and 
 that, by its great size, it makes each individual 
 feel impotent even in a democracy. I shall re- 
 turn in a later lecture to the question of pre- 
 venting war. The prevention of the sense of 
 individual impotence cannot be achieved by a 
 return to the small City State, which would be 
 as reactionary as a return to the days before 
 machinery. It must be achieved by a method 
 which is in the direction of present tendencies. 
 Such a method would be the increasing devolu- 
 tion of positive political initiative to bodies 
 formed voluntarily for specific purposes, leav- 
 ing the State rather in the position of a federal 
 authority or a court of arbitration. The State 
 will then confine itself to insisting upon some 
 settlement of rival interests: its only principle 
 in deciding what is the right settlement will be 
 an attempt to find the measure most acceptable, 
 on the whole, to all the parties concerned. 
 This is the direction in which democratic States 
 naturally tend, except in so far as they are 
 turned aside by war or the fear of war. So 
 long as war remains a daily imminent danger, 
 the State will remain a Moloch, sacrificing 
 sometimes the life of the individual, and always
 
 78 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 his unfettered development, to the barren strug- 
 gle for mastery in the competition with other 
 States. In internal as in external affairs, the 
 worst enemy of freedom is war.
 
 in 
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 
 
 IN spite of the fact that most nations at most 
 times, are at peace, war is one of the per- 
 manent institutions of all free communities, 
 just as Parliament is one of our permanent in- 
 stitutions in spite of the fact that it is not al- 
 ways sitting. It is war as a permanent insti- 
 tution that I wish to consider: why men toler- 
 ate it; why they ought not to tolerate it; what 
 hope there is of their coming not to tolerate 
 it ; and how they could abolish it if they wished 
 to do so. 
 
 War is a conflict between two groups, each 
 of which attempts to kill and maim as many 
 as possible of the other group in order to 
 achieve some object which it desires. The ob- 
 ject is generally either power or wealth. It is 
 a pleasure to exercise authority over other men, 
 and it is a pleasure to live on the produce of 
 other men's labor. The victor in war can en- 
 joy more of these delights than the vanquished. 
 
 79
 
 80 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 But war, like all other natural activities, is not 
 so much prompted by the end which it has in 
 \dew as by an impulse to the activity itself. 
 Very often men desire an end, not on its own 
 account, but because their nature demands the 
 actions which will lead to the end. And so it is 
 in this case : the ends to be achieved by war ap- 
 pear in prospect far more important than they 
 will appear when they are realized, because 
 war itself is a fulfilment of one side of our na- 
 ture. If men's actions sprang from desires for 
 what would in fact bring happiness, the purely 
 rational arguments against war would have 
 long ago put an end to it. What makes war 
 difficult to suppress is that it springs from an 
 impulse, rather than from a calculation of the 
 advantages to be derived from war. 
 
 War differs from the employment of force 
 by the police through the fact that the actions 
 of the police are ordered by a neutral author- 
 ity, whereas in war it is the parties to the dis- 
 pute themselves who set force in motion. This 
 distinction is not absolute, since the State is 
 not always wholly neutral in internal disturb- 
 ances. When strikers are shot down, the State 
 is taking the side of the rich. When opinions 
 adverse to the existing State are punished, the
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 81 
 
 State is obviously one of the parties to the dis- 
 pute. And from the suppression of individual 
 opinion up to civil war all gradations are pos- 
 sible. But broadly speaking, force employed 
 according to laws previously laid down by the 
 community as a whole may be distinguished 
 from force employed by one community against 
 another on occasions of which the one com- 
 munity is the sole judge. I have dwelt upon 
 this difference because I do not think the use 
 of force by the police can be wholly eliminated, 
 and I think a similar use of force in interna- 
 tional affairs is the best hope of permanent 
 peace. At present, international affairs are 
 regulated by the principle that a nation must 
 not intervene unless its interests are involved: 
 diplomatic usage forbids intervention for the 
 mere maintenance of international law. Amer- 
 ica may protest when American citizens are 
 drowned by German submarines, but must not 
 protest when no American citizens are involved. 
 The case would be analogous in internal affairs 
 if the police would only interfere with murder 
 when it happened that a policeman had been 
 killed. So long as this principle prevails in the 
 relations of States, the power of neutrals can- 
 not be effectively employed to prevent war.
 
 82 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 In every civilized country two forces coop- 
 erate to produce war. In ordinary times some 
 men — usually a small proportion of the popula- 
 tion — are bellicose: they predict war, and ob- 
 viously are not unhappy in the prospect. So 
 long as war is not imminent, the bulk of the 
 population pay little attention to these men, and 
 do not actively either support or oppose them. 
 But when war begins to seem very near, a war- 
 fever seizes hold of people, and those who were 
 already bellicose find themselves enthusias- 
 tically supported by all but an insignificant mi- 
 nority. The impulses which inspire w^ar-fever 
 are rather different from those which make 
 some men bellicose in ordinary times. Only ed- 
 ucated men are likely to be warlike at ordinary 
 times, since they alone are vividly aware of 
 other countries or of the part which their own 
 nation might play in the affairs of the world. 
 But it is only their knowledge, not their nature, 
 that distinguishes them from their more igno- 
 rant compatriots. 
 
 To take the most ob^dous example, German 
 policy, in recent years before the war, w^as not 
 averse from war, and not friendly to England. 
 It is worth while to try to understand the state 
 of mind from which this policy sprang.
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 83 
 
 The men who direct German policy are, to 
 begin with, patriotic to an extent which is al- 
 most unknown in France and England. The in- 
 terests of Germany appear to them unquestion- 
 ably the only interests they need take into ac- 
 count. What injury may, in pursuing those 
 interests, be done to other nations, what de- 
 struction may be brought upon populations and 
 cities, what irreparable damage may result to 
 civilization, it is not for them to consider. If 
 they can confer what they regard as benefits 
 upon Germany, everything else is of no account. 
 
 The second noteworthy point about German 
 policy is that its conception of national wel- 
 fare is mainly competitive. It is not the in- 
 trinsic wealth of Germany, whether materially 
 or mentally, that the rulers of Germany con- 
 sider important: it is the comparative wealth 
 in the competition with other civilized coun- 
 tries. For this reason the destruction of good 
 things abroad appears to them almost as desir- 
 able as the creation of good things in Germany. 
 In most parts of the world the French are re- 
 garded as the most civilized of nations: their 
 art and their literature and their way of life 
 have an attraction for foreigners which those 
 of Germany do not have. The English have
 
 84 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 developed political liberty, and the art of main- 
 taining an Empire with a minimum of coercion, 
 in a way for which Germany, hitherto, has 
 shown no aptitude. These are grounds for 
 envjy and envy wishes to destroy what is good 
 in other countries. German militarists, quite 
 rightly, judged that what was best in France 
 and England would probably be destroyed by a 
 great war, even if France and England were 
 not in the end defeated in the actual fighting. 
 I have seen a list of young French writers 
 killed on the battlefield; probably the German 
 authorities have also seen it, and have reflected 
 with joy that another year of such losses will 
 destroy French literature for a generation — 
 perhaps, through loss of tradition, for ever. 
 Every outburst against liberty in our more bel- 
 licose newspapers, every incitement to perse- 
 cution of defenseless Germans, every mark of 
 growing ferocity in our attitude, must be read 
 with delight by German patriots, as proving 
 their success in robbing us of our best, and in 
 forcing us to imitate whatever is worst in Prus- 
 sia. 
 
 But what the rulers of Germany have envied 
 ns most was power and wealth — the power de- 
 rived from command of the seas and the straits,
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 85 
 
 the wealth derived from a centuiy of industrial 
 supremacy. In both these respects they feel 
 that their deserts are higher than ours. They 
 have devoted far more thought and skill to mil- 
 itary and industrial organization. Their aver- 
 age of intelligence and knowledge is far supe- 
 rior; their capacity for pursuing an attainable 
 end, unitedly and with forethought, is infinitely 
 greater. Yet we, merely (as they think) be- 
 cause we had a start in the race, have achieved 
 a vastly larger Empire than they have, and an 
 enormously greater control of capital. All this 
 is unbearable ; yet nothing but a great war can 
 alter it. 
 
 Besides all these feelings, there is in many 
 Germans, especially in those who know us best, 
 a hot hatred of us on account of our pride. 
 Farinata degli Uberti surveyed Hell ''come 
 avesse lo Inferno in gran dispitto." Just so, 
 by German accounts, English officer prisoners 
 look round them among their captors — hold- 
 ing aloof, as though the enemy were noxious, 
 unclean creatures, toads or slugs or centipedes, 
 which a man does not touch willingly, and 
 shakes off with loathing if he is forced to touch 
 them for a moment. It is easy to imagine how 
 the devils hated Farinata, and inflicted greater
 
 86 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 pains upon him than upon his neighbors, hop- 
 ing to win recognition by some slight wincing 
 on his part, driven to frenzy by his continuing 
 to behave as if they did not exist. In just the 
 same way the Germans are maddened by our 
 spiritual immobility. At bottom we have re- 
 garded the Geraians as one regards flies on a 
 hot day: they are a nuisance, one has to brush 
 them off, but it would not occur to one to be 
 turned aside by them. Now that the initial cer- 
 tainty of victory has faded, we begin to be af- 
 fected inwardly by the Germans. In time, if 
 we continue to fail in our military enterprises, 
 we shall realize that they are human beings, not 
 just a tiresome circumstance. Then perhaps 
 we shall hate them with a hatred which they 
 will have no reason to resent. And from such 
 a hatred it will be only a short journey to a 
 genuine rapprochement. 
 
 The problem which must be solved, if the fu- 
 ture of the world is to be less terrible than its 
 present, is the problem of preventing nations 
 from getting into the moods of England and 
 Germany at the outbreak of the war. These 
 two nations as they were at that moment might 
 be taken as almost mythical representatives of 
 pride and envy — cold pride and hot envy. Ger-
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 87 
 
 many declaimed passionately: *'You, Eng- 
 land, swollen and decrepit, you overshadow my 
 whole growth — your rotting branches keep the 
 sun from shining upon me and the rain from 
 nourishing me. Your spreading foliage must 
 be lopped, your symmetrical beauty must be 
 destroyed, that I too may have freedom to grow, 
 that my young vigor may no longer be 
 impeded by your decaying mass." England, 
 bored and aloof, unconscious of the claims of 
 outside forces, attempted absent-mindedly to 
 sweep away the upstart disturber of medita- 
 tion; but the upstart was not swept away, and 
 remains so far with every prospect of making 
 good his claim. The claim and the resistance 
 to it are alike folly. Germany had no good 
 ground for envy; we had no good ground for 
 resisting whatever in Germany's demands was 
 compatible with our continued existence. Is 
 there any method of averting such reciprocal 
 folly in the future ? 
 
 I think if either the English or the Germans 
 were capable of thinking in terms of individual 
 welfare rather than national pride, they would 
 have seen that, at every moment during the war 
 the wisest course would have been to conclude 
 peace at once, on the best terms that could have
 
 88 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 been obtained. This course, I am convinced, 
 would have been the wisest for each separate 
 nation, as well as for civilization in general. 
 The utmost evil that the enemy could inflict 
 through an unfavorable peace would be a trifle 
 compared to the evil which all the nations in- 
 flict upon themselves by continuing to fight. 
 What blinds us to this obvious fact is pride, the 
 pride which makes the acknowledgment of de- 
 feat intolerable, and clothes itself in the garb 
 of reason by suggesting all kinds of evils which 
 are supposed to result from admitting defeat. 
 But the only real evil of defeat is humiliation, 
 and humiliation is subjective; we shall not feel 
 humiliated if we become persuaded that it was 
 a mistake to engage in the war, and that it is 
 better to pursue other tasks not deiDendent upon 
 world-dominion. If either the English or the 
 Germans could admit this inwardly, any peace 
 which did not destroy national independence 
 could be accepted without real loss in the self- 
 respect which is essential to a good life. 
 
 The mood in which Germany embarked upon 
 the war was abominable, but it was a mood 
 fostered by the habitual mood of England. We 
 have prided ourselves upon our territory and 
 our wealth ; we have been ready at all times to
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 89 
 
 defend by force of arms what we have conquered 
 in India and Africa. If we had realized the 
 futility of empire, and had shown a willingness 
 to yield colonies to Germany without waiting for 
 the threat of force, we might have been in a 
 position to persuade the Germans that their 
 ambitions were foolish, and that the respect of 
 the world was not to be won by an imperialist 
 policy. But by our resistance we showed that 
 we shared their standards. We, being in pos- 
 session, became enamored of the status quo. 
 The Germans were willing to make war to up- 
 set the status quo; we were willing to make war 
 to prevent its being upset in Germany's favor. 
 So convinced were we of the sacredness of the 
 status quo that we never realized how advan- 
 tageous it was to us, or how, by insisting upon 
 it, we shared the responsibility for the war. In 
 a world where nations grow and decay, where 
 forces change and populations become cramped, 
 it is not possible or desirable to maintain the 
 status quo for ever. If peace is to be pre- 
 served, nations must learn to accept unfavor- 
 able alterations of the map without feeling that 
 tliey must first be defeated in war, or that in 
 yielding they incur a humiliation. 
 It is the insistence of legalists and friends of
 
 90 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 peace upon the maintenance of the status quo 
 that has driven Germany into militarism. 
 Germany had as good a right to an Empire as 
 any other Great Power, but could only acquire 
 an Empire through war. Love of peace has 
 been too much associated with a static concep- 
 tion of international relations. In economic 
 disputes we all know that whatever is vigorous 
 in the wage-earning classes is opposed to "in- 
 dustrial peace," because the existing distribu- 
 tion of wealth is felt to be unfair. Those who 
 enjoy a privileged position endeavor to bolster 
 up their claims by appealing to the desire for 
 peace, and decrying those who promote strife 
 between the classes. It never occurs to them 
 that by opposing changes without considering 
 whether they are just, the capitalists share the 
 responsibility for the class war. And in ex- 
 actly the same way England shares the respon- 
 sibility for Germany's war. If actual war is 
 ever to cease there will have to be political 
 methods of achieving the results which now 
 can only be achieved by successful fighting, and 
 nations will have voluntarily to admit adverse 
 claims which appear just in the judgment of 
 neutrals. 
 
 It is only by some such admission, embody-
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 91 
 
 ing itself in a Parliament of the nations with 
 full power to alter the distribution of territory, 
 that militarism can be permanently overcome. 
 It may be that the present war will bring, in the 
 Western nations, a change of mood and outlook 
 sufficient to make such an institution possible. 
 It may be that more wars and more destruction 
 will be necessary before the majority of civil- 
 ized men rebel against the brutality and futile 
 destruction of modern war. But unless our 
 standards of civilization and our powers of con- 
 structive thought are to be permanently low- 
 ered, I cannot doubt that, sooner or later, 
 reason will conquer the blind impulses which 
 now lead nations into war. And if a large ma- 
 jority of the Great Powers had a firm determi- 
 nation that peace should be preserved, there 
 would be no difficulty in devising diplomatic 
 machinery for the settlement of disputes, and 
 in establishing educational systems which 
 would implant in the minds of the young an in- 
 eradicable horror of the slaughter which they 
 are now taught to admire. 
 
 Besides the conscious and deliberate forces 
 leading to war, there are the inarticulate feel- 
 ings of common men, which, in most civilized 
 countries, are always ready to burst into war
 
 92 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 fever at the bidding of statesmen. If peace is 
 to be secure, the readiness to catch war fever 
 must be somehow diminished. Whoever wishes 
 to succeed in this must first understand what 
 war fever is and why it arises. 
 
 The men who have an important influence in 
 the world, whether for good or evil, are domi- 
 nated as a rule by a threefold desire: they de- 
 sire, ^rst, an activity which calls fully into play 
 the faculties in which they feel that they excel ; 
 secondly, the sense of successfully overcoming 
 resistance ; thirdly, the respect of others on ac- 
 count of their success. The third of these de- 
 sires is sometimes absent : some men who have 
 been great have been without the "last infinn- 
 ity," and have been content with their own 
 sense of success, or merely with the joy of diffi- 
 cult effort. But as a rule all three are pres- 
 ent. Some men's talents are specialized, so 
 that their choice of activities is circumscribed 
 by the nature of their faculties ; other men have, 
 in youth, such a wide range of possible aptitudes 
 that their choice is chiefly determined by the 
 varying degrees of respect which public opinion 
 gives to different kinds of success. 
 
 The same desires, usually in a less marked 
 degree, exist in men who have no exceptional
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 93 
 
 talents. But such men cannot achieve any- 
 thing very difficult by their individual efforts; 
 for them, as units, it is impossible to acquire 
 the sense of greatness or the triumph of strong 
 resistance overcome. Their separate lives are 
 unadventurous and dull. In the morning they 
 go to the office or the plow, in the evening 
 they return tired and silent, to the sober 
 monotony of wife and children. Believing that 
 security is the supreme good, they have insured 
 against sickness and death, and have found an 
 employment where they have little fear of dis- 
 missal and no hope of any great rise. But se- 
 curity, once achieved, brings a Nemesis of 
 ennui. Adventure, imagination, risk, also have 
 their claims ; but how can these claims be satis- 
 fied by the ordinary wage-earner I Even if it 
 were possible to satisfy them, the claims of 
 wife and children have priority and must not be 
 neglected. 
 
 To this victim of order and good organiza- 
 tion the realization comes, in some moment of 
 sudden crisis, that he belongs to a nation, that 
 his nation may take risks, may engage in diffi- 
 cult enterprises, enjoy the hot passion of doubt- 
 ful combat, stimulate adventure and imagina- 
 tion by military expeditions to Mount Sinai and
 
 94 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the Garden of Eden. What his nation does, in 
 some sense, he does ; what his nation suffers, he 
 suffers. The long years of private caution are 
 avenged by a wild plunge into public madness. 
 All the horrid duties of thrift and order and 
 care which he has learnt to fulfil in private are 
 thought not to apply to public affairs: it is 
 patriotic and noble to be reckless for the na- 
 tion, though it would be wicked to be reckless 
 for oneself. The old primitive passions, which 
 civilization has denied, surge up all the stronger 
 for repression. In a moment imagination and 
 instinct travel back through the centuries, and 
 the wild man of the woods emerges from the 
 mental prison in which he has been confined. 
 This is the deeper part of the psychology of the 
 war fever. 
 
 But besides the irrational and instinctive ele- 
 ment in the war fever, there is alwaj^s also, if 
 only as a liberator of primitive impulse, a cer- 
 tain amount of quasi-rational calculation and 
 what is euphemistically called * ' thought. ' ' The 
 war fever very seldom seizes a nation unless it 
 believes that it will be victorious. Undoubt- 
 edly, under the influence of excitement, men 
 over-estimate their chances of success ; but there 
 is some proportion between what is hoped and
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 95 
 
 what a rational man would expect. Holland, 
 though quite as humane as England, had no 
 impulse to go to war on behalf of Belgium, be- 
 cause the likelihood of disaster was so obvi- 
 ously overwhelming. The London populace, if 
 they had known how the war was going to de- 
 velop, would not have rejoiced as they did on 
 that August Bank Holiday long ago. A nation 
 which has had a recent experience of war, and 
 has come to know that a war is almost always 
 more painful than it is expected to be at the 
 outset, becomes much less liable to war fever 
 until a new generation grows up. The ele- 
 ment of rationality in war fever is recognized 
 by Governments and journalists who desire 
 war, as may be seen by their invariably mini- 
 raizing the perils of a war which they wish to 
 provoke. At the beginning of the South Afri- 
 can War Sir William Butler was dismissed, ap- 
 parently for suggesting that sixty thousand 
 men and three months might not suffice to sub- 
 due the Boer Republics. And when the war 
 proved long and difficult, the nation turned 
 against those who had made it. We may as- 
 sume, I think, without attributing too great 
 a share to reason in human affairs, that a na- 
 tion would not suffer from war fever in a case
 
 96 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 where every sane man could see that defeat was 
 very probable. 
 
 The importance of this lies in the fact that it 
 would make aggressive war very unlikely if its 
 chances of success were very small. If the 
 peace-loving nations were sufficiently strong to 
 be obviously capable of defeating the nations 
 which were willing to wage aggressive war, the 
 peace-loving nations might form an alliance and 
 agree to fight jointly against any nation which 
 refused to submit its claims to an Interna- 
 tional Council. Before the present war we 
 might have reasonably hoped to secure the 
 peace of the world in some such way; but the 
 military strength of Germany has shown that 
 such a scheme has no great chance of success at 
 present. Perhaps at some not far distant date 
 it may be made more feasible by developments 
 of policy in America. 
 
 The economic and political forces which make 
 for war could be easily curbed if the will to 
 peace existed strongly in all civilized nations. 
 But so long as the populations are liable to war 
 fever, all work for peace must be precarious; 
 and if war fever could not be aroused, political 
 and economic forces would be powerless to pro- 
 duce any long or very destructive war. The
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 97 
 
 fundamental problem for the pacifist is to pre- 
 vent the impulse towards war which seizes 
 whole communities from time to time. And 
 this can only be done by far-reaching changes 
 in education, in the economic structure of so- 
 ciety, and in the moral code by which public 
 opinion controls the lives of men and women. ^ 
 
 A great many of the impulses which now lead 
 nations to go to war are in themselves essential 
 to any vigorous or progressive life. Without 
 imagination and love of adventure a society 
 soon becomes stagnant and begins to decay. 
 Conflict, provided it is not destructive and 
 brutal, is necessary in order to stimulate men's 
 activities, and to secure the victory of what is 
 living over what is dead or merely traditional. 
 The wish for the triumph of one's cause, the 
 sense of solidarity with large bodies of men, 
 are not things which a wdse man will wish to 
 destroy. It is only the outcome in death and 
 destruction and hatred that is evil. The prob- 
 lem is, to keep these impulses, without making 
 war the outlet for them. 
 
 All Utopias that have hitherto been con- 
 
 1 These changes, which are to be desired on their own ac- 
 count, not only in order to prevent war, will be discussed in 
 later lectures.
 
 98 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 structed are intolerably dull. Any man with 
 any force in him would rather live in this world, 
 with all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato's Re- 
 public or among Swift's Houylmhnms. The 
 men who make Utopias proceed upon a radi- 
 cally false assumption as to what constitutes a 
 good life. They conceive that it is possible to 
 imagine a certain state of society and a certain 
 way of life which should be once for all recog- 
 nized as good, and should then continue for ever 
 and ever. They do not realize that much the 
 greater part of a man's happiness depends upon 
 activity, and only a very small remnant con- 
 sists in passive enjoyment. Even the pleas- 
 ures which do consist in enjoyment are only 
 satisfactory, to most men, when they come in 
 the intervals of activity. Social reformers, like 
 inventors of Utopias, are apt to forget this very 
 obvious fact of human nature. They aim 
 rather at securing more leisure, and more op- 
 portunity for enjoying it, than at making work 
 itself more satisfactory, more consonant with 
 impulse, and a better outlet for creativeness and 
 the desire to employ one's faculties. Work, in 
 the modern world, is, to almost all who depend 
 on earnings, mere work, not an embodiment of 
 the desire for activity. Probably this is to a
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 99 
 
 considerable extent inevitable. But in so far 
 as it can be prevented something will be done 
 to give a peaceful outlet to some of the im- 
 pulses which lead to war. 
 
 It would, of course, be easy to bring about 
 peace if there were no vigor in the world. The 
 Roman Empire was pacific and unproductive; 
 the Athens of Pericles was the most productive 
 and almost the most warlike community known 
 to history. The only form of production in 
 which our own age excels is science, and in 
 science Germany, the most warlike of Great 
 Powers, is supreme. It is useless to multiply 
 examples; but it is plain that the very same 
 vital energy which produces all that is best also 
 produces war and the love of war. This is the 
 basis of the opposition to pacifism felt by many 
 men whose aims and activities are by no means 
 brutal. Pacifism, in practice, too often ex- 
 presses merely lack of force, not the refusal to 
 use force in thwarting others. Pacifism, if it is 
 to be both victorious and beneficent, must find 
 an outlet, compatible with humane feeling, for 
 the vigor which now leads nations into war and 
 destruction. 
 
 This problem was considered by William 
 James in an admirable address on **The Moral
 
 100 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Equivalent of War," delivered to a congress of 
 pacifists during the Spanish-American War of 
 1898. His statement of the problem could not 
 be bettered; and so far as I know, he is the 
 only writer who has faced the problem ade- 
 quately. But his solution is not adequate ; per- 
 haps no adequate solution is possible. The 
 problem, however, is one of degree : every addi- 
 tional peaceful outlet for men's energies dimin- 
 ishes the force which urges nations towards 
 war, and makes war less frequent and less 
 fierce. And as a question of degree, it is cap- 
 able of more or less partial solutions.^ 
 
 Every vigorous man needs some kind of con- 
 test, some sense of resistance overcome, in or- 
 der to feel that he is exercising his faculties. 
 Under the influence of economics, a theory has 
 grown up that what men desire is wealth ; this 
 theory has tended to verify itself, because peo- 
 ple's actions are more often determined by 
 what they think they desire than by what they 
 really desire. The less active members of a 
 community often do in fact desire wealth, since 
 it enables them to gratify a taste for passive 
 
 1 Wliat is said on this subject in the present lecture is only 
 preliminary, since the subsequent lectures all deal with some 
 aspect of the same problem.
 
 WAE AS AN INSTITUTION 101 
 
 enjoyment, and to secure respect without exer- 
 tion. But tlie energetic men who make great 
 fortunes seldom desire the actual money: they 
 desire ,the sense of power through a contest, 
 and the joy of successful activity. For this 
 reason, those who are the most ruthless in mak- 
 ing money are often the most willing to give it 
 away; there are many notorious examples of 
 this among American millionaires. The only 
 element of truth in the economic theory that 
 these men are actuated by desire for money is 
 this: owing to the fact that money is what is 
 believed to be desirable, the making of money 
 is recognized as the test of success. What is de- 
 sired is visible and indubitable success ; but this 
 can only be achieved by being one of the few 
 who reach a goal which many men would wish to 
 reach. For this reason, public opinion has a 
 great influence in directing the activities of 
 vigorous men. In America a millionaire is 
 more respected than a great artist; this leads 
 men who might become either the one or the 
 other to choose to become millionaires. In 
 Renaissance Italy great artists were more re- 
 spected than millionaires, and the result was the 
 opposite of what it is in America. 
 
 Some pacifists and all militarists deprecate
 
 102 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 social and political conflicts. In tins the mili- 
 tarists are in the right, from their point of 
 view; but the pacifists seem to me mistaken. 
 Conflicts of party politics, conflicts between 
 capital and labor, and generally all those con- 
 flicts of principle which do not involve war, 
 serve many useful purposes, and do very little 
 harm. They increase men's interest in public 
 affairs, they afford a comparatively innocent 
 outlet for the love of contest, and they help to 
 alter laws and institutions, when changing con- 
 ditions or greater knowledge create the wish 
 for an alteration. Everything that intensifies 
 political life tends to bring about a peaceful 
 interest of the same kind as the interest which 
 leads to desire for war. And in a democratic 
 community political questions give every voter 
 a sense of initiative and power and responsi- 
 bility which relieves his life of something of its 
 narrow unadventurousness. The object of the 
 pacifist should be to give men more and more 
 political control over their own lives, and in 
 particular to introduce democracy into the man- 
 agement of industry, as the syndicalists advise. 
 The problem for the reflective pacifist is two- 
 fold : how to keep his own country at peace, and 
 how to preserve the peace of the world. It is
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 103 
 
 impossible that the peace of the world should 
 be preserved while nations are liable to the 
 mood in which Germany entered upon the war 
 — unless, indeed, one nation were so obviously 
 stronger than all others combined as to make 
 war unnecessary for that one and hopeless for 
 all the others. As this war has dragged on its 
 weary length, many people must have asked 
 themselves whether national independence is 
 worth the price that has to be paid for it. 
 Would it not perhaps be better to secure uni- 
 versal peace by the supremacy of one Power? 
 "To secure peace by a world federation" — so 
 a submissive pacifist may argue — "would re- 
 quire some faint glimmerings of reason in 
 rulers and peoples, and is therefore out of the 
 question ; but to secure it by allowing Germany 
 to dictate terms to Europe would be easy, in 
 view of Germany's amazing military success. 
 Since there is no other way of ending war" — 
 so our advocate of peace at any price would 
 contend — ' * let us adopt this way, which happens 
 at the moment to be open to us." It is worth 
 while to consider this view more attentively 
 than is commonly considered. 
 
 There is one great historic example of a long 
 peace secured in this way; I mean the Roman
 
 104 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Empire. We in England boast of the Pax Bri- 
 tannica which we have imposed, in this way, 
 upon the warring races and religions in India. 
 If we are right in boasting of this, if we have 
 in fact conferred a benefit upon India by en- 
 forced peace, the Germans would be right in 
 boasting if they could impose a Pax Germanica 
 upon Europe. Before the war, men might have 
 said that India and Europe are not analogous, 
 because India is less civilized than Europe ; but 
 now, I hope, no one would have the effrontery 
 to maintain anything so preposterous. Re- 
 peatedly in modern history there has been a 
 chance of achieving European unity by the 
 hegemony of a single State; but always Eng- 
 land, in obedience to the doctrine of the Balance 
 of Power, has prevented this consummation, 
 and preserved what our statesmen have called 
 the "liberties of Europe." It is this task upon 
 which we are now engaged. But I do not think 
 our statesmen, or any others among us, have 
 made much effort to consider whether the task 
 is worth what it costs. 
 
 In one case we were clearly wrong: in our 
 resistance to revolutionary France. If revolu- 
 tionary France could have conquered the Con- 
 tinent and Great Britain, the world would now
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 105 
 
 be happier, more civilized, and more free, as 
 well as more peaceful. But revolutionary 
 France was a quite exceptional case, because 
 its early conquests were made in the name of 
 liberty, against tyrants, not against peoples; 
 and everywhere the French armies were wel- 
 comed as liberators by all except rulers and 
 bigots. In the case of Philip II we were as 
 clearly right as we were wrong in 1793. But 
 in both cases our action is not to be judged by 
 some abstract diplomatic conception of the 
 ''liberties of Europe," but by the ideals of the 
 Power seeking hegemony, and by the probable 
 effect upon the welfare of ordinary men and 
 women throughout Europe. 
 
 "Hegemony" is a very vague word, and 
 everything turns upon the degree of interfer- 
 ence with liberty which it involves. There is a 
 degree of interference with liberty which is 
 fatal to many forms of national life; for ex- 
 ample, Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries was crushed by the supremacy of 
 Spain and Austria. If the Germans were actu- 
 ally to annex French provinces, as they did in 
 1871, they would probably inflict a serious in- 
 jury upon those provinces, and make tliem less 
 fruitful for civilization in general. For suet
 
 106 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 reasons national liberty is a matter of real im- 
 portance, and a Europe actually governed by 
 Germany would probably be very dead and un- 
 productive. But if ''hegemony" merely means 
 increased weight in diplomatic questions, more 
 coaling stations and possessions in Africa, more 
 power of securing advantageous commercial 
 treaties, then it can hardly be supposed that it 
 would do any vital damage to other nations; 
 certainly it would not do so much damage as the 
 present war is doing. I cannot doubt that, be- 
 fore the war, a hegemony of this kind would 
 have abundantly satisfied the Germans. But 
 the effect of the war, so far, has been to in- 
 crease immeasurably all the dangers which it 
 was intended to avert. We have now only the 
 choice between certain exhaustion of Europe in 
 fighting Germany and possible damage to the 
 national life of France by German tyranny. 
 Stated in terms of civilization and human wel- 
 fare, not in terms of national prestige, that is 
 now in fact the issue. 
 
 Assuming that war is not ended by one State 
 conquering all the others, the only way in which 
 it can be permanently ended is by a wpjld- 
 federation. So long as there are many sover- 
 eign States, each with its own Army, there can
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 107 
 
 be no security that there will not be war. 
 There will have to be in the world only one 
 Army and one Navy before there will be any 
 reason to think that wars have ceased. This 
 means that, so far as the military functions of 
 the State are concerned, there will be only one 
 State, which will be world-wide. 
 
 The civil functions of the State — legislative, 
 administrative, and judicial — have no very es- 
 sential connection with the military functions, 
 and there is no reason why both kinds of func- 
 tions should normally be exercised by the 
 same State. There is, in fact, every reason 
 why the civil State and the military State 
 should be different. The greater modern 
 States are already too large for most civil pur- 
 poses, but for military purposes they are not 
 large enough, since they are not world-wide. 
 This difference as to the desirable area for the 
 two kinds of State introduces a certain perplex- 
 ity and hesitation, when it is not realized that 
 the two functions have little necessary connec- 
 tion: one set of considerations points towards 
 small States, the other towards continually 
 larger States. Of course, if there were an in- 
 ternational Army and Navy, there would have 
 to be some international authority to set them
 
 108 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 in motion. But this authority need never con- 
 cern itself with any of the internal affairs of 
 national States: it need only declare the rules 
 which should regulate their relations, and pro- 
 nounce judicially when those rules have been so 
 infringed as to call for the intervention of the 
 international force. How easily the limit of 
 the authority could be fixed may be seen by 
 many actual examples. 
 
 The civil and military State are often differ- 
 ent in practice, for many purposes. The South 
 American Republics are sovereign for all pur- 
 poses except their relations with Europe, in re- 
 gard to which they are subject to the United 
 States : in dealings with Europe, the Army and 
 Navy of the United States are their Army and 
 Navy. Our self-governing Dominions depend 
 for their defense, not upon their own forces but 
 upon our Navy. Most Governments, nowa- 
 days, do not aim at formal annexation of a 
 country which they wish to incorporate, but only 
 at a protectorate — that is, civil autonomy sub- 
 ject to military control. Such autonomy is, of 
 course, in practice incomplete, because it does 
 not enable the "protected" country to adopt 
 measures which are vetoed by the Power in 
 military control. But it may be very nearly
 
 . WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 109 
 
 complete, as in the case of our self-governing 
 Dominions. At the other extreme, it may be- 
 come a mere farce, as in Egypt. In the case of 
 an alliance, there is complete autonomy of the 
 separate allied countries, together with what 
 is practically a combination of their military 
 forces into one single force. 
 
 The great advantage of a large military 
 State is that it increases the area over which 
 internal war is not possible except by revolu- 
 tion. If England and Canada have a disagree- 
 ment, it is taken as a matter of course that a 
 settlement shall be arrived at by discussion, not 
 by force. Still more is this the case if Man- 
 chester and Liverpool have a quarrel, in spite 
 of the fact that each is autonomous for many 
 local purposes. No one would have thought it 
 reasonable that Liverpool should go to war to 
 prevent the construction of the Manchester 
 Ship Canal, although almost any two Great 
 Powers would have gone to war over an issue 
 of the same relative importance. England and 
 Russia would probably have gone to war over 
 Persia if they had not been allies ; as it is, they 
 arrived by diplomacy at much the same iniqui- 
 tous result as they would otherwise have 
 reached by fighting. Australia and Japan
 
 110 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 would probably fight if they were both com- 
 pletely independent; but both depend for their 
 liberties upon the British Navy, and therefore 
 they have to adjust their differences peaceably. 
 The chief disadvantage of a large military 
 State is that, when external war occurs, the area 
 affected is greater. The quadruple Entente 
 forms, for the present, one military State; the 
 result is that, because of a dispute between Aus- 
 tria and Serbia, Belgium is devastated and Aus- 
 tralians are killed in the Dardanelles. Another 
 disadvantage is that it facilitates oppression. 
 A large military State is practically omnipotent 
 against a small State, and can impose its will, 
 as England and Russia did in Persia and as 
 Austria-Hungary has been doing in Serbia. It 
 is impossible to make sure of avoiding oppres- 
 sion by any purely mechanical guarantees ; only 
 a liberal and humane spirit can afford a real 
 protection. It has been perfectly possible for 
 England to oppress Ireland, in spite of democ- 
 racy and the presence of Irish Members at 
 Westminster. Nor has the presence of Poles 
 in the Reichstag prevented the oppression of 
 Prussian Poland. But democracy and repre- 
 sentative government undoubtedly make op- 
 pression less probable : they afford a means by
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 111 
 
 which those who might be oppressed can cause 
 their wishes and grievances to be publicly 
 known, they render it certain that only a minor- 
 ity can be oppressed, and then only if the ma- 
 jority are nearly unanimous in wishing to op- 
 press them. Also the practice of oppression 
 affords much more pleasure to the governing 
 classes, who actually carry it out, than to the 
 mass of the population. For this reason the 
 mass of the population, where it has power, is 
 likely to be less tjTannical than an oligarchy or 
 a bureaucracy. 
 
 In order to prevent war and at the same 
 time preserve liberty it is necessary that there 
 should be only one military State in the world, 
 and that when disputes between different coun- 
 tries arise, it should act according to the de- 
 cision of a central authority. This is what 
 would naturally result from a federation of the 
 world, if such a thing ever came about. But 
 the prospect is remote, and it is worth while 
 to consider why it is so remote. 
 
 The unity of a nation is produced by similar 
 habits, instinctive liking, a common history, 
 and a common pride. The unity of a nation is 
 partly due to intrinsic affinities between its 
 citizens, but partly also to the pressure and con-
 
 112 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 trast of the outside world: if a nation were 
 isolated, it would not have the same cohesion 
 or the same fervor of patriotism. When we 
 come to alliances of nations, it is seldom any- 
 thing except outside pressure that produces 
 solidarity. England and America, to some ex- 
 tent, are drawn together by the same causes 
 which often make national unity: a (more or 
 less) common language, similar political insti- 
 tutions, similar aims in international politics. 
 But England, France, and Russia were drawn 
 together solely by fear of Germany; if Ger- 
 many had been annihilated by a natural cata- 
 clysm, they would at once have begun to hate 
 one another, as they did before Germany was 
 strong. For this reason, the possibility of co- 
 operation in the present alliance against Ger- 
 many affords no ground whatever for hoping 
 that all the nations of the world might cooper- 
 ate permanently in a peaceful alliance. The 
 present motive for cohesion, namely a common 
 fear, would be gone, and could not be replaced 
 by any other motive unless men's thoughts and 
 purposes were very different from what they 
 are now. 
 
 The ultimate fact from which war results is 
 not economic or political, and does not rest
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 113 
 
 upon any mechanical difficulty of inventing 
 means for the peaceful settlement of interna- 
 tional disputes. The ultimate fact from which 
 war results is the fact that a large proportion 
 of mankind have an impulse to conflict rather 
 than harmony, and can only be brought to co- 
 operate with others in resisting or attacking a 
 common enemy. This is the case in private 
 life as w^ell as in the relations of States. Most 
 men, when they feel themselves suflficiently 
 strong, set to work to make themselves feared 
 rather than loved; the wish to gain the good 
 opinion of others is confined, as a rule, to those 
 who have not acquired secure power. The im- 
 pulse to quarreling and self-assertion, the 
 pleasure of getting one's own way in spite of 
 opposition, is native to most men. It is this 
 impulse, rather than any motive of calculated 
 self-interest, which produces war, and causes 
 the difficulty of bringing about a World-State. 
 And this impulse is not confined to one nation ; 
 it exists, in varying degrees, in all the vigorous 
 nations of the world. 
 
 But although this impulse is strong, there is 
 no reason why it should be allowed to lead to 
 war. It was exactly the same impulse which 
 led to duelling; yet now civilized men conduct
 
 114 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 their private quarrels without bloodshed. If 
 political contest within a World-State were 
 substituted for w^ar, imagination would soon 
 accustom itself to the new situation, as it has 
 accustomed itself to absence of duelling. 
 Through the influence of institutions and habits, 
 without any fundamental change in human na- 
 ture, men would leani to look back upon war as 
 we look upon the burning of heretics or upon 
 human sacrifice to heathen deities. If I were to 
 buy a revolver costing several pounds, in order 
 to shoot my friend with a view to stealing six- 
 pence out of his pocket, I should be thought 
 neither very wise nor very virtuous. But if I 
 can get sixty-five million accomplices to join me 
 in this criminal absurdity, I become one of a 
 great and glorious nation, nobly sacrificing the 
 cost of my revolver, perhaps even my life, in 
 order to secure the sixpence for the honor of 
 my country. Historians, who are almost in- 
 variably sycophants, will praise me and my ac- 
 complices if we are successful, and say that we 
 are worthy successors of the heroes who over- 
 threw the might of Imperial Rome. But if my 
 opponents are victorious, if their sixpences are 
 defended at the cost of many pounds each and 
 the lives of a large proportion of the popula-
 
 WAR AS AN INSTITUTION 115 
 
 tion, then historians will call me a brigand (as I 
 am), and praise the spirit and self-sacrifice of 
 those who resisted me. 
 
 War is surrounded with glamour, by tradi- 
 tion, by Homer and the Old Testament by early 
 education, by elaborate myths as to the impor- 
 tance of the issues involved, by the heroism and 
 self-sacrifice, which these myths call out. Jeph- 
 thah sacrificing his daughter is a heroic figure, 
 but he would have let her live if he had not been 
 deceived by a myth. Mothers sending their sons 
 to the battlefield are heroic, but they are as 
 much deceived as Jephthah. And, in both cases 
 alike, the heroism which issues in cruelty would 
 be dispelled if there were not some strain of 
 barbarism in the imaginative outlook from 
 which myths spring. A God wlio can be pleased 
 by the sacrifice of an innocent girl could only 
 be worshiped by men to whom the thought of 
 receiving such a sacrifice is not wholly abhor- 
 rent. A nation which believes that its welfare 
 can only be secured by suffering and inflicting 
 hundreds of thousands of equally horrible sacri- 
 fices, is a nation which has no very spiritual con- 
 ception of what constitutes national welfare. 
 It would be better a hundredfold to forgo ma- 
 terial comfort, power, pomp, and outward glory
 
 116 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 than to kill and be killed, to hate and be hated, 
 to throw away in a mad moment of fury the 
 bright heritage of the ages. We have learnt 
 gradually to free our God from the savagery 
 with which the primitive Israelites and the 
 Fathers endowed Him: few of us now believe 
 that it is His pleasure to torture most of the 
 human race in an eternity of hell-fire. But we 
 have not yet learnt to free our national ideals 
 from the ancient taint. Devotion to the nation 
 is perhaps the deepest and most widespread re- 
 ligion of the present age. Like the ancient re- 
 ligions, it demands its persecutions, its holo- 
 causts, its lurid heroic cruelties ; like them, it is 
 noble, primitive, brutal, and mad. Now, as in 
 the past, religion, lagging behind private con- 
 sciences through the weight of tradition, steels 
 the hearts of men against mercy and their minds 
 against truth. If the world is to be saved, men 
 must learn to be noble without being cruel, to be 
 filled with faith and yet open to truth, to be 
 inspired by great purposes without hating those 
 who try to thwart them. But before this can 
 happen, men must first face the terrible realiza- 
 tion that the gods before whom they have bowed 
 down were false gods and the sacrifices they 
 have made were vain.
 
 IV 
 
 PROPERTY 
 
 AMONG the many gloomy novelists of the 
 realistic school, perhaps the most full of 
 gloom is Gissing. In common with all his char- 
 acters, he lives under the weight of a great op- 
 pression: the power of the fearful and yet 
 adored idol of Money. One of his typical 
 stories is ''Eve's Ransom," where the heroine, 
 with various discreditable subterfuges, throws 
 over the poor man whom she loves in order to 
 marry the rich man whose income she loves still 
 better. The poor man, finding that the rich 
 man's income has given her a fuller life and a 
 better character than the poor man's love could 
 have given her, decides that she has done quite 
 right, and that he deserves to be punished for 
 his lack of money. In this story, as in his other 
 books, Gissing has set forth, quite accurately, 
 the actual dominion of money, and the imper- 
 sonal worship which it exacts from the great 
 majority of civilized mankind. 
 
 Gissing 's facts are undeniable, and yet his 
 117
 
 118 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 attitude produces a revolt in any reader who 
 has vital passions and masterful desires. His 
 worship of money is bound up with his con- 
 sciousness of inward defeat. And in the 
 modern world generally, it is the decay of life 
 which has promoted the religion of material 
 goods; and the religion of material goods, in 
 its turn, has hastened the decay of life on which 
 it thrives. The man who worships money has 
 ceased to hope for happiness through his own 
 efforts or in his own activities: he looks upon 
 happiness as a passive enjoyment of pleasures 
 derived from the outside world. The artist or 
 the lover does not worship money in his mo- 
 ments of ardor, because his desires are specific, 
 and directed towards objects which only he can 
 create. And conversely, the worshiper of 
 money can never achieve greatness as an artist 
 or a lover. 
 
 Love of money has been denounced by 
 moralists since the world began. I do not wish 
 to add another to the moral denunciations, of 
 which the efficacy in the past has not been en- 
 couraging. I wish to show how the worship of 
 money is both an effect and a cause of diminish- 
 ing vitality, and liow our institutions might be 
 changed so as to make the worship of money
 
 PROPERTY 119 
 
 grow less and the general vitality grow more. 
 It is not the desire for money as a means to defi- 
 nite ends that is in question. A struggling 
 artist may desire money in order to have leisure 
 for his art, but this desire is finite, and can be 
 satisfied fully by a very modest sum. It is the 
 worship of money that I wish to consider: the 
 belief that all values may be measured in terms 
 of money, and that money is the ultimate test 
 of success in life. This belief is held in fact, 
 if not in words, by multitudes of men and 
 women, and yet it is not in harmony with human 
 nature, since it ignores vital needs and the in- 
 stinctive tendency towards some specific kind 
 of growth. It makes men treat as unimportant 
 those of their desires which run counter to the 
 acquisition of money, and yet such desires are, 
 as a rule, more important to well-being than any 
 increase of income. It leads men to mutilate 
 their own natures from a mistaken theory of 
 what constitutes success, and to give admiration 
 to enterprises which add notliing to human wel- 
 fare. It promotes a dead uniformity of char- 
 acter and purpose, a diminution in the joy of 
 life, and a stress and strain which leaves whole 
 communities weary, discouraged, and disillu- 
 sioned.
 
 120 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 America, the pioneer of Western progress, is 
 thought by many to display the worship of 
 money in its most perfect form. A well-to-do 
 American, who already has more than enough 
 money to satisfy all reasonable requirements, 
 almost always continues to work at his office 
 with an assiduity which would only be pardon- 
 able if starvation were the alternative. 
 
 But England, except among a small minority, 
 is almost as much given over to the worship of 
 money as America. Love of money in Eng- 
 land takes, as a rule, the form of snobbishly de- 
 siring to maintain a certain social status, rather 
 than of striving after an indefinite increase of 
 income. Men postpone marriage until they 
 have an income enabling them to have as 
 many rooms and servants in their house 
 as they feel that their dignity requires. This 
 makes it necessary for them while they are 
 young to keep a watch upon their affections, lest 
 they should be led into an imprudence : they ac- 
 quire a cautious habit of mind, and a fear of 
 ''giving themselves away," which makes a free 
 and vigorous life impossible. In acting as they 
 do they imagine that they are being virtuous, 
 since they would feel it a hardship for a woman 
 to be asked to descend to a lower social status
 
 PROPEETY 121 
 
 than that of her parents, and a degradation to 
 themselves to marry a woman whose social 
 status was not equal to their own. The things 
 of nature are not valued in comparison with 
 money. It is not thought a hardship for a 
 woman to have to accept, as her only experience 
 of love, the prudent and limited attentions of a 
 man whose capacity for emotion has been lost 
 during j^ears of wise restraint or sordid rela- 
 tions with women whom he did not respect. 
 The woman herself does not know that it is a 
 hardship ; for she, too, has been taught prudence 
 for fear of a descent in the social scale, and 
 from early yoiith she has had it instilled into 
 her that strong feeling does not become a young 
 woman. So the two unite to slip through life 
 in ignorance of all that is worth knowing. 
 Their ancestors were not restrained from pas- 
 sion by the fear of hell-fire, but they are re- 
 strained effectually by a worse fear, the fear of 
 coming down in the world. 
 
 The same motives which lead men to marry 
 late also lead them to limit their families. Pro- 
 fessional men wish to send their sons to a pub- 
 lic school, though the education they will ob- 
 tain is no better than at a grammar school, and 
 the companions with whom they will associate
 
 122 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 are more vicious. But snobdom has decided 
 that public schools are best, and from its ver- 
 dict there is no appeal. What makes them the 
 best is that they are the most expensive. And 
 the same social struggle, in varying forms, 
 runs through all classes except the very highest 
 and the very lowest. For this purpose men 
 and women make great moral efforts, and show 
 amazing powers of self-control ; but all their ef- 
 forts and all their self-control, being not used 
 for any creative end, serve merely to dry up the 
 well-spring of life within them, to niake them 
 feeble, listless, and trivial. It is not in 
 such a soil that the passion which produces 
 genius can be nourished. Men's souls have 
 exchanged the wilderness for the drawing-room : 
 they have become cramped and petty and de- 
 formed, like Chinese women's feet. Even the 
 horrors of war have hardly awakened them 
 from the smug somnambulism of respectability. 
 And it is chiefly the worship of money that has 
 brought about this deathlike slumber of all that 
 makes men great. 
 
 In France the worship of money takes the 
 form of thrift. It is not easy to make a fortune 
 in France, but an inherited competence is very 
 common, and where it exists the main purpose
 
 PEOPEETY 123 
 
 of life is to hand it on undiminished, if not in- 
 creased. The French rentier is one of the great 
 forces in international politics : it is he through 
 whom France has been strengthened in diplo- 
 macy and weakened in war, by increasing the 
 supply of French capital and diminishing the 
 supply of French men. The necessity of pro- 
 viding a dot for daughters, and the subdivision 
 of property by the law of inheritance, have made 
 the family more powerful, as an institution, 
 than in any other civilized country. In order 
 that the family may prosper, it is kept small, 
 and the individual members are often sacrificed 
 to it. The desire for family continuity makes 
 men timid and unadventurous : it is only in 
 the organized proletariat that the daring spirit 
 survives which made the Eevolution and led 
 the world in political thought and practice. 
 Through the influence of money, the strength 
 of the family has become a weakness to the na- 
 tion by making the population remain station- 
 ary and even tend to decline. The same love 
 of safety is beginning to produce the same ef- 
 fects elsewhere; but in this, as in many better 
 things, France has led the way. 
 
 In Germany the worship of money is more 
 recent than in France, England, and America;
 
 124 -^ WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 indeed, it hardly existed until after the Franco- 
 Prussian War. But it has been adopted now 
 with the same intensity and whole-heartedness 
 which have always marked German beliefs. It 
 is characteristic that, as in France the worship 
 of money is associated with the family, so in 
 Germany it is associated with the State. Liszt, 
 in deliberate revolt against the English econo- 
 mists, taught his compatriots to think of eco- 
 nomics in national terms, and the German who 
 develops a business is felt, by others as well as 
 by himself, to be performing a service to the 
 State. Germans believe that England's great- 
 ness is due to industrialism and Empire, and 
 that our success in these is due to an intense 
 nationalism. The apparent internationalism of 
 our Free Trade policy they regard as mere hy- 
 pocrisy. They have set themselves to imitate 
 what they believe we really are, with only the 
 hypocrisy omitted. It must be admitted that 
 their success has been amazing. But in the 
 process they have destroyed almost all that 
 made Germany of value to the world, and they 
 have not adopted whatever of good there may 
 Have been among us, since that was all swept 
 aside in the wholesale condemnation of *4iy- 
 pocrisy." And in adopting our worst faults,
 
 PEOPERTY 125 
 
 they have made them far worse by a system, a 
 thoroughness, and a unanimity of which we are 
 happily incapable. Germany's religion is of 
 great importance to the world, since Germans 
 have a power of real belief, and have the energy 
 to acquire the virtues and vices which their 
 creed demands. For the sake of the world, as 
 well as for the sake of Germany, we must hope 
 that they will soon abandon the worship of 
 wealth which they have unfortunately learnt 
 from us. 
 
 AVorship of money is no new thing, but it is 
 a more harmful thing than it used to be, for 
 several reasons. Industrialism has made work 
 more wearisome and intense, less capable of 
 affording pleasure and interest by the way to 
 the man who has undertaken it for the sake of 
 money. The power of limiting families has 
 opened a new field for the operation of thrift. 
 The general increase in education and self-disci- 
 pline has made men more capable of pursuing 
 a purpose consistently in spite of temptations, 
 and when the purpose is against life it becomes 
 more destructive with every increase of tenacity 
 in those who adopt it. The greater produc- 
 tivity resulting from industrialism has en- 
 abled us to devote more labor and capital to
 
 126 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 armies and navies for the protection of our 
 wealth from envious neighbors, and for the ex- 
 ploitation of inferior races, which are ruthlessly 
 wasted by the capitalist regime. Through the 
 fear of losing money, forethought and anxiety 
 eat away men's power of happiness, and the 
 dread of misfortune becomes a greater misfor- 
 tune than the one which is dreaded. The hap- 
 piest men and women, as we can all testify from 
 our own experience, are those who are indif- 
 ferent to money because they have some posi- 
 tive purpose which shuts it out. And yet all 
 our political thought, whether imperialist, rad- 
 ical, or socialist, continues to occupy itself al- 
 most exclusively with men's economic desires, 
 as though they alone had real importance. 
 
 In judging of an industrial system, whether 
 the one under which we live or one proposed by 
 reformers, there are four main tests which may 
 be applied. We may consider whether the sys- 
 tem secures (1) the maximum of production, or 
 (2) justice in distribution, or (3) a tolerable ex- 
 istence for producers, or (4) the greatest pos- 
 sible freedom and stimulus to vitality and prog- 
 ress. We may say, broadly, that the present 
 system aims only at the first of these objects, 
 while socialism aims at the second and third.
 
 PROPERTY 127 
 
 Some defenders of the present system contend 
 that technical progress is better promoted by 
 private enterprise than it would be if indus- 
 tiy were in the hands of the State ; to this ex- 
 tent they recognize the fourth of the objects 
 we have enumerated. But they recognize it 
 only on the side of the goods and the capitalist, 
 not on the side of the wage-earner. I believe 
 that the fourth is much the most important of 
 the objects to be aimed at, that the present sys- 
 tem is fatal to it, and that orthodox socialism 
 might well prove equally fatal. 
 
 One of the least questioned assumptions of 
 the capitalist system is, that production ought 
 to be increased in amount by every possible 
 means : by new kinds of machinery, by employ- 
 ment of women and boys, by making hours of 
 labor as long as is compatible with efficiency. 
 Central African natives, accustomed to living 
 on raw fruits of the earth and defeating Man- 
 chester by dispensing with clothes, are com- 
 pelled to work by a hut tax which they can only 
 pay by taking employment under European cap- 
 italists. It is admitted that they are perfectly 
 happy while they remain free from European 
 influences, and that industrialism brings upon 
 them, not only the unwonted misery of confine-
 
 128 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ment, but also death from diseases to which 
 white men have become partially immune. It 
 is admitted that the best negro workers are the 
 ''raw natives," fresh from the bush, uncontami- 
 nated by previous experience of wage-earning. 
 Nevertheless, no one effectively contends that 
 they ought to be preserved from the deteriora- 
 tion which we bring, since no one effectively 
 doubts that it is good to increase the world's 
 production at no matter what cost. 
 
 The belief in the importance of production 
 has a fanatical irrationality and ruthlessness. 
 So long as something is produced, what it is 
 that is produced seems to be thought a matter 
 of no account. Our whole economic system en- 
 courages this view, since fear of unemployment 
 makes any kind of work a boon to wage-earn- 
 ers. The mania for increasing production has 
 turned men's thoughts away from much more 
 important problems, and has prevented the 
 world from getting the benefits it might have 
 got out of the increased productivity of labor. 
 
 When we are fed and clothed and housed, 
 further material goods are needed only for os- 
 tentation.^ With modern methods, a certain 
 
 1 Except by that small minority who are capable of artistic 
 enjoyment.
 
 PROPEETY 129 
 
 proportion of the population, without working 
 long hours, could do all the work that is really 
 necessary in the way of producing commodi- 
 ties. The time which is now spent in produc- 
 ing luxuries could be spent partly in enjoyment 
 and country holidays, partly in better educa- 
 tion, partly in work that is not manual or sub- 
 serving manual work. We could, if we wished, 
 have far more science and art, more diffused 
 knowledge and mental cultivation, more leisure 
 for wage-earners, and more capacity for intelli- 
 gent pleasures. At present not only wages, but 
 ahnost all earned incomes, can only be obtained 
 by working much longer hours than men ought 
 to work. A man who earns £800 a year by hard 
 work could not, as a rule, earn £400 a year by 
 half as much work. Often he could not earn 
 anything if he were not willing to work prac- 
 tically all day and every day. Because of the 
 excessive belief in the value of production, it 
 is thought right and proper for men to work 
 long hours, and the good that might result from 
 shorter hours is not realized. And all the cruel- 
 ties of the industrial system, not only in Europe 
 but even more in the tropics, arouse only an 
 occasional feeble protest from a few philanthro- 
 pists. This is because, owing to the distortion
 
 130 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 produced by our present economic methods, 
 men's conscious desires, in such matters, cover 
 only a very small part, and that not the most 
 important part, of the real needs affected by 
 industrial work. If this is to be remedied, it 
 can only be by a different economic system, in 
 which the relation of activity to needs will be 
 less concealed and more direct. 
 
 The purpose of maximizing production will 
 not be achieved in the long run if our present 
 industrial system continues. Our present sys- 
 tem is wasteful of human material, partly 
 through damage to the health and efficiency of 
 industrial workers, especially when women and 
 children are employed, partly through the fact 
 that the best workers tend to have small fam- 
 ilies and that the more civilized races are in 
 danger of gradual extinction. Every great 
 city is a center of race-deterioration. For the 
 case of London this has been argued with a 
 wealth of statistical detail by Sir H. Llewelyn 
 Smith ; ^ and it cannot easily be doubted that it 
 is equally true in other cases. The same is true 
 of material resources: the minerals, the virgin 
 forests, and the newly developed wheatfields of 
 the world are being exhausted with a reckless 
 
 1 Booth's " Life and Labour of the People," vol. iii.
 
 PEOPERTY 131 
 
 prodigality which entails almost a certainty of 
 hardship for future generations. 
 
 Socialists see the remedy in State ownership 
 of land and capital, combined with a more just 
 system of distribution. It cannot be denied that 
 our present system of distribution is indefen- 
 sible from every point of view, including the 
 point of view of justice. Our system of distri- 
 bution is regulated by law, and is capable of 
 being changed in many respects which familiar- 
 ity makes us regard as natural and inevitable. 
 We may distinguish four chief sources of rec- 
 ognized legal rights to private property: (1) a 
 man's right to what he has made himself; (2) 
 the right to interest on capital which has been 
 lent; (3) the ownership of land; (4) inheritance. 
 These form a crescendo of respectability: cap- 
 ital is more respectable than labor, land is more 
 respectable than capital, and any form of 
 wealth is more respectable when it is inherited 
 than when it has been acquired by our own ex- 
 ertions. 
 
 A man's right to the produce of his own la- 
 bor has never, in fact, had more than a very lim- 
 ited recognition from the law. The early so- 
 cialists, especially the English forerunners of 
 Marx, used to insist upon this right as the basis
 
 132 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 of a just system of distribution, but in the com- 
 plication of modern industrial processes it is 
 impossible to say what a man has produced. 
 What proportion of the goods carried by a rail- 
 way should belong to the goods porters con- 
 cerned in their journey? When a surgeon saves 
 a man's life by an operation, what proportion 
 of the commodities which the man subsequently 
 produces can the surgeon justly claim? Such 
 problems are insoluble. And there is no spe- 
 cial justice, even if they were soluble, in allow- 
 ing to each man what he himself produces. 
 Some men are stronger, healthier, cleverer, 
 than others, but there is no reason for increas- 
 ing these natural injustices by the artificial in- 
 justices of the law. The principle recommends 
 itself partly as a way of abolishing the very 
 rich, partly as a way of stimulating people to 
 work hard. But the first of these objects can 
 be better obtained in other ways, and the second 
 ceases to be obviously desirable as soon as we 
 cease to worship money. 
 
 Interest arises naturally in any community 
 in which private property is unrestricted and 
 theft is punished, because some of the most eco- 
 nomical processes of production are slow, and 
 those who have the skill to perform them may
 
 PROPERTY 133 
 
 not have tlie means of living while they are 
 being completed. But the power of lending 
 money gives such great wealth and influence to 
 private capitalists that unless strictly controlled 
 it is not compatible with any real freedom for 
 the rest of the population. Its effects at pres- 
 ent, both in the industrial world and in interna- 
 tional politics, are so bad that it seems impera- 
 tively necessary to devise some means of curb- 
 ing its power. 
 
 Private property in land has no justification 
 except historically through power of the sword. 
 In the beginning of feudal times, certain men 
 had enough military strength to be able to force 
 those whom they disliked not to live in a cer- 
 tain area. Those whom they chose to leave on 
 the land became their serfs, and were forced to 
 work for them in return for the gracious per- 
 mission to stay. In order to establish law in 
 place of private force, it was necessary, in the 
 main, to leave undisturbed the rights which had 
 been acquired by the sword. The land became 
 the property of those who had conquered it, and 
 the serfs were allowed to give rent instead of 
 service. There is no justification for private 
 property in land, except the historical necessity 
 to conciliate turbulent robbers who would not
 
 134 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 otherwise have obeyed the law. This neces- 
 sity arose in Europe many centuries ago, but 
 in Africa the whole process is often quite re- 
 cent. It is by this process, slightly disguised, 
 that the Kimberley diamond mines and the 
 Eand gold mines were acquired in spite of prior 
 native rights. It is a singular example of hu- 
 man inertia that men should have continued 
 until now to endure the tyranny and extortion 
 which a small minority are able to inflict by 
 their possession of the land. No good to the 
 community, of any sort or kind, results from 
 the private ownership of land. If men were 
 reasonable, they would decree that it should 
 cease to-morrow, with no compensation beyond 
 a moderate life income to the present holders. 
 The mere abolition of rent would not remove 
 injustice, since it would confer a capricious ad- 
 vantage upon the occupiers of the best sites and 
 the most fertile land. It is necessary that there 
 should be rent, but it should be paid to the State 
 or to some body which performs public serv- 
 ices; or, if the total rental were more than is 
 required for such purposes, it might be paid 
 into a common fund and divided equally among 
 the population. Such a method would be just, 
 and would not only help to relieve poverty, but
 
 PROPERTY 135 
 
 would prevent wasteful employment of land and 
 the tyranny of local magnates. Much that ap- 
 pears as the power of capital is really the power 
 of the landowner — for example, the power of 
 railway companies and mine-owners. The evil 
 and injustice of the present system are glaring, 
 but men's patience of preventable evils to which 
 they are accustomed is so great that it is impos- 
 sible to guess when they will put an end to this 
 strange absurdity. 
 
 Inheritance, which is the source of the greater 
 part of the unearned income in the world, is re- 
 garded by most men as a natural right. Some- 
 times, as in England, the right is inherent in 
 the o^vner of property, who may dispose of it in 
 any way that seems good to him. Sometimes, 
 as in France, his right is limited by the right of 
 his family to inherit at least a portion of what 
 he has to leave. But neither the right to dis- 
 pose of property by will nor the right of chil- 
 dren to inherit from parents has any basis out- 
 side the instincts of possession and family 
 pride. 
 
 There may be reasons for allowing a man 
 whose work is exceptionally fruitful — for in- 
 stance, an inventor — to enjoy a larger income 
 than is enjoyed by the average citizen, but there
 
 136 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 can be no good reason for allowing this privi- 
 lege to descend to his children and grandchil- 
 dren and so on for ever. The effect is to pro- 
 duce an idle and exceptionally fortunate class, 
 who are influential through their money, and 
 opposed to reform for fear it should be di- 
 rected against themselves. Their whole habit 
 of thought becomes timid, since they dread 
 being forced to acknowledge that their position 
 is indefensible; yet snobbery and the wish to 
 secure their favor leads almost the whole middle 
 class to ape their manners and adopt their opin- 
 ions. In this way they become a poison infect- 
 ing the outlook of almost all educated people. 
 
 It is sometimes said that without the incen- 
 tive of inheritance men would not work so well. 
 The great captains of industry, we are assured, 
 are actuated by the desire to found a family, 
 and would not devote their lives to unremitting 
 toil without the hope of gratifying this desire. 
 I do not believe that any large proportion of 
 really useful work is done from this motive. 
 Ordinary work is done for the sake of a living, 
 and the very best work is done for the interest 
 of the work itself. Even the captains of indus- 
 try, who are thought (perhaps by themselves as 
 well as by others) to be aiming at founding a
 
 PROPERTY 137 
 
 family, are probably more actuated by love of 
 power and by the adventurous pleasure of great 
 enterprises. And if there were some slight 
 diminution in the amount of work done, it 
 would be well worth while in order to get rid 
 of the idle rich, with the oppression, feeble- 
 ness, and corruption which they inevitably in- 
 troduce. 
 
 The present system of distribution is not 
 based upon any principle. Starting from a sys- 
 tem imposed by conquest, the arrangements 
 made by the conquerors for their own benefit 
 were stereotyped by the law, and have never 
 been fundamentally reconstructed. On what 
 principles ought the reconstruction to be 
 based? 
 
 Socialism, which is the most widely advo- 
 cated scheme of reconstruction, aims chiefly at 
 justice: the present inequalities of wealth are 
 unjust, and socialism would abolish them. It 
 is not essential to socialism that all men should 
 have the same income, but it is essential that 
 inequalities should be justified, in each case, by 
 inequality of need or of service performed. 
 There can be no disputing that the present sys- 
 tem is grossly unjust, and that almost all that 
 is unjust in it is harmful. But I do not think
 
 138 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 justice alone is a sufficient principle upon which 
 to base an economic reconstruction. Justice 
 would be secured if all were equally unhappy, 
 as well as if all were equally happy. Justice, 
 
 I by itself, when once realized, contains no source 
 of new life. The old type of Marxian revolu- 
 tionary socialist never dwelt, in imagination, 
 upon the life of communities after the establish- 
 ment of the millennium. He imagined that, 
 like the Prince and Princess in a fairy story, 
 they would live happily ever after. But that 
 is not a condition possible to human nature. 
 Desire, activity, purpose, are essential to a tol- 
 erable life, and a millennium, though it may be 
 a joy in prospect, would be intolerable if it were 
 actually achieved. 
 
 The more modern socialists, it is true, have 
 lost most of the religious ferv^or which charac- 
 terized the pioneers, and view socialism as a 
 tendency rather than a definite goal. But they 
 still retain the view that what is of most po- 
 I litical importance to a man is his income, and 
 I that the principal aim of a democratic politician 
 [ ought to be to increase the wages of labor. I 
 believe this involves too passive a conception 
 of what constitutes happiness. It is true that, 
 in the industrial world, large sections of the
 
 PROPERTY 139 
 
 population are too poor to have any possibility 
 of a good life ; but it is not true that a good life 
 will come of itself with a diminution of poverty. 
 Very few of the well-to-do classes have a good 
 life at present, and perhaps socialism would 
 only substitute the evils which now afflict the 
 more prosperous in place of the evils resulting 
 from destitution. 
 
 In the existing labor movement, although it 
 is one of the most vital sources of change, there 
 are certain tendencies against which reformers 
 ought to be on their guard. The labor move- 
 ment is in essence a movement in favor of jus- 
 tice, based upon the belief that the sacrifice of 
 the many to the few is not necessary now, what- 
 ever may have been the case in the past. When 
 labor was less productive and education was less 
 widespread, an aristocratic civilization may 
 have been the only one possible: it may have 
 been necessary that the many should contribute 
 to the life of the few, if the few were to trans- 
 mit and increase the world's possessions in art 
 and thought and civilized existence. But this 
 necessity is past or rapidly passing, and there 
 is no longer any valid objection to the claims of 
 justice. The labor movement is morally irre- 
 sistible, and is not now seriously opposed ex-
 
 140 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 cept by prejudice and simple self-assertion. 
 All living thought is on its side ; what is against 
 it is traditional and dead. But although it it- 
 self is living, it is not by any means certain that 
 it will make for life. 
 
 Labor is led by current political thought in 
 certain directions which would become repres- 
 sive and dangerous if they were to remain 
 strong after labor had triumphed. The aspira- 
 tions of the labor movement are, on the whole, 
 opposed by the great majority of the educated 
 classes, who feel a menace, not only or chiefly 
 to their personal comfort, but to the civilized 
 life in which they have their part, which they 
 profoundly believe to be important to the world. 
 Owing to the opposition of the educated classes, 
 labor, when it is revolutionary and vigorous, 
 tends to despise all that the educated classes 
 represent. When it is more respectful, as its 
 leaders tend to be in England, the subtle and 
 almost unconscious influence of educated men 
 is apt to sap revolutionary ardor, producing 
 doubt and uncertainty instead of the swift, sim- 
 ple assurance by which victory might have been 
 won. The very sympathy which the best men 
 in the well-to-do classes extend to labor, their 
 very readiness to admit the justice of its claims,
 
 PKOPERTY 141 
 
 may have the effect of softening the opposition 
 of labor leaders to the status quo, and of open- 
 ing their minds to the suggestion that no funda- 
 mental change is possible. Since these influ- 
 ences affect leaders much more than the rank 
 and file, they tend to produce in the rank and file 
 a distrust of leaders, and a desire to seek out 
 new leaders who will be less ready to concede 
 the claims of the more fortunate classes. The 
 result may be in the end a labor movement as 
 hostile to the life of the mind as some terrified 
 property-owners believe it to be at present. 
 
 The claims of justice, narrowly interpreted, 
 may reinforce this tendency. It may be thought 
 unjust that some men should have larger in- 
 comes or shorter hours of work than other men. 
 But efficiency in mental work, including the 
 work of education, certainly requires more com- 
 fort and longer periods of rest than are required 
 for efficiency in physical work, if only because 
 mental work is not physiologically wholesome. 
 If this is not recognized, the life of the mind 
 may suffer through short-sightedness even 
 more than through deliberate hostility. 
 
 Education suffers at present, and may long 
 continue to suffer, through the desire of par- 
 ents that their children should earn money as
 
 142 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 soon as possible. Every one knows that the 
 half-time system, for example, is bad; but the 
 power of organized labor keeps it in existence. 
 It is clear that the cure for this evil, as for 
 those that are concerned with the population 
 question, is to relieve parents of the expense 
 of their children's education, and at the same 
 time to take away their right to appropriate 
 their children's earnings. 
 
 The way to prevent any dangerous opposition 
 of labor to the life of the mind is not to oppose 
 the labor movement, which is too strong to be 
 opposed with justice. The right way is, to 
 show by actual practice that thought is useful 
 to labor, that without thought its positive aims 
 cannot be achieved, and that there are men in 
 the world of thought who are willing to devote 
 their energies to helping labor in its struggle. 
 Such men, if they are wise and sincere, can pre- 
 vent labor from becoming destructive of what 
 is living in the intellectual world. 
 
 Another danger in the aims of organized la- 
 bor is the danger of conservatism as to meth- 
 ods of production. Improvements of machin- 
 ery or organization bring great advantages to 
 employers, but involve temporary and some- 
 times permanent loss to the wage-earners. For
 
 PROPERTY 143 
 
 this reason, and also from mere instinctive dis- 
 like of any change of habits, strong labor or- 
 ganizations are often obstacles to technical 
 progress. The ultimate basis of all social prog- 
 ress must be increased technical efficiency, a 
 greater result from a given amount of labor. 
 If labor were to offer an effective opposition 
 to this kind of progress, it would in the long 
 run paralyze all other progress. The way to 
 overcome the opposition of labor is not by hos- 
 tility or moral homilies, but by giving to labor 
 the direct interest in economical processes 
 which now belongs to the employers. Here, as 
 elsewhere, the unprogressive part of a move- 
 ment which is essentially progressive is to be 
 eliminated, not by decrying the whole movement 
 but by giving it a wider sweep, making it more 
 progressive, and leading it to demand an even 
 greater change in the structure of society than 
 any that it had contemplated in its inception. 
 The most important purpose that political in- 
 stitutions can achieve is to keep alive in indi- 
 viduals creativeness, vigor, vitality, and the joy 
 of life. These things existed, for example, in 
 Elizabethan England in a way in which they 
 do not exist now. They stimulated adventure, 
 poetry, music, fine architecture, and set going
 
 144 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the whole movement out of which England's 
 greatness has sprung in every direction in which 
 England has been great. These things coex- 
 isted with injustice, but outweighed it, and made 
 a national life more admirable than any that is 
 likely to exist under socialism. 
 
 I What is wanted in order to keep men full of 
 
 I vitality is opportunity, not security. Security 
 is merely a refuge from fear ; opportunity is the 
 source of hope. The chief test of an economic 
 system is not whether it makes men prosperous, 
 or whether it secures distributive justice 
 (though these are both very desirable), but 
 hvhether it leaves men's instinctive growth un- 
 
 iimpeded. To achieve this purpose, there are 
 tjj^o main conditions which it should fulfil: it 
 should not cramp men's private affections, and 
 it should give the greatest possible outlet to 
 
 ^ the impulse of creation. There is in most men, 
 until it becomes atrophied by disuse, an instinct 
 of constructiveness, a wish to make something. 
 The men who achieve most are, as a rule, those 
 in whom this instinct is strongest: such men 
 become artists, men of science, statesmen, em- 
 pire-builders, or captains of industry, accord- 
 ing to the accidents of temperament and oppor- 
 tunity. The most beneficent and the most
 
 PROPERTY ■ 145 
 
 harmful careers are inspired by this impulse. 
 Without it, the world would sink to the level of 
 Tibet: it would subsist, as it is always prone 
 to do, on the wisdom of its ancestors, and each 
 generation would sink more deeply into a life- 
 less traditionalism. 
 
 But it is not only the remarkable men who 
 have the instinct of constructiveness, though it 
 is they who have it most strongly. It is almost 
 universal in boys, and in men it usually sur- 
 vives in a greater or less degree, according to 
 the greater or less outlet which it is able to 
 find. Work inspired by this instinct is satis- 
 fying, even when it is irksome and difficult, be- 
 cause every effort is as natural as the effort of 
 a dog pursuing a hare. The chief defect of 
 the present capitalistic system is that work done 
 for wages very seldom affords any outlet for 
 the creative impulse. The man who works for 
 wages has no choice as to what he shall make : 
 the whole creativeness of the processes concen- 
 trate in the employer who orders the work to 
 be done. For this reason the work becomes a 
 merely external means to a certain result, the 
 earning of wages. Employers grow indignant 
 about the trade union rules for limitation of 
 output, but they have no right to be indignant,
 
 146 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 since they do not permit the men whom they 
 employ to have any share in the purpose for 
 which the work is undertaken. And so the proc- 
 ess of production, which should form one in- 
 stinctive cycle, becomes divided into separate 
 purposes, which can no longer provide any sat- 
 isfaction of instinct for those who do the work. 
 
 This result is due to our industrial system, 
 but it would not be avoided by socialism. In 
 a socialist community, the State would be the 
 employer, and the individual workman would 
 have almost as little control over his work as 
 he has at present. Such control as he could 
 exercise would be indirect, through political 
 channels, and would be too slight and round- 
 about to afford any appreciable satisfaction. 
 It is to be feared that instead of an increase of 
 self-direction, there would only be an increase 
 of mutual interference. 
 
 The total abolition of private capitalistic en- 
 terprise, which is demanded by Marxian social- 
 ism, seems scarcely necessary. Most men who 
 construct sweeping systems of reform, like most 
 of those who defend the status quo, do not allow 
 enough for the importance of exceptions and 
 the undesirability of rigid system. Provided 
 the sphere of capitalism is restricted, and a
 
 PROPERTY 147 
 
 large proportion of the population are rescued 
 from its dominion, there is no reason to wish 
 it wholly abolished. As a competitor and a 
 rival, it might serve a useful purpose in pre- 
 venting more democratic enterprises from sink- 
 ing into sloth and technical conservatism. But 
 it is of the very highest importance that capital- 
 ism should become the exception rather than the 
 rule, and that the bulk of the world's industry 
 should be conducted on a more democratic sys- 
 tem. 
 
 Much of what is to be said against militarism 
 in the State is also to be said against capitalism 
 in the economic sphere. Economic organiza- 
 tions, in the pursuit of efficiency, grow larger 
 and larger, and there is no possibility of re- 
 versing this process. The causes of their 
 growth are technical, and large organizations 
 must be accepted as an essential part of civ- 
 ilized society. But there is no reason why their 
 government should be centralized and monar- 
 chical. The present economic system, by rob- 
 bing most men of initiative, is one of the causes 
 of the universal weariness which devitalizes 
 urban and industrial populations, making them 
 perpetually seek excitement, and leading them 
 to welcome even the outbreak of war as a relief
 
 148 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 from the dreary monotony of their daily lives. 
 
 If the vigor of the nation is to be preserved, 
 if we are to retain any capacity for new ideas, 
 if we are not to sink into a Chinese condition of 
 stereotyped immobility, the monarchical organ- 
 ization of industry must be swept away. All 
 large businesses must become democratic and 
 federal in their government. The whole wage- 
 earning system is an abomination, not only be- 
 cause of the social injustice which it causes and 
 perpetuates, but also because it separates the 
 man who does the work from the purpose for 
 which the work is done. The whole of the con- 
 trolling purpose is concentrated in the capital- 
 ist; the purpose of the wage-earner is not the 
 produce, but the wages. The purpose of the 
 capitalist is to secure the maximum of work for 
 the minimum of wages; the purpose of the 
 wage-earner is to secure the maximum of wages 
 for the minimum of work. A system involv- 
 ing this essential conflict of interests cannot be 
 expected to work smoothly or successfully, or 
 to produce a community with any pride in ef- 
 ficiency. 
 
 Two movements exist, one already well ad- 
 vanced, the other in its infancy, which seem 
 capable, between them, of effecting most of
 
 PROPERTY 149 
 
 what is needed. The two movements I mean 
 are the cooperative movement and syndical- 
 ism. The cooperative movement is capable of 
 replacing the wage system over a very wide 
 field, but it is not easy to see how it could be 
 applied to such things as railways. It is just 
 in these cases that the principles of syndicalism 
 are most easily applicable. 
 
 If organization is not to crush individuality, 
 membership of an organization ought to be vol- 
 untary, not compulsory, and ought always to 
 carry with it a voice in the management. This 
 is not the case with economic organizations, 
 which give no opportunity for the pride and 
 pleasure that men find in an activity of their 
 own choice, provided it is not utterly monot- 
 onous. 
 
 It must be admitted, however, that much of 
 the mechanical work which is necessary in in- 
 dustry is probably not capable of being made 
 interesting in itself. But it will seem less 
 tedious than it does at present if those who do 
 it have a voice in the management of their in- 
 dustry. And men who desire leisure for other 
 occupations might be given the opportunity of 
 doing uninteresting work during a few hours 
 of the day for a low wage; this would give an
 
 150 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 opening to all who wished for some activity not 
 immediately profitable to themselves. When 
 everything that is possible has been done to 
 make work interesting, the residue will have to 
 be made endurable, as almost all work is at 
 present, by the inducement of rewards outside 
 the hours of labor. But if these rewards are 
 to be satisfactory, it is essential that the unin- 
 teresting work should not necessarily absorb a 
 man's whole energies, and that opportunities 
 should exist for more or less continuous activi- 
 ties during the remaining hours. Such a sys- 
 tem might be an immeasurable boon to artists, 
 men of letters, and others who produce for their 
 owm satisfaction works which the public does 
 not value soon enough to secure a living for 
 the producers ; and apart from such rather rare 
 cases, it might provide an opportunity for 
 young men and women with intellectual ambi- 
 tions to continue their education after they have 
 left school, or to prepare themselves for careers 
 which require an exceptionally long training. 
 
 The evils of the present system result from 
 the separation between the several interests of 
 consumer, producer, and capitalist. No one of 
 these three has the same interests as the com- 
 munity or as either of the other two. The co-
 
 PKOPERTY 151 
 
 operative system amalgamates the interests of 
 consumer and capitalist; syndicalism would 
 amalgamate the interests of producer and cap- 
 italist. Neither amalgamates all three, or 
 makes the interests of those who direct indus- 
 try quite identical with those of the commun- 
 ity. Neither, therefore, would wholly prevent 
 industrial strife, or obviate the need of the 
 State as arbitrator. But either would be bet- 
 ter than the present system, and probably a 
 mixture of both would cure most of the evils 
 of industrialism as it exists now. It is surpris- 
 ing that, while men and women have struggled 
 to achieve political democracy, so little has been 
 done to introduce democracy in industry. I be- 
 lieve incalculable benefits might result from in- 
 dustrial democracy, either on the cooperative 
 model or with recognition of a trade or indus- 
 try as a unit for purposes of government, with 
 some kind of Home Rule such as syndicalism 
 aims at securing. There is no reason why all 
 governmental units should be geographical: 
 this system was necessary in the past because 
 of the slowness of means of communication, but 
 it is not necessary now. By some such system 
 many men might come to feel again a pride in 
 their work, and to find again that outlet for the
 
 152 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 creative impulse whicli is now denied to all but 
 a fortunate few. Such a system requires the 
 abolition of the land-owner and the restriction 
 of the capitalist, but does not entail equality of 
 earnings. And unlike socialism, it is not a 
 static or final system : it is hardly more than a 
 framework for energy and initiative. It is only 
 by some such method, I believe, that the free 
 growth of the individual can be reconciled with 
 the huge technical organizations which have 
 been rendered necessary by industrialism.
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 NO political theory is adequate unless it is 
 applicable to children as well as to men 
 and women. Theorists are mostly childless, or, 
 if they have children, they are carefully 
 screened from the disturbances which would be 
 caused by youthful turmoil. Some of them 
 have written books on education, but without, 
 as a rule, having any actual children present to 
 their minds while they wrote. Those educa- 
 tional theorists who have had a knowledge of 
 children, such as the inventors of Kindergarten 
 and the Montessori system,^ have not always 
 had enough realization of the ultimate goal of 
 education to be able to deal successfully with 
 advanced instruction. I have not the knowl- 
 edge either of children or of education which 
 would enable me to supply whatever defects 
 there may be in the writings of others. But 
 
 1 As repfards the education of youn<T rliildren, Madame 
 Monteauori'a methods seem to me full of wisdom. 
 
 153
 
 154 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 some questions, concerning education as a po- 
 litical institution, are involved in any hope of 
 social reconstruction, and are not usually con- 
 sidered by writers on educational theory. It 
 is these questions that I wish to discuss. 
 
 The power of education in forming character 
 and opinion is very great and very generally 
 recognized. The genuine beliefs, though not 
 usually the professed precepts, of parents and 
 teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by 
 most children; and even if they depart from 
 these beliefs in later life, something of them re- 
 mains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in a 
 time of stress or crisis. Education is, as a rule, 
 the strongest force on the side of what exists 
 and against fundamental change : threatened in- 
 stitutions, while they are still powerful, pos- 
 sess themselves of the educational machine, and 
 instil a respect for their own excellence into 
 the malleable minds of the young. Reformers 
 retort by trying to oust their opponents from 
 their position of vantage. The children them- 
 selves are not considered by either party; they 
 are merely so much material, to be recruited 
 into one army or the other. If the children 
 themselves were considered, education would 
 not aim at making them belong to this party
 
 EDUCATION 155 
 
 or that, but at enabling them to choose intelli- 
 gently between the parties; it would aim at 
 making them able to think, not at making them 
 think what their teachers think. Education as 
 a political weapon could not exist if we re- 
 spected the rights of children. If we respected 
 the rights of children, we should educate them 
 so as to give them the knowledge and the men- 
 tal habits required for forming independent 
 opinions; but education as a political institu- 
 tion endeavors to form habits and to circum- 
 scribe knowledge in such a way as to make one 
 set of opinions inevitable. 
 
 The two principles of justice and liberty, 
 which cover a very great deal of the social re- 
 construction required, are not by themselves 
 sufficient where education is concerned. Jus- 
 tice, in the literal sense of equal rights, is ob- 
 viously not wholly possible as regards children. 
 And as for liberty, it is, to begin with, essen- 
 tially negative: it condemns all avoidable in- 
 terference with freedom, without giving a posi- 
 tive principle of construction. But education 
 is essentially constructive, and requires some 
 positive conception of what constitutes a good 
 life. And although liberty is to be respected 
 in education as much as is compatible with in-
 
 156 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 struotion, and although a very great deal more 
 liberty than is customary can be allowed with- 
 out loss to instruction, yet it is clear that some 
 departure from complete liberty is unavoid- 
 able if children are to be taught anything, ex- 
 cept in the case of unusually intelligent chil- 
 dren who are kept isolated from more normal 
 companions. This is one reason for the great 
 responsibility which rests upon teachers: the 
 children must, necessarily, be more or less at 
 the mercy of their elders, and cannot make 
 themselves the guardians of their own interests. 
 Authority in education is to some extent un- 
 avoidable, and those who educate have to find 
 a way of exercising authority in accordance 
 with the spirit of liberty. 
 
 Where authority is unavoidable, what is 
 needed is reverence. A man who is to educate 
 really well, and is to make the young grow and 
 develop into their full stature, must be filled 
 through and through with the spirit of rever- 
 ence. It is reverence towards others that is 
 lacking in those Avho advocate machine-made 
 cast-iron systems: militarism, capitalism, Fa- 
 bian scientific organization, and all the other 
 prisons into which reformers and reactionaries 
 try to force the human spirit. In education,
 
 EDUCATION 157 
 
 with its codes of rules emanating from a Gov- 
 ernment office, its large classes and fixed cur- 
 riculum and overworked teachers, its deter- 
 mination to produce a dead level of glib medi- 
 ocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all 
 but universal. Reverence requires imagination 
 and vital warmth; it requires most imagina- 
 tion in respect of those who have least actual 
 achievement or power. The child is weak and 
 superficially foolish, the teacher is strong, and 
 in an every-day sense wiser than the child. 
 The teacher without reverence, or the bureau- 
 crat without reverence, easily despises the child 
 for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it 
 is bis duty to ''mold" the child: in imagina- 
 tion he is the potter with the clay. And so he 
 gives to the child some unnatural shape, which 
 hardens with age, producing strains and spir- 
 itual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty 
 and envy, and the belief that others must be 
 compelled to undergo the same distortions. 
 
 Th© man who has reverence will not think it 
 his duty to "mold" the young. He feels in 
 all that lives, but especially in human beings, 
 and most of all in children, something sacred, 
 indefinable, unlimited, something individual 
 and strangely precious, the growing principle
 
 158 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striv- 
 ing of the world. In the presence of a child 
 he feels an unaccountable humility — a humil- 
 ity not easily defensible on any rational 
 ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than 
 the easy self-confidence of many parents and 
 teachers. The outward helplessness of the 
 child and the appeal of dependence make him 
 conscious of the responsibility of a trust. His 
 imagination shows him what the child may be- 
 come, for good or evil, how its impulses may 
 be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must 
 be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, 
 how its trust will be bruised and its quick de- 
 sires replaced by brooding will. All this gives 
 him a longing to help the child in its own bat- 
 tle; he would equip and strengthen it, not for 
 some outside end proposed by the State or by 
 any other impersonal authority, but for the 
 ends which the child's own spirit is obscurely 
 seeking. The man who feels this can wield the 
 authority of an educator without infringing the 
 principle of liberty. 
 
 It is not in a spirit of reverence that educa- 
 tion is conducted by States and Churches and 
 the great institutions that are subservient to 
 them. What is considered in education is
 
 EDUCATION 159 
 
 hardly ever the boy or girl, the young man or 
 young woman, but almost always, in some form, 
 the maintenance of the existing order. When 
 the individual is considered, it is almost ex- 
 clusively with a view to worldly success — mak- 
 ing money or achieving a good position. To be 
 ordinary, and to acquire the art of getting on, 
 is the ideal which is set before the youthful 
 mind, except by a few rare teachers who have 
 enough energy of belief to break through the 
 system within which they are expected to work. 
 Almost all education has a political motive : it 
 aims at strengthening some group, national or 
 religious or even social, in the competition with 
 other groups. It is this motive, in the main, 
 which determines the subjects taught, the 
 knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, 
 and also decides what mental habits the pupils 
 are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is 
 done to foster the inward growth of mind and 
 spirit; in fact, those who have had most educa- 
 tion are very often atrophied in their mental 
 and spiritual life, devoid of impulse, and pos- 
 sessing only certain mechanical aptitudes which 
 take the place of living thought. 
 
 Some of the things which education achieves 
 at present must continue to be adiieved by edu-
 
 160 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 cation in any civilized country. All children 
 must continue to be taught how to read and 
 write, and some must continue to acquire the 
 knowledge needed for such professions as medi- 
 cine or law or engineering. The higher educa- 
 tion required for the sciences and the arts is 
 necessary for those to whom it is suited. Ex- 
 cept in history and religion and kindred mat- 
 ters, the actual instruction is only inadequate, 
 not positively harmful. The instruction might 
 be given in a more liberal spirit, with more at- 
 tempt to show its ultimate uses j and of course 
 much of it is traditional and dead. But in the 
 main it is necessary, and would have to form 
 a part of any educational system. 
 
 It is in history and religion and other contro- 
 versial subjects that the actual instruction is 
 positively harmful. These subjects touch the 
 interests by which schools are maintained ; and 
 the interests maintain the schools in order that 
 certain views on these subjects may be instilled. 
 History, in every country, is so taught as to 
 magnify that country : children learn to believe 
 that their own country has always been in the 
 right and almost always victorious, that it has 
 produced almost all the great men, and that it 
 is in all respects superior to all other countries.
 
 EDUCATION 161 
 
 Since these beliefs are flattering, they are eas- 
 ily absorbed, and hardly ever dislodged from 
 instinct by later knowledge. 
 
 To take a simple and almost trivial example : 
 the facts about the battle of Waterloo are 
 known in great detail and with minute accu- 
 racy; but the facts as taught in elementary 
 schools will be widely different in England, 
 France, and Germany. The ordinary English 
 boy imagines that the Prussians played hardly ' 
 any part; the ordinary German boy imagines 
 that Wellington was practically defeated when 
 the day was retrieved by Bliicher's gallantry. 
 If the facts were taught accurately in both 
 countries, national pride would not be fostered 
 to the same extent, neither nation would feel 
 so certain of victory in the event of war, and the 
 willingness to fight would be diminished. It is 
 this result which has to be prevented. Every 
 State wishes to promote national pride, and is 
 conscious that this cannot be done by unbiased 
 history. The defenseless children are taught 
 by distortions and suppressions and sugges- 
 tions. The false ideas as to the history of the 
 world which are taught in the various countries 
 are of a kind which encourages strife and serves 
 to keep alive a bigoted nationalism. If good
 
 162 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 relations between States were desired, one of 
 the first steps ought to be to submit all teaching 
 of history to an international commission, which 
 should produce neutral textbooks free from the 
 patriotic bias which is now demanded every- 
 where.^ 
 
 Exactly the same thing applies to religion. 
 Elementary schools are practically always in 
 the hands either of some religious body or of 
 a State which has a certain attitude towards re- 
 ligion. A religious body exists through the 
 fact that its members all have certain definite 
 beliefs on subjects as to which the truth is not 
 ascertainable. Schools conducted by religious 
 bodies have to prevent the young, who are often 
 inquiring by nature, from discovering that 
 
 1 The TitACHiNQ of Patriotism. His Majesty's 
 Approval. 
 The King has been graciously pleased to accept a copy of the 
 little book containing suggestions to local education authorities 
 and teachers in Wales as to the teaching of patriotism which 
 has just been issued by the Welsh Department of the Board 
 of Education in connection with the observance of the Na- 
 tional Anniversary of St. David's Day. His Private Secretary 
 (Lord Stamfordham) , in writing to ]Mr. Alfred T. Davies, the 
 Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Department, says that his 
 Majesty is much pleased with the contents of the book, and 
 trusts that the principles inculcated in it will bear good fruit 
 in the lives and characters of the coming generation. — Morning 
 Post, January 29, 1916.
 
 EDUCATION 163 
 
 these definite beliefs are opposed by others 
 which are no more unreasonable, and that many 
 of the men best qualified to judge think that 
 there is no good evidence in favor of any defi.- 
 nite belief. When the State is militantly secu- 
 lar, as in France, State schools become as dog- 
 matic as those that are in the hands of the 
 Churches (I understand that the word ''God" 
 must not be mentioned in a French elementary 
 school). The result in all these cases is the 
 same : free inquiry is checked, and on the most 
 important matter in the world the child is met 
 with dogma or with stony silence. 
 
 It is not only in elementary education that 
 these evils exist. In more advanced education 
 they take subtler forms, and there is more at- 
 tempt to conceal them, but they are still pres- 
 ent. Eton and Oxford set a certain stamp 
 upon a man's mind, just as a Jesuit College 
 does. It can hardly be said that Eton and Ox- 
 ford have a conscious purpose, but they have a 
 purpose which is none the less strong and effec- 
 tive for not being formulated. In almost all 
 who have been through them they fjroduce a 
 worship of "good form," which is as destruc- 
 tive to life and thought as the medieval 
 Church. ''Good form" is quite compatible
 
 164 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 with a superficial open-mindedness, a readiness 
 to hear all sides, and a certain urbanity towards 
 opponents. But it is not compatible with funda- 
 mental open-mindedness, or with any inward 
 readiness to give weight to the other side. Its 
 essence is the assumption that what is most im- 
 portant is a certain kind of behavior, a behav- 
 ior which minimizes friction between equals 
 and delicately impresses inferiors with a con- 
 viction of their own crudity. As a political 
 weapon for preserving the privileges of the rich 
 in a snobbish democracy it is unsurpassable. 
 As a means of producing an agreeable social 
 milieu for those who have money with no strong 
 beliefs or unusual desires it has some merit. 
 In every other respect it is abominable. 
 
 The evils of *'good form" arise from two 
 sources : its perfect assurance of its own right- 
 ness, and its belief that correct manners are 
 more to be desired than intellect, or artistic 
 creation, or vital energy, or any of the other 
 sources of progress in the world. Perfect as- 
 surance, by itself, is enough to destroy all men- 
 tal progress in those who have it. And when 
 it is combined with contempt for the angulari- 
 ties and awkwardnesses that are almost inva- 
 riably associated with great mental power, it
 
 EDUCATION 165 
 
 becomes a source of destruction to all who come 
 in contact with it. ''Good form" is itself dead 
 and incapable of growth ; and by its attitude to 
 those who are without it it spreads its own death 
 to many who might otherwise have life. The 
 harm which it has done to well-to-do English- 
 men, and to men whose abilities have led the 
 well-to-do to notice them, is incalculable. 
 
 The prevention of free inquiry is unavoid- 
 able so long as the purpose of education is to 
 produce belief rather than thought, to compel 
 the young to hold positive opinions on doubt- 
 ful matters rather than to let them see the 
 doubtfulness and be encouraged to indepen- 
 dence of mind. Education ought to foster the 
 wish for truth, not the conviction that some 
 particular creed is the truth. But it is creeds 
 that hold men together in fighting organiza- 
 tions : Churches, States, political parties. It is 
 intensity of belief in a creed that produces ef- 
 ficiency in fighting: victory comes to those who 
 feel the strongest certainty about matters on 
 which doubt is the only rational attitude. To 
 produce this intensity of belief and this effi- 
 ciency in fighting, the child's nature is warped, 
 and its free outlook is cramped, by cultivating 
 inhibitions as a check to the growth of new
 
 166 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ideas. In those whose minds are not very ao 
 tive the result is the omnipotence of prejudice; 
 while the few whose thought cannot be wholly 
 killed become cynical, intellectually hopeless, 
 destructively critical, able to make all that is 
 living seem foolish, unable themselves to sup- 
 ply the creative impulses which they destroy in 
 others. 
 
 The success in fighting which is achieved by 
 suppressing freedom of thought is brief and 
 very worthless. In the long run mental vigor 
 is as essential to success as it is to a good life. 
 The conception of education as a form of drill, 
 a means of producing unanimity through slav- 
 ishness, is very common, and is defended chiefly 
 on the ground that it leads to victory. Those 
 who enjoy parallels from ancient history will 
 point to the victory of Sparta over Athens to 
 enforce their moral. But it is Athens that has 
 had power over men's thoughts and imagina- 
 tions, not Sparta: any one of us, if we could 
 be born again into some past epoch, would 
 rather be born an Athenian than a Spartan. 
 And in the modem world so much intellect is 
 required in practical affairs that even the ex- 
 ternal victory is more likely to be won by in-
 
 EDUCATION 167 
 
 telligence than by docility. Education in cre- 
 dulity leads by quick stages to mental decay; 
 it is only by keeping alive the spirit of free in- 
 quiry that the indispensable minimum of prog- 
 ress can be achieved. 
 
 Certain mental habits are commonly instilled 
 by tliose who are engaged in educating: obedi- 
 ence and discipline, ruthlessness in the struggle 
 for worldly success, contempt towards oppos- 
 ing groups, and an unquestioning credulity, a 
 passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom. 
 All these habits are against life. Instead of 
 obedience and discipline, we ought to aim 
 at preserving independence and impulse. In- 
 stead of ruthlessness, education should try to 
 develop justice in thought. Instead of con- 
 tempt, it ought to instil reverence, and the at- 
 tempt at understanding; towards tlie opinions 
 of others it ought to produce, not necessarily 
 acquiescence, but only such opposition as is 
 combined with imaginative apprehension and 
 a clear realization of the grounds for opposi- 
 tion. Instead of credulity, the object should 
 be to stimulate constructive doubt, the love of 
 mental adventure, the sense of worlds to con- 
 quer by enterprise and boldness in thought.
 
 168 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Contentment with the status quo, and subor- 
 dination of the individual pupil to political 
 aims, owing to the indifference to the things 
 of the mind, are the immediate causes of these 
 evils; but beneath these causes there is one 
 more fundamental, the fact that education is 
 treated as a means of acquiring power over tTie 
 pupil, not as a means of nourishing his own 
 growth. It is in this that lack of reverence 
 shows itself; and it is only by more reverence 
 that a fundamental reform can be effected. 
 
 Obedience and discipline are supposed to be 
 indispensable if order is to be kept in a class, 
 and if any instruction is to be given. To some 
 extent this is true; but the extent is much less 
 than it is thought to be by those who regard 
 obedience and discipline as in themselves desir- 
 able. Obedience, the yielding of one's will to 
 outside direction, is the counterpart of author- 
 ity. Both may be necessary in certain cases. 
 Refractory children, lunatics, and criminals 
 may require authority, and may need to be 
 forced to obey. But in so far as this is neces- 
 sary it is a misfortune: what is to be desired 
 is the free choice of ends with which it is not 
 necessary to interfere. And educational re- 
 formers have shown that this is far more pos-
 
 EDUCATION 169 
 
 sible than our fathers would ever have be- 
 lieved/ 
 
 What makes obedience seem necessary in 
 schools is the large classes and overworked 
 teachers demanded by a false economy. Those 
 who have no experience of teaching are inca- 
 pable of imagining the expense of spirit en- 
 tailed by any really living instruction. They 
 think that teachers can reasonably be expected 
 to work as many hours as bank clerks. Intense 
 fatigTie and irritable nerves are the result, and 
 an absolute necessity of performing the day's 
 task mechanically. But the task cannot be per- 
 formed mechanically except by exacting obedi- 
 ence. 
 
 If we took education seriously, and thought 
 it as important to keep alive the minds of chil- 
 dren as to secure victory in war, we should 
 conduct education quite differently: we should 
 make sure of achieving the end, even if the 
 expense were a hundredfold greater than it is. 
 To many men and women a small amount of 
 teaching is a delight, and can be done with a 
 fresh zest and life which keeps most pupils in- 
 
 1 What Madame Montessori has achieved in the way of 
 minimizing obedience and discipline with advantage to educa- 
 tion is almost miraculous.
 
 170 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 terested without any need of discipline. The 
 few who do not become interested might be 
 separated from the rest, and given a different 
 kind of instruction. A teacher ought to have 
 only as much teaching as can be done, on most 
 days, with actual pleasure in the work, and 
 with an awareness of the pupil's mental needs. 
 The result would be a relation of friendliness 
 instead of hostility between teacher and pupil, 
 a realization on the part of most pupils that 
 education serves to develop their own lives and 
 is not merely an outside imposition, interfer- 
 ing with play and demanding many hours of sit- 
 ting still. All that is necessary to this end 
 is a greater expenditure of money, to secure 
 teachers with more leisure and with a natural 
 love of teaching. 
 
 Discipline, as it exists in schools, is very 
 largely an evil. There is a kind of discipline 
 which is necessary to almost all achievement, 
 and which perhaps is not sufficiently valued by 
 those who react against the purely external dis- 
 cipline of traditional methods. The desirable 
 kind of discipline is the kind that comes from 
 within, which consists in tlie power of pursuing 
 a distant object steadily, foregoing and suffer- 
 ing many things on the way. This involves the
 
 EDUCATION 171 
 
 subordination of impulse to will, the power of 
 a directing action by large creative desires even 
 at moments when they are not vividly alive. 
 Without this, no serious ambition, good or bad, 
 can be realized, no consistent purpose can domi- 
 nate. This kind of discipline is very necessary, 
 but can only result from strong desires for 
 ends not immediately attainable, and can only 
 be produced by education if education fosters 
 such desires, which it seldom does at present. 
 Such discipline springs from one's own will, 
 not from outside authority. It is not this kind 
 which is sought in most schools, and it is not 
 this kind which seems to me an evil. 
 
 Although elementary education encourages 
 the undesirable discipline that consists in pas- 
 sive obedience, and although hardly any exist- 
 ing education encourages the moral discipline 
 of consistent self-direction, there is a certain 
 kind of purely mental discipline which is pro- 
 duced by the traditional higher education. The 
 kind I mean is that which enables a man to con- 
 centrate his thoughts at will upon any matter 
 that he has occasion to consider, regardless of 
 preoccupations or boredom or intellectual dif- 
 ficulty. This quality, though it has no impor- 
 tant intrinsic excellence, greatly enhances the
 
 172 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 eflBciency of the mind as an instrument. It is 
 this that enables a lawyer to master the scien- 
 tific details of a patent case which he forgets as 
 soon as judgment has been given, or a civil 
 servant to deal quickly with many different ad- 
 ministrative questions in succession. It is this 
 that enables men to forget private cares dur- 
 ing business hours. In a complicated world it 
 is a very necessary faculty for those whose 
 work requires mental concentration. 
 
 Success in producing mental discipline is the 
 chief merit of traditional higher education. I 
 doubt whether it can be achieved except by com- 
 pelling or persuading active attention to a pre- 
 scribed task. It is for this reason chiefly that 
 I do not believe methods such as Madame Mon- 
 tessori's applicable when the age of childhood 
 has been passed. The essence of her method 
 consists in giving a choice of occupations, any 
 one of which is interesting to most children, and 
 all of which are instructive. The child's at- 
 tention is wholly spontaneous, as in play ; it en- 
 joys acquiring knowledge in this way, and does 
 not acquire any knowledge which it does not 
 desire. I am convinced that this is the best 
 method of education with young children: the 
 actual results make it ahnost impossible to think
 
 EDUCATION 173 
 
 otherwise. But it is difficult to see how this 
 method can lead to control of attention by the 
 will. Many things which must be thought 
 about are uninteresting, and even those that are 
 interesting at first often become very weari- 
 some before they have been considered as long 
 as is necessary. The power of giving pro- 
 longed attention is very important, and it is 
 hardly to be widely acquired except as a habit 
 induced originally by outside pressure. Some 
 few boys, it is true, have sufficiently strong in- 
 tellectual desires to be willing to undergo all 
 that is necessary by their own initiative and 
 free will ; but for all others an external induce- 
 ment is required in order to make them learn 
 any subject thoroughly. There is among edu- 
 cational reformers a certain fear of demanding 
 great efforts, and in the world at large a grow- 
 iug unwillingness to be bored. Both these tend- 
 encies have their good sides, but both also have 
 their dangers. The mental discipline which is 
 jeopardized can be preserved by mere advice 
 without external compulsion whenever a boy^s 
 intellectual interest and ambition can be suffi- 
 ciently stimulated. A good teacher ought to 
 bo able to do this for any boy who is capable 
 of much mental achievement; and for many of
 
 174 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the others the present purely bookish education 
 is probably not the best. In this way, so long 
 as the importance of mental discipline is real- 
 ized, it can probably be attained, whenever it 
 is attainable, by appealing to the pupil's con- 
 sciousness of his own needs. So long as teach- 
 ers are not expected to succeed by this method, 
 it is easy for them to slip into a slothful dull- 
 ness, and blame their pupils when the fault is 
 really their o^vn. 
 
 Ruthlessness in the economic struggle will 
 almost unavoidably be taught in schools so long 
 as the economic structure of society remains 
 unchanged. This must be particularly the case 
 in middle-class schools, which depend for their 
 numbers upon the good opinion of parents, and 
 secure the good opinion of parents by adver- 
 tising the successes of pupils. This is one of 
 many ways in which the competitive organiza- 
 tion of the State is harmful. Spontaneous and 
 disinterested desire for knowledge is not at all 
 uncommon in the young, and might be easily 
 aroused in many in whom it remains latent. 
 But it is remorselessly checked by teachers who 
 think only of examinations, diplomas, and de- 
 grees. For the abler boys there is no time for 
 thought, no time for the indulgence of intellec-
 
 EDUCATION 175 
 
 tual taste, from the moment of first going to 
 school until the moment of leaving the univer- 
 sity. From first to last there is nothing but 
 one long drudgery of examination tips and text- 
 book facts. The most intelligent, at the end, 
 are disgusted with learning, longing only to for- 
 get it and to escape into a life of action. Yet 
 there, as before, the economic machine holds 
 them prisoners, and all their spontaneous de- 
 sires are bruised and thwarted. 
 
 The examination system, and the fact that 
 instruction is treated mainly as training for a 
 livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge, 
 from a purely utilitarian point of view, as the 
 j*oad to money, not as the gateway to wisdom. 
 This would not matter so much if it affected 
 only those who have no genuine intellectual 
 interests. But unfortunately it affects most 
 those whose intellectual interests are strongest, 
 since it is upon them that the pressure of ex- 
 aminations falls with most severity. To them 
 most, but to all in some degree, education ap- 
 pears as a means of acquiring superiority over 
 others ; it is infected through and through with 
 ruthlessness and glorification of social inequal- 
 ity. Any free, disinterested consideration 
 shows that, whatever inequalities might remain
 
 176 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 in a Utopia, the actual inequalities are almost 
 all contrary to justice. But our educational 
 system tends to conceal this from all except the 
 failures, since those who succeed are on the way 
 to profit by the inequalities, with every encour- 
 agement from the men who have directed their 
 education. 
 
 Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom 
 is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no 
 effort of independent thought, and seems ra- 
 tional because the teacher knows more than his 
 pupils ; it is moreover the way to win the favor 
 of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional 
 man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a 
 disastrous one in later life. It causes men to 
 seek a leader, and to accept as a loader who- 
 ever is established in that position. It makes 
 the power of Churches, Governments, party 
 caucuses, and all the other organizations by 
 which plain men are misled into supporting old 
 systems which are harmful to the nation and to 
 themselves. It is possible that there would not 
 be much independence of thought even if educa- 
 tion did everything to promote it; but there 
 would certainly be more than there is at pres- 
 ent. If the object were to make pupils think, 
 rather than to make them accept certain con-
 
 EDUCATION 177 
 
 elusions, education would be conducted quite 
 differently: there would be less rapidity of in- 
 struction and more discussion, more occasions 
 when pupils were encouraged to express them- 
 selves, more attempt to make education con- 
 cern itself with matters in which the pupils felt 
 some interest. 
 
 Above all, there would be an endeavor to 
 rouse and stimulate the love of mental adven- 
 ture. The world in which we live is various 
 and astonishing: some of the things that seem 
 plainest grow more and more difficult the more 
 they are considered; other things, which might 
 have been thought quite impossible to discover, 
 have nevertheless been laid bare by genius and 
 industry. The powers of thought, the vast 
 regions which it can master, the much more vast 
 regions wliicli it can only dimly suggest to im- 
 agination, give to those whose minds have 
 traveled beyond the daily round an amazing 
 richness of material, an escape from the triv- 
 iality and wearisomeness of familiar routine, 
 by which the whole of life is filled with interest, 
 and the prison walls of the commonplace are 
 broken down. The same love of adventure 
 which takes men to the South Pole, the same 
 passion for a conclusive trial of strength which
 
 178 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 leads some men to welcome war, can find in 
 creative thought an outlet which is neither 
 wasteful nor cruel, but increases the dignity of 
 man by incarnating in life some of that shining 
 splendor which the human spirit is bringing 
 down out of the unknown. To give this joy, in 
 a greater or less measure, to all who are capable 
 of it, is the supreme end for which the education 
 of the mind is to be valued. 
 
 It will be said that the joy of mental adven- 
 ^ ture must be rare, that there are few who can 
 appreciate it, and that ordinary education can 
 take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do 
 not believe this. The joy of mental adventure 
 is far commoner in the young than in grown 
 men and women. Among children it is very 
 common, and grows naturally out of the period 
 of make-believe and fancy. It is rare in later 
 life because everything is done to kill it during 
 education. Men fear thought as they fear noth- 
 ing else on earth — more than ruin, more even 
 than death. Thought is subversive and revolu- 
 tionary, destructive and terrible; thought is 
 merciless to privilege, established institutions, 
 and comfortable habits ; thought is anarchic and 
 lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the 
 well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks
 
 EDUCATION 179 
 
 into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees 
 man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathom- 
 able depths of silence; yet it bears itself 
 proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the 
 universe. Thought is great and swift and free, 
 the light of the world, and the chief glory of 
 man. 
 
 But if thought is to become the possession of 
 many, not the privilege of the few, we must 
 have done with fear. It is fear that holds men 
 back — fear lest their cherished beliefs should 
 prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by 
 which they live should prove harmful, fear lest 
 they themselves should prove less worthy of 
 respect than they have supposed themselves 
 to be. ''Should the working man think freely 
 about property? Then what will become of us, 
 the rich ? Should young men and young women 
 think freely about sex ? Then what will become 
 of morality? Should soldiers think freely 
 about war? Then what will become of mili- 
 tary discipline? Away with thought! Back 
 into the shades of prejudice, lest property, 
 morals, and war should be endangered ! Better 
 men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive 
 than that their thoughts should be free. For 
 if their thoughts were free they might not think
 
 180 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 as we do. And at all costs this disaster must 
 be averted." So the opponents of thought 
 argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. 
 And so they act in their churches, their schools, 
 and their universities. 
 
 No institution inspired by fear can further 
 life. Hope, not fear, is the creative principle 
 in human affairs. All that has made man great 
 has sprung from the attempt to secure what is 
 good, not from the struggle to avert what was 
 thought evil. It is because modern education 
 is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so 
 seldom achieves a gTeat result. The wish to 
 preserve the past rather than the hope of cre- 
 ating the future dominates the minds of those 
 who control the teaching of the young. Educa- 
 tion should not aim at a passive awareness of 
 dead facts, but at an activity directed towards 
 the world that our efforts are to create. It 
 should be inspired, not by a regretful hankering 
 after the extinct beauties of Greece and the 
 Renaissance, but by a shining vision of the so- 
 ciety that is to be, of the triumphs that thought 
 will achieve in the time to come, and of the ever- 
 widening horizon of man's survey over the uni- 
 verse. Those who are taught in this spirit will
 
 EDUCATION 181 
 
 be filled with life and hope and joy, able to bear 
 their part in bringing to mankind a future less 
 somber than the past, with faith in the glory 
 that human effort can create.
 
 VI 
 
 IVIARRIAGE AND THE POPULATION 
 
 QUESTION 
 
 THE influence of the Christian religion on 
 daily life has decayed very rapidly 
 throughout Europe during the last hundred 
 years. Not only has the proportion of nominal 
 believers declined, but even among those who 
 believe the intensity and dogmatism of belief is 
 enormously diminished. But there is one social 
 institution which is still profoundly affected by 
 the Christian tradition — I mean the institution 
 of marriage. The law and public opinion as re- 
 gards marriage are dominated even now to a 
 very great extent by the teachings of the 
 Church, which continue to influence in this way 
 the lives of men, women, and children in their 
 most intimate concerns. 
 
 It is marriage as a political institution that I 
 wish to consider, not marriage as a matter for 
 the private morality of each individual. Mar- 
 riage is regulated by law, and is regarded as a 
 
 182
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 183 
 
 matter in which the community has a right to 
 interfere. It is only the action of the com- 
 munity in regard to marriage that I am con- 
 cerned to discuss: whether the present action 
 furthers the life of the community, and if not, 
 in what ways it ought to be changed. 
 
 There are two questions to be asked in regard 
 to any marriage system : first, how it affects the 
 development and character of the men and 
 women concerned ; secondly, what is its influence 
 on the propagation and education of children. 
 These two questions are entirely distinct, and a 
 system may well be desirable from one of these 
 two points of view when it is very undesirable 
 from the other. I propose first to describe the 
 present English law and public opinion and 
 practice in regard to the relations of the 
 sexes, then to consider their effects as re- 
 gards children, and finally to consider how 
 these effects, which are bad, could be obviated 
 by a system which would also have a better in- 
 fluence on the character and development of 
 men and women. 
 
 The law in England is based upon the ex- 
 pectation that the great majority of marriages 
 will be lifelong. A marriage can only be dis- 
 solved if either the wife or the husband, but not
 
 184 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 both, can be proved to have committed adultery. 
 In case the husband is the ''guilty party," he 
 must also be guilty of cruelty or desertion. 
 Even when these conditions are fulfilled, in 
 practice only the well-to-do can be divorced, be- 
 cause the expense is very great.^ A marriage 
 cannot be dissolved for insanity or crime, or for 
 cruelty, however abominable, or for desertion, 
 or for adultery by both parties ; and it cannot 
 be dissolved for any cause whatever if both hus- 
 band and wife have agreed that they wish it dis- 
 solved. In all these cases the law regards the 
 man and woman as bound together for life. A 
 special official, the King's Proctor, is employed 
 to prevent divorce when there is collusion and 
 when both parties have committed adultery.^ 
 
 1 There was a provision for suits in forma pauperis, but for 
 various reasons this provision was nearly useless; a new and 
 Bomewhat better provision has recently been made, but is still 
 very far from satisfactory. 
 
 2 The following letter {Neic Statesman, December 4, 1915) 
 illustrates the nature of his activities: — 
 
 DiVOBCE AND Wab. 
 
 To the Editor of the "New Statesman." 
 Sib, — The following episodes may be of interest to your 
 readers. Under the new facilities for divorce offered to the 
 London poor, a poor woman recently obtained a decree nisi for 
 divorce against her husband, who had often covered her body 
 with bruises, infected her with a dangerous disease, and com-
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 185 
 
 This interesting system embodies the opinions 
 held by the Church of England some fifty years 
 ago, and by most Nonconformists then and 
 now. It rests npon the assumption that adult- 
 ery is sin, and that when this sin has been com- 
 mitted by one party to the marriage, the other 
 is entitled to revenge if he is rich. But when 
 both have committed the same sin, or when the 
 one who has not committed it feels no righteous 
 anger, the right to revenge does not exist. As 
 soon as this point of view is understood, the 
 law, which at first seems somewhat strange, 
 is seen to be perfectly consistent. It rests, 
 broadly speaking, upon four propositions: (1) 
 that sexual intercourse outside marriage is sin; 
 (2) that resentment of adultery by the "inno- 
 
 mitted bigamy. By this bigamous marriage the husband had 
 ten illegitimate children. In order to prevent this decree being 
 made absolute, the Treasury spent at least £200 of the taxes 
 in briefing a leading counsel and an eminent junior counsel 
 and in bringing about ten witnesses from a city a hundred 
 miles away to prove that this woman had committed casual 
 acts of adultery in 1895 and 1898. The net result is that this 
 woman will probably be forced by destitution into further 
 adultery, and that the husband will be able to treat his mistress 
 exactly as he treated his wife, with impunity, so far as dis- 
 ease is concerned. In nearly every other civilized country the 
 marriage would have been dissolved, the children could have 
 been legitimated by subsequent marriage, and the lawyers 
 employed by the Treasury would not have earned the large fees
 
 186 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 cent" party is a righteous horror of wrong-do- 
 ing; (3) that his resentment, but nothing else, 
 may be rightly regarded as making a common 
 life impossible; (4) that the poor have no right 
 to fine feelings. The Church of England, under 
 the influence of the High Church, has ceased to 
 believe the third of these propositions, but it 
 still believes the first and second, and does noth- 
 ing actively to show that it disbelieves the 
 fourth. 
 
 The penalty for infringing the marriage law 
 is partly financial, but depends mainly upon 
 
 they did from the community for an achievement which seems 
 to most other lawyers thoroughly anti-social in its effects. If 
 any lawyers really feel that society is benefited by this sort of 
 litigation, why cannot they give their services for nothing, 
 like the lawyers who assisted the wife? If we are to practise 
 economy in war-time, why cannot the King's Proctor be satis- 
 fied with a junior counsel only? The fact remains that many 
 persons situated like the husband and wife in question prefer 
 to avoid having illegitimate children, and the birth-rate ac- 
 cordingly suffers. 
 
 The other episode is this. A divorce was obtained by Mr. 
 A. against Mrs. A. and Mr. B. Mr. B. was married and Mrs. 
 B., on hearing of the divorce proceedings, obtained a decree 
 nisi against Mr. B. Mr. B. is at any moment liable to be 
 called to the Front, but Mrs. B. has for some months declined 
 to make the decree nisi absolute, and this prevents him marry- 
 ing Mrs. A., as he feels in honor bound to do. Yet the law 
 allows any petitioner, male or female, to obtain a decree nisi 
 and to refrain from making it absolute for motives which 
 are probably discreditable. The Divorce Law Commissioners
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 187 
 
 public opinion. A rather small section of the 
 public genuinely believes that sexual relations 
 outside marriage are wicked ; those who believe 
 this are naturally kept in ignorance of the con- 
 duct of friends who feel otherwise, and are able 
 to go through life not knowing how others live 
 or what others think. This small section of 
 the public regards as depraved not only actions, 
 but opinions, which are contrary to its prin- 
 ciples. It is able to control the professions of 
 politicians through its influence on elections, 
 and the votes of the House of Lords through the 
 presence of the Bishops. By these means it 
 governs legislation, and makes any change in 
 the marriage law almost impossible. It is able, 
 also, to secure in most cases that a man who 
 openly infringes the marriage law shall be dis- 
 
 strongly condemned this state of things, and the hardship in 
 question is immensely aggravated in war-time, just as the war 
 has given rise to many cases of bigamy owing to the chivalrous 
 desire of our soldiers to obtain for the de facto wife and family 
 the separation allowance of the State. The legal wife is often 
 united by similar ties to anotlier man. I commend these facts 
 to consideration in your columns, having regard to your fre- 
 quent complaints of a falling birth-rate. The iniquity of our 
 marriage laws is an important contributory cause to the fall 
 in question. 
 
 Yours, etc., 
 
 E. S. P. Haynks. 
 November 2dth.
 
 188 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 missed from his employment or ruined by the 
 defection of his customers or clients. A doctor 
 or lawj^er, or a tradesman in a country town, 
 cannot make a living, nor can a politician be in 
 Parliament, if he is publicly known to be "im- 
 moral." Whatever a man's own conduct may 
 be, he is not likely to defend publicly those who 
 have been branded, lest some of the odium 
 should fall on him. Yet so long as a man has 
 not been branded, few men will object to him, 
 whatever they may know privately of his be- 
 havior in these respects. 
 
 Owing to the nature of the penalty, it falls 
 very unequally upon different professions. An 
 actor or journalist usually escapes all punish- 
 ment. An urban workingman can almost al- 
 ways do as he likes. A man of private means, 
 unless he wishes to take part in public life, need 
 not suffer at all if he has chosen his friends 
 suitably. Women, who formerly suffered more 
 than men, now suffer less, since there are large 
 -sircles in which no social penalty is inflicted, and 
 a very rapidly increasing number of women who 
 do not believe the conventional code. But for 
 the majority of men outside the working classes 
 the penalty is still sufficiently severe to be pro- 
 hibitive.
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 189 
 
 The result of this state of things is a wide- 
 spread but very flimsy hj^ocrisy, which allows 
 many infractions of the code, and forbids only 
 those which must become public. A man may 
 not live openly with a woman who is not his 
 wife, an unmarried woman may not have a 
 child, and neither man nor woman may get into 
 the divorce court. Subject to these restric- 
 tions, there is in practice very great freedom. 
 It is this practical freedom which makes the 
 state of the law seem tolerable to those who 
 do not accept the principles upon which it is 
 based. What has to be sacrificed to propitiate 
 the holders of strict views is not pleasure, but 
 only children and a common life and truth and 
 honesty. It cannot be supposed that this is 
 the result desired by those who maintain the 
 code, but equally it cannot be denied that this 
 is the result which they do in fact achieve. Ex- 
 tra-matrimonial relations which do not lead to 
 children and are accompanied by a certain 
 amount of deceit remain unpunished, but severe 
 penalties fall on those which are honest or lead 
 to children. 
 
 Within marriage, the expense of children 
 leads to continually greater limitation of fami- 
 lies. The limitation is greatest among those
 
 190 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 who have most sense of parental responsibility 
 and most wish to educate their children well, 
 since it is to them that the expense of children 
 is most severe. But although the economic 
 motive for limiting families has hitherto prob- 
 ably been the strongest, it is being continually 
 reinforced by another. Women are acquiring 
 freedom — not merely outward and formal free- 
 dom, but inward freedom, enabling them to 
 think and feel genuinely, not according to re- 
 ceived maxims. To the men who have prated 
 confidently of women's natural instincts, the re- 
 sult would be surprising if they were aware of 
 it. Very large numbers of women, when they 
 are sufiSciently free to think for themselves, do 
 not desire to have children, or at most desire 
 one child in order not to miss the experience 
 which a child brings. There are women who 
 are intelligent and active-minded who resent 
 the slavery to the body which is involved in hav- 
 ing children. There are ambitious women, who 
 desire a career which leaves no time for chil- 
 dren. There are women who love pleasure and 
 gaiety, and women who love the admiration of 
 men; such women will at least postpone child- 
 bearing until their youth is past. All these 
 classes of women are rapidly becoming more
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 191 
 
 numerous, and it may be safely assumed that 
 their numbers will continue to increase for 
 many years to come. 
 
 It is too soon to judge with any confidence 
 as to the effects of women's freedom upon pri- 
 vate life and upon the life of the nation. But I 
 think it is not too soon to see that it will be 
 profoundly different from the effect expected 
 by the pioneers of the women's movement. 
 Men have invented, and women in the past have 
 often accepted, a theory that women are the 
 guardians of the race, that their life centers in 
 motherhood, that all their instincts and desires 
 are directed, consciously or unconsciously, to 
 this end. Tolstoy's Natacha illustrates this 
 theory: she is charming, gay, liable to passion, 
 until she is married ; then she becomes merely a 
 virtuous mother, without any mental life. This 
 result has Tolstoy's entire approval. It must 
 be admitted that it is very desirable from the 
 point of view of the nation, whatever we may 
 think of it in relation to private life. It must 
 also be admitted that it is probably common 
 among women who are physically vigorous and 
 not highly civilized. But in countries like 
 France and England it is becoming increasingly 
 rare. More and more women find motherhood
 
 192 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 unsatisfying, not what their needs demand. 
 And more and more there comes to be a conflict 
 between their personal development and the fu- 
 ture of the community. It is difficult to know 
 what ought to be done to mitigate this conflict, 
 but I think it is worth while to see what are 
 likely to be its effects if it is not mitigated. 
 
 Owing to the combination of economic pru- 
 dence with the increasing freedom of women, 
 there is at present a selective birth-rate of a very 
 singular kind.^ In France the population is prac- 
 tically stationary, and in England it is rapidly 
 becoming so ; this means that some sections are 
 dwindling while others are increasing. Unless 
 some change occurs, the sections that are 
 dwindling will practically become extinct, and 
 the population will be almost wholly replenished 
 from the sections that are now increasing.^ 
 
 1 Some interesting facts were given by Mr. Sidney Webb in 
 two letters to The Times, October 11 and 16, 1906; there is also 
 a Fabian tract on the subject: "The Decline in the Birth- 
 Rate," by Sidney Webb (Xo. 131). Some further information 
 may be found in "The Declining Birth-Rate: Its National and 
 International Significance," by A. Newsholme, M.D., M.R.C.S. 
 (Cassell, 1911). 
 
 2 The fall in the death-rate, and especially in the infant 
 mortality, which has occurred concurrently with the fall in 
 the birth-rate, has hitherto been sufficiently great to allow the 
 population of Great Britain to go on increasing. But there
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 193 
 
 The sections that are dwindling include the 
 whole middle-class and the skilled artisans. 
 The sections that are increasing are the very 
 poor, the shiftless and drunken, the feeble- 
 minded — feeble-minded women, especially, are 
 apt to be very prolific. There is an increase in 
 those sections of the population which still 
 actively believe the Catholic religion, such as 
 the Irish and the Bretons, because the Catholic 
 religion forbids limitation of families. Within 
 the classes that are dwindling, it is the best ele- 
 ments that are dwindling most rapidly. Wouk- 
 ing-class boys of exceptional ability rise, by 
 means of scholarships, into the professional 
 class; they naturally desire to marry into the 
 class to which they belong by education, not into 
 the class from which they spring; but as they 
 have no money beyond what they earn, they can- 
 not marry young, or afford a large family. The 
 result is that in each generation the best ele- 
 ments are extracted from the working classes 
 and artificially sterilized, at least in comparison 
 with those who are loft. In the professional 
 classes the young women who have initiative^ 
 
 are obvious limits to tlic fall of the doath-rate, whereas the 
 birth-rate mif;ht easify fall to a point which would maJce an 
 actual diminution of numbers unavoidable.
 
 194 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 energy, or intelligence are as a rule not in- 
 clined to marry young, or to have more than one 
 or two children when they do marry. Marriage 
 has been in the past the only obvious means of 
 livelihood for women; pressure from parents 
 and fear of becoming an old maid combined to 
 force many women to marry in spite of a com- 
 plete absence of inclination for the duties of a 
 wife. But now a young woman of ordinary in- 
 telligence can easily earn her own living, and 
 can acquire freedom and experience without the 
 permanent ties of a husband and a family of 
 children. The result is that if she marries she 
 marries late. 
 
 For these reasons, if an average sample of 
 children were taken out of the population of 
 England, and their parents were examined, it 
 would be found that prudence, energy, intellect, 
 and enlightenment were less common among 
 the parents than in the population in general; 
 while shiftlessness, feeble-mindedness, stupid- 
 ity, and superstition were more common than 
 in the population in general. It would be found 
 that those who are prudent or energetic or in- 
 telligent or enlightened actually fail to repro- 
 duce their own numbers ; that is to say, they do 
 not on the average have as many as two children
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 195 
 
 each who survive infancy. On the other hand, 
 those who have the opposite qualities have, 
 on the average, more than two childnen each, 
 and more than reproduce their own num- 
 bers. 
 
 It is impossible to estimate the effect which 
 this will have upon the character of the popula- 
 tion without a much greater knowledge of 
 heredity than exists at present. But so long as 
 children continue to live with their parents, pa- 
 rental example and early education must have 
 a great influence in developing their character, 
 even if we leave heredity entirely out of account. 
 Whatever may be thought of genius, there can 
 be no doubt that intelligence, whether through 
 heredity or through education, tends to run in 
 families, and that the decay of the families in 
 which it is common must lower the mental 
 standard of the population. It seems unques- 
 tionable that if our economic system and our 
 moral standards remain unchanged, there will 
 be, in the next two or three generations, a rapid 
 change for the worse in the character of the 
 population in all civilized countries, and an 
 actual diminution of numbers in the most civil- 
 ized. 
 
 The diminution of numbers, in all likelihood,
 
 196 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 will rectify itself in time tlirougli the elimina- 
 tion of those characteristics which at present 
 lead to a small birth-rate. Men and w^omen who 
 can still believe the Catholic faith will have a 
 biological advantage ; gradually a race will grow 
 up which will be impervious to all the assaults 
 of reason, and will believe imperturbably that 
 limitation of families leads to hell-fire. Women 
 who have mental interests, who care about art 
 or literature or politics, who desire a career or 
 who value their liberty, will gradually grow 
 rarer, and be more and more replaced by a 
 placid maternal type w^hich has no interests out- 
 side the home and no dislike of the burden of 
 motherhood. This result, which ages of mascu- 
 line domination have vainly striven to achieve, 
 is likely to be the final outcome of women's 
 emancipation and of their attempt to enter upon 
 a wider sphere than that to which the jealousy 
 of men confined them in the past. 
 
 Perhaps, if the facts could be ascertained, 
 it would be found that something of the same 
 kind occurred in the Roman Empire. The de- 
 cay of energy and intelligence during the sec- 
 ond, third, and fourth centuries of our era has 
 always remained more or less mysterious. But 
 there is reason to think that then, as now, the
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 197 
 
 best elements of the population in eacli genera- 
 tion failed to reproduce themselves, and that 
 the least vigorous were, as a rule, those to whom 
 the continuance of the race was due. One might 
 be tempted to suppose that civilization, when it 
 has reached a certain height, becomes unstable, 
 and tends to decay through some inherent weak- 
 ness, some failure to adapt the life of instinct to 
 the intense mental life of a period of high cul- 
 ture. But such vague theories have always 
 something glib and superstitious which makes 
 them worthless as scientific explanations or as 
 guides to action. It is not by a literary for- 
 mula, but by detailed and complex thought, that 
 a true solution is to be found. 
 
 Let us first be clear as to what we desire. 
 There is no importance in an increasing popula- 
 tion; on the contrary, if the population of Eu- 
 rope were stationary, it would be much easier to 
 promote economic reform and to avoid war. 
 What is regrettable at present is not the decline 
 of the birth-rate in itself, but the fact that the 
 decline is greatest in the best elements of the 
 population. There is reason, however, to fear 
 in the future three bad results : first, an absolute 
 decline in the numbers of English, French, and 
 Germans; secondly, as a consequence of this
 
 198 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 decline, their subjugation by less civilized races 
 and the extinction of their tradition; thirdly, a 
 revival of their numbers on a much lower plane 
 of civilization, after generations of selection of 
 those who have neither intelligence nor fore- 
 sight. If this result is to be avoided, the pres- 
 ent unforunate selectiveness of the birth-rate 
 must be somehow stopped. 
 
 The problem is one which applies to the whole 
 of Western civilization. There is no difficulty 
 in discovering a theoretical solution, but there 
 is great difficulty in persuading men to adopt a 
 solution in practice, because the effects to be 
 feared are not immediate and the subject is one 
 upon which people are not in the habit of using 
 their reason. If a rational solution is ever 
 adopted, the cause will probably be interna- 
 tional rivalry. It is obvious that if one State — 
 say Germany — adopted a rational means of 
 dealing with the matter, it would acquire an 
 enormous advantage over other States unless 
 they did likewise. After the war, it is possible 
 that population questions will attract more at- 
 tention than they did before, and it is likely that 
 they will be studied from the point of view 
 of international rivalry. This motive, unlike 
 reason and humanity, is perhaps strong enough
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 199 
 
 to overcome men's objections to a scientific 
 treatment of the birth-rate. 
 
 In the past, at most periods and in most so- 
 cieties, the instincts of men and women led of 
 themselves to a more than sufiScient birth-rate ; 
 Malthus's statement of the population question 
 had been true enough up to the time when he 
 wrote. It is still true of barbarous and semi- 
 civilized races, and of the worst elements among 
 civilized races. But it has become false as re- 
 gards the more civilized half of the population 
 in Western Europe and America. Among 
 them, instinct no longer suffices to keep numbers 
 even stationary. 
 
 We may sum up the reasons for this in order 
 of importance, as follows : — 
 
 1. The expense of children is very great if 
 parents are conscientious. 
 
 2. An increasing number of women desire to 
 have no children, or only one or two, in order 
 not to be hampered in their own careers. 
 
 3. Owing to the excess of women, a large 
 number of women remain unmarried. These 
 women, though not debarred in practice from 
 relations with men, are debarred by the code 
 from having children. In this class are to be 
 found an enormous and increasing number of
 
 200 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 women who earn their own living as typists, in 
 shops, or otherwise. The war has opened many 
 emiDloyments to women from which they were 
 formerly excluded, and this change is probably 
 only in part temporary. 
 
 If the sterilizing of the best parts of the popu- 
 lation is to be arrested, the first and most press- 
 ing necessity is the removal of the economic 
 motives for limiting families. The expense of 
 children ought to be borne wholly by the com- 
 munity. Their food and clothing and education 
 ought to be provided, not only to the very poor 
 as a matter of charity, but to all classes as a 
 matter of public interest. In addition to this, a 
 woman who is capable of earning money, and 
 who abandons wage-earning for motherhood, 
 ought to receive from the State as nearly as pos- 
 sible what she would have received if she had not 
 had children. The only condition attached to 
 State maintenance of the mother and the chil- 
 dren should be that both parents are physically 
 and mentally sound in all ways likely to affect 
 the children. Those who are not sound should 
 not be debarred from having children, but 
 should continue, as at present, to bear the ex- 
 pense of children themselves. 
 
 It ought to be recognized that the law is only
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 201 
 
 concerned with marriage through the question 
 of children, and should be indifferent to what 
 is called "morality," which is based upon cus- 
 tom and texts of the Bible, not upon any real 
 consideration of the needs of the community. 
 The excess women, who at present are in every 
 way discouraged from having children, ought 
 no longer to be discouraged. If the State is to 
 undertake the expense of children, it has the 
 right, on eugenic grounds, to know who the 
 father is, and to demand a certain stability in a 
 union. But there is no reason to demand or 
 expect a lifelong stability, or to exact any 
 ground for divorce beyond mutual consent. 
 This would make it possible for the women who 
 must at present remain unmarried to have chil- 
 dren if they wished it. In this way an enor- 
 mous and unnecessary waste would be pre- 
 vented, and a great deal of needless unhappiness 
 would be avoided. 
 
 There is no necessity to begin such a system 
 all at once. It might be begun tentatively 
 with certain exceptionally desirable sections of 
 the community. It might then be extended 
 gradually, with the experience of its working 
 which had been derived from the first experi- 
 ment. If the birth-rate were very much in-
 
 202 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 creased, the eugenic conditions exacted might 
 be made more strict. 
 
 There are of course various practical diffi- 
 culties in the way of such a scheme : the opposi- 
 tion of the Church and the upholders of tradi- 
 tional moralit}^, the fear of weakening parental 
 responsibility, and the expense. All these, how- 
 ever, might be overcome. But there remains 
 one difficulty which it seems impossible to over- 
 come completely in England, and that is, that 
 the whole conception is anti-democratic, since it 
 regards some men as better than others, and 
 would demand that the State should bestow a 
 better education upon the children of some men 
 than upon the children of others. This is con- 
 trary to all the principles of progressive politics 
 in England. For this reason it can hardly be 
 expected that any such method of dealing with 
 the population question will ever be adopted in 
 its entirety in this country. Something of the 
 sort may well be done in Germany, and if so, it 
 will assure German hegemony as no merely mili- 
 tary victory could do. But among ourselves we 
 can only hope to see it adopted in some partial, 
 piecemeal fashion, and probably only after a 
 change in the economic structure of society 
 which will remove most of the artificial inequali-
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 203 
 
 ties that progressive parties are rightly trying 
 to diminish. 
 
 So far we have been considering the question 
 of the reproduction of the race, rather than the 
 effect of sex relations in fostering or hindering 
 the development of men and women. From the 
 point of view of the race, what seems needed is 
 a complete removal of the economic burdens due 
 to children from all parents who are not phys- 
 ically or mentally unfit, and as much freedom 
 in the law as is compatible with public knowl- 
 edge of paternity. Exactly the same changes 
 seem called for when the question is considered 
 from the point of view of the men and women 
 concerned. 
 
 In regard to marriage, as with all the other 
 traditional bonds between human beings, a very 
 extraordinary change is taking place, wholly 
 inevitable, wholly necessary as a stage in the de- 
 velopment of a new life, but by no means wholly 
 satisfactory until it is completed. All the tra- 
 ditional bonds were based on authority — of the 
 king, the feudal baron, the priest, the father, the 
 husband. All these bonds, just because they 
 were based on authority, are dissolving or al- 
 ready dissolved, and the creation of other bonds 
 to take their place is as yet very incomplete.
 
 204 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 For this reason human relations have at present 
 an unusual triviality, and do less than they did 
 formerly to break down the hard walls of the 
 Ego. 
 
 The ideal of marriage in the past depended 
 upon the authority of the husband, which was 
 admitted as a right by the wife. The husband 
 was free, the wife was a willing slave. In all 
 matters which concerned husband and wife 
 jointly, it was taken for granted that the hus- 
 band's fiat should be final. The wife was ex- 
 pected to be faithful, while the husband, except 
 in very religious societies, was only expected to 
 throw a decent veil over his infidelities. Fami- 
 lies could not be limited except by continence, 
 and a wife had no recognized right to demand 
 continence, however she might suffer from fre- 
 quent children. 
 
 So long as the husband's right to authority 
 was unquestioningly believed by both men and 
 women, this system was fairly satisfactory, and 
 afforded to both a certain instinctive fulfilment 
 which is rarely achieved among educated peo- 
 ple now. Only one will, the husband's, had to 
 be taken into account, and there was no need of 
 the difl&cult adjustments required when common 
 decisions have to be reached by two equal wills.
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 205 
 
 The wife's desires were not treated seriously 
 enough to enable them to thwart the husband's 
 needs, and the wife herself, unless she was ex- 
 ceptionally selfish, did not seek self-develop- 
 ment, or see in marriage anything but an op- 
 portunity for duties. Since she did not seek or 
 expect much happiness, she suffered less, when 
 happiness was not attained, than a woman does 
 now: her suffering contained no element of in- 
 dignation or surprise, and did not readily turn 
 into bitterness and sense of injury. 
 
 The saintly, self-sacrificing woman whom our 
 ancestors praised had her place in a certain 
 organic conception of societ}^, the conception of 
 the ordered hierarchy of authorities which domi- 
 nated the Middle Ages. She belongs to the same 
 order of ideas as the faithful servant, the loyal 
 subject, and the orthodox son of the Church. 
 This whole order of ideas has vanished from the 
 civilized word, and it is to be hoped that it has 
 vanished for ever, in spite of the fact that the 
 society w^iicli it produced was vital and in some 
 ways full of nobility. The old order has been 
 destroyed by the new ideals of justice and 
 liberty, beginning with religion, passing on to 
 politics, and reaching at last the private rela- 
 tions of marriage and the family. When once
 
 206 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the question lias been asked, "Why should a 
 woman submit to a man!" when once the an- 
 swers derived from tradition and the Bible have 
 ceased to satisfy, there is no longer any possi- 
 bility of maintaining the old subordination. To 
 every man who has the power of thinking im- 
 personally and freely, it is obvious, as soon as 
 the question is asked, that the rights of women 
 are precisely the same as the rights of men. 
 Whatever dangers and difficulties, whatever 
 temporary chaos, may be incurred in the transi- 
 tion to equality, the claims of reason are so in- 
 sistent and so clear that no opposition to them 
 can hope to be long successful. 
 
 Mutual liberty, which is now demanded, is 
 making the old form of marriage impossible. 
 But a new form, which shall be an equally good 
 vehicle for instinct, and an equal help to spirit- 
 tual growth, has not yet been developed. For 
 the present, women who are conscious of liberty 
 as something to be preserved are also conscious 
 of the difficulty of preserving it. The wish for 
 mastery is an ingredient in most men's sexual 
 passions, especially in those which are strong 
 and serious. It survives in many men whose 
 theories are entirely opposed to despotism. 
 The result is a fight for liberty on the one side
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 207 
 
 and for life on the other. Women feel that they 
 must protect their individuality ; men feel, often 
 very dumbly, that the repression of instinct 
 which is demanded of them is incompatible with 
 vigor and initiative. The clash of these oppos- 
 ing moods makes all real mingling of personali- 
 ties impossible; the man and woman remain 
 hard, separate units, continually asking them- 
 selves whether anything of value to themselves 
 is resulting from the union. The effect is that 
 relations tend to become trivial and temporary, 
 a pleasure rather than the satisfaction of a 
 profound need, an excitement, not an attain- 
 ment. The fundamental loneliness into which 
 we are born remains untouched, and the hunger 
 for inner companionship remains unappeased. 
 No cheap and easy solution of this trouble 
 is possible. It is a trouble which affects most 
 the most civilized men and women, and is an out- 
 come of the increasing sense of individuality 
 which springs inevitably from mental progress. 
 I doubt if there is any radical cure except in 
 some form of religion, so firmly and sincerely 
 believed as to dominate even the life of instinct. 
 The individual is not the end and aim of his own 
 being: outside the individual, there is the com- 
 munity, the future of mankind, the immensity
 
 208 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 of the universe in which all our hopes and fears 
 are a mere pin-point. A man and woman with 
 reverence for the spirit of life in each other, 
 with an equal sense of their own unimportance 
 beside the w^hole life of man, may become com- 
 rades without interference with liberty, and 
 may achieve the union of instinct without do- 
 ing violence to the life of mind and spirit. As 
 religion dominated the old form of marriage, so 
 religion must dominate the new. But it must 
 be a new religion, based upon liberty, justice, 
 and love, not upon authority and law and hell- 
 lire. 
 
 A bad effect upon the relations of men and 
 w^omen has been produced by the romantic 
 movement, through directing attention to what 
 ought to be an incidental good, not the purpose 
 for which relations exist. Love is what gives 
 intrinsic value to a marriage, and, like art and 
 thought, it is one of the supreme things w4iich 
 make human life worth preserving. But though 
 there is no good marriage without love, the best 
 marriages have a purpose which goes beyond 
 love. The love of two people for each other is 
 too circumscribed, too separate from the com- 
 munity, to be by itself the main purpose of a 
 good life. It is not in itself a sufficient source
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 209 
 
 of activities, it is not sufficiently prospective, to 
 make an existence in which ultimate satisfaction 
 can be found. It brings its great moments, and 
 then its times which are less great, which are 
 unsatisfying because they are less great. It 
 becomes, sooner or later, retrospective, a tomb 
 of dead joys, not a well-spring of new life. This 
 evil is inseparable from any purpose which is 
 to be achieved in a single supreme emotion. 
 The only adequate purposes are those which 
 stretch out into the future, which can never be 
 fully achieved, but are always growing, and in- 
 finite with the infinity of human endeavor. And 
 it is only when love is linked to some infinite 
 purpose of this kind that it can have the serious- 
 ness and depth of which it is capable. 
 
 For the great majority of men and women 
 seriousness in sex relations is most likely to 
 be achieved through children. Children are to 
 most people rather a need than a desire: in- 
 stinct is as a rule only consciously directed to- 
 wards what used to lead to children. The desire 
 for children is apt to develop in middle life, 
 when the adventure of one's own existence is 
 past, when the friendships of youth seem less 
 important than they once did, when the prospect 
 of a lonely old age begins to terrify, and the
 
 210 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 feeling of having no share in the future becomes 
 oppressive. Then those who, while they were 
 young, have had no sense that children would 
 be a fulfilment of their needs, begin to regret 
 their former contempt for the normal, and to 
 envy acquaintances whom before they had 
 thought humdrum. But owing to economic 
 causes it is often impossible for the young, and 
 especially for the best of the young, to have 
 children without sacrificing things of vital im- 
 portance to their own lives. And so youth 
 passes, and the need is felt too late. 
 
 Needs without corresponding desires have 
 grown increasingly common as life has grown 
 more different from that primitive existence 
 from which our instincts are derived, and to 
 which, rather than to that of the present day, 
 they are still very largely adapted. An un- 
 satisfied need produces, in the end, as much 
 pain and as much distortion of character as if 
 it had been associated with a conscious desire. 
 For this reason, as well as for the sake of the 
 race, it is important to remove the present eco- 
 nomic inducements to childlessness. There is 
 no necessity whatever to urge parenthood upon 
 those who feel disinclined to it, but there is 
 
 /
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 211 
 
 necessity not to place obstacles in the way of 
 those who have no such disinclination. 
 
 In speaking of the importance of preserving 
 seriousness in the relations of men and women, 
 I do not mean to suggest that relations which 
 are not serious are always harmful. Tradi- 
 tional morality has erred by laying stress on 
 what ought not to happen, rather than on what 
 ought to happen. What is important is that 
 men and women should find, sooner or later, the 
 best relation of which their natures are capable. 
 It is not always possible to know in advance 
 what will be the best, or to be sure of not missing 
 the best if everything that can be doubted is re- 
 jected. Among primitive races, a man wants a 
 female, a woman wants a male, and there is no 
 such differentiation as makes one a much more 
 suitable companion than another. But with the 
 increasing complexity of disposition that civil- 
 ized life brings, it becomes more and more diffi- 
 cult to find the man or woman who will bring 
 happiness, and more and more necessary to 
 make it not too difficult to acknowledge a mis- 
 take. 
 
 The present marriage law is an inheritance 
 from a simpler age, and is supported, in the
 
 212 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 main, by unreasoning fears and by contempt 
 for all that is delicate and difficult in the life of 
 the mind. Owing to the law, large numbers of 
 men and women are condemned, so far as their 
 ostensible relations are concerned, to the so- 
 ciety of an utterly uncongenial companion, with 
 all the embittering consciousness that escape is 
 practically impossible. In these circumstances, 
 happier relations with others are often sought, 
 but they have to be clandestine, without a com- 
 mon life, and without children. Apart from the 
 great evil of being clandestine, such relations 
 have some almost inevitable drawbacks. They 
 are liable to emphasize sex unduly, to be excit- 
 ing and disturbing; and it is hardly possible that 
 they should bring a real satisfaction of instinct. 
 It is the combination of love, children, and a 
 common life that makes the best relation be- 
 tween a man and a woman. The law at present 
 confines children and a common life within the 
 bonds of monogamy, but it cannot confine love. 
 By forcing many to separate love from children 
 and a common life, the law cramps their J.ives, 
 prevents them from reaching the full measure 
 of their possible development, and inflicts a 
 wholly unnecessary torture upon those who are 
 not content to become frivolous.
 
 THE POPULATION QUESTION 213 
 
 To sum up : The present state of the law, of 
 public opinion, and of our economic system is 
 tending to degrade the quality of the race, by 
 making the worst half of the population the par- 
 ents of more than half of the next generation. 
 At the same time, women's claim to liberty is 
 making the old form of marriage a hindrance to 
 the development of both men and women. A 
 new system is required, if the European nations 
 are not to degenerate, and if the relations of 
 men and women are to have the strong happi- 
 ness and organic seriousness which belonged to 
 the best marriages in the past. The new sys- 
 tem must be based upon the fact that to produce 
 children is a service to the State, and ought not 
 to expose parents to heavy pecuniary penal- 
 ties. It will have to recognize that neither the 
 law nor public opinion should concern itself 
 with the private relations of men and women, 
 except where children are concerned. It ought 
 to remove the inducements to make relations 
 clandestine and childless. It ought to admit 
 that, although lifelong monogamy is best when 
 it is successful, the increasing complexity of our 
 needs makes it increasingly often a failure for 
 which divorce is the best preventive. Here, as 
 elsewhere, liberty is the basis of political wis-
 
 214 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 dom. And when liberty has been won, what re- 
 mains to be desired must be left to the con- 
 science and religion of individual men and 
 women.
 
 VII 
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 
 
 ALMOST all the changes which the world 
 has undergone since the end of the Middle 
 Ages are due to the discovery and diffusion of 
 new knowledge. This was the primary cause of 
 the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the in- 
 dustrial revolution. It was also, very directly, 
 the cause of the decay of dogmatic religion. 
 The study of classical texts and early Church 
 history, Copernican astronomy and physics. 
 Darwinian biology and comparative anthro- 
 pology, have each in turn battered down some 
 part of the edifice of Catholic dogma, until, for 
 almost all thinking and instructed people, the 
 most that seems defensible is some inner spirit, 
 some vague hope, and some not very definite 
 feeling of moral obligation. This result might 
 perhaps have remained limited to the educated 
 minority but for the fact that the Churches have 
 almost everywhere opposed political progress 
 with the same bitterness with which they have 
 
 216
 
 216 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 opposed progress in thought. Political con- 
 servatism has brought the Churches into conflict 
 with whatever was vigorous in the w^orking 
 classes, and has spread free thought in wide 
 circles which might otherwise have remained 
 orthodox for centuries. The decay of dogmatic 
 religion is, for good or evil, one of the most 
 important facts in the modern world. Its ef- 
 fects have hardly yet begun to show themselves : 
 what they will be it is impossible to say, but they 
 will certainly be profound and far-reaching. 
 
 Eeligion is partly personal, partly social: to 
 the Protestant primarily personal, to the Catho- 
 lic primarily social. It is only when the two 
 elements are intimately blended that religion 
 becomes a powerful force in molding society. 
 The Catholic Church, as it existed from the time 
 of Constantine to the time of the Reformation, 
 represented a blending which would have 
 seemed incredible if it had not been actually 
 achieved, the blending of Christ and Caesar, of 
 the morality of humble submission with the 
 pride of Imperial Rome. Those who loved the 
 one could find it in the Thebaid ; those who loved 
 the other could admire it in the pomp of metro- 
 politan archbishops. In St. Francis and Inno- 
 cent III the same two sides of the Church are
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 217 
 
 still represented. But since the Reformation 
 personal religion has been increasingly outside 
 the Catholic Church, while the religion which 
 has remained Catholic has been increasingly a 
 matter of institutions and politics and historic 
 continuity. This division has weakened the 
 force of religion : religious bodies have not been 
 strengthened by the enthusiasm and single- 
 mindedness of the men in whom personal re- 
 ligion is strong, and these men have not found 
 their teaching diffused and made permanent by 
 the power of ecclesiastical institutions. 
 
 The Catholic Church achieved, during the 
 Middle Ages, the most organic society and the 
 most harmonious inner synthesis of instinct, 
 mind, and spirit, that the Western world has 
 ever known. St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and 
 Dante represent its summit as regards indi- 
 vidual development. The cathedrals, the men- 
 dicant Orders, and the triumph of the Pa- 
 pacy over the Empire represent its supreme 
 political success. But the perfection which had 
 been achieved was a narrow perfection : instinct, 
 mind, and spirit all suffered from curtailment in 
 order to fit into the pattern ; laymen found them- 
 selves subject to the Church in ways which they 
 resented, and the Church used its power for
 
 218 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 rapacity and oppression. The perfect synthe- 
 sis was an enemy to new growth, and after the 
 time of Dante all that was living in the world 
 had first to fight for its right to live against the 
 representatives of the old order. This fight is 
 even now not ended. Only when it is quite 
 ended, both in the external world of politics and 
 in the internal world of men's own thoughts, 
 will it be possible for a new organic society and 
 a new inner synthesis to take the place which 
 the Church held for a thousand years. 
 
 The clerical profession suffers from two 
 causes, one of which it shares with some other 
 professions, while the other is peculiar to itself. 
 The cause peculiar to it is the convention that 
 clergymen are more virtuous than other men. 
 Any average selection of mankind, set apart and 
 told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend 
 to sink below the average. This is an ancient 
 commonplace in regard to princes and those who 
 used to be called "the great." But it is no less 
 true as regards those of the clergy who are not 
 genuinely and by nature as much better than the 
 average as they are conventionally supposed to 
 be. The other source of harm to the clerical 
 profession is endowments. Property which is 
 only available for those who will support an es-
 
 RELIGION AND THE CPIUKCHES 219 
 
 tablished institution has a tendency to warp 
 men's judgments as to the excellence of the in- 
 stitution. The tendency is aggravated when 
 the property is associated with social considera- 
 tion and opportunities for petty power. It is at 
 its worst when the institution is tied by law to 
 an ancient creed, almost impossible to change, 
 and yet quite out of touch with the unfettered 
 thought of the present day. All these causes 
 combine to damage the moral force of the 
 Church. 
 
 It is not so much that the creed of the Church 
 is the wrong one. What is amiss is the mere 
 existence of a creed. As soon as income, posi- 
 tion, and power are dependent upon acceptance 
 of no matter what creed, intellectual honesty is 
 imperiled. Men will tell themselves that a 
 formal assent is justified by the good which 
 it will enable them to do. They fail to real- 
 ize that, in those whose mental life has any 
 vigor, loss of complete intellectual integrity puts 
 an end to the power of doing good, by pro- 
 ducing gradually in all directions an inability to 
 see truth simply. The strictness of party disci- 
 pline has introduced the same evil in politics; 
 there, because the evil is comparatively new, it 
 is visible to many who think it unimportant as
 
 220 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 regards the Church. But the evil is greater as 
 regards the Church, because religion is of more 
 importance than politics, and because it is more 
 necessary that the exponents of religion should 
 be wholly free from taint. 
 
 The evils we have been considering seem in- 
 separable from the existence of a professional 
 priesthood. If religion is not to be harmful in a 
 world of rapid change, it must, like the Society 
 of Friends, be carried on by men who have other 
 occupations during the week, who do their re- 
 ligious work from enthusiasm, without receiving 
 any payment. And such men, because they 
 know the everyday world, are not likely to fall 
 into a remote morality which no one regards as 
 applicable to common life. Being free, they 
 will not be bound to reach certain conclusions 
 decided in advance, but will be able to consider 
 moral and religious questions genuinely, with- 
 out bias. Except in a quite stationary society, 
 no religious life can be living or a real support 
 to the spirit unless it is freed from the incubus 
 of a professional priesthood. 
 
 It is largely for these reasons that so little 
 of what is valuable in morals and religion comes 
 nowadays from the men who are eminent in the 
 religious world. It is true that among pro-
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHUECHES 221 
 
 fessed believers there are raany who are wholly 
 sincere, who feel still the inspiration which 
 Christianity brought before it had been weak- 
 ened by the progress of knowledge. These sin- 
 cere believers are valuable to the world because 
 they keep alive the conviction that the life of 
 the spirit is what is of most importance to men 
 and women. Some of them, in all the countries 
 now at war, have had the courage to preach 
 peace and love in the name of Christ, and have 
 done what lay in their power to mitigate the bit- 
 terness of hatred. All praise is due to these 
 men, and without them the world would be even 
 worse than it is. 
 
 But it is not through even the most sincere 
 and courageous believers in the traditional re- 
 ligion that a new spirit can come into the world. 
 It is not through them that religion can be 
 brought back to those who have lost it because 
 their minds were active, not because their spirit 
 was dead. Believers in the traditional religion 
 necessarily look to the past for inspiration 
 rather than to the future. They seek wisdom 
 in the teaching of Christ, which, admirable as it 
 is, remains quite inadequate for many of the 
 social and spiritual issues of modern life. Art 
 and intellect and all the problems of govern-
 
 222 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ment are ignored in the Gospels. Those who, 
 like Tolstoy, endeavor seriously to take the 
 Gospels as a guide to life are compelled to re- 
 gard the ignorant peasant as the best type of 
 man, and to brush aside political questions by an 
 extreme and impracticable anarchism. 
 
 If a religious view of life and the world is 
 ever to reconquer the thoughts and feelings of 
 free-minded men and women, much that we are 
 accustomed to associate with religion will have 
 to be discarded. The first and greatest change 
 that is required is to establish a morality of 
 initiative, not a morality of submission, a mor- 
 ality of hope rather than fear, of things to be 
 done rather than of things to be left un- 
 done. It is not the whole duty of man to 
 slip through the world so as to escape the 
 wrath of God. The world is our world, and it 
 rests with us to make it a heaven or a hell. The 
 power is ours, and the kingdom and the glory 
 would be ours also if we had courage and in- 
 sight to create them. The religious life that we 
 must seek will not be one of occasional solemnity 
 and superstitious prohibitions, it will not be sad 
 or ascetic, it will concern itself little with rules 
 of conduct. It will be inspired by a vision of 
 what human life may be, and will be happy with
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 223 
 
 the joy of creation, living in a large free world 
 of initiative and hope. It will love mankind, 
 not for what they are to the outward eye, but 
 for what imagination shows that they have it 
 in them to become. It will not readily con- 
 demn, but it will give praise to positive achieve- 
 ment rather than negative sinlessness, to the joy 
 of life, the quick affection, the creative insight, 
 by which the world may grow young and beauti- 
 ful and filled with vigor. 
 
 ** Religion" is a word which has many mean- 
 ings and a long history. In origin, it was con- 
 cerned with certain rites, inherited from a re- 
 mote past, performed originally for some reason 
 long since forgotten, and associated from time 
 to time with various myths to account for their 
 supposed importance. Much of this lingers 
 still. A religious man is one who goes to 
 church, a communicant, one who "practises," as 
 Catholics say. How he behaves otherwise, or 
 how he feels concerning life and man's place in 
 the world, does not bear upon the question 
 whether he is ''religious" in this simple but his- 
 torically correct sense. Many men and women 
 are religious in this sense without having in 
 their natures anything that deserves to be called 
 religion in the sense in which I mean the word.
 
 224 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 The mere familiarity of the Church service has 
 made them impervious to it; they are uiicon- 
 soious of all the history and human experience 
 by which the liturgy has been enriched, and 
 unmoved by the glibly repeated words of the 
 Gospel, which condemn almost all the activities 
 of those who fancy themselves disciples of 
 Christ. This fate must overtake any habitual 
 rite : it is impossible that it should continue to 
 produce much effect after it has been performed 
 so often as to grow mechanical. 
 
 The activities of men may be roughly derived 
 from three sources, not in actual fact sharply 
 separate one from another, but sufficiently dis- 
 tinguishable to deserve different names. The 
 three sources I mean are instinct, mind, and 
 spirit, and of these three it is the life of the 
 spirit that makes religion. 
 
 The life of instinct includes all that man 
 shares with the lower animals, all that is con- 
 cerned with self-preservation and reproduction 
 and the desires and impulses derivative from 
 these. It includes vanity and love of posses- 
 sions, love of family, and even much of what 
 makes love of country. It includes all the im- 
 pulses that are essentially concerned witli the 
 biological success of oneself or one's group —
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHUECHES 225 
 
 for among gTegarious animals the life of in- 
 stinct includes the group. The impulses which 
 it includes may not in fact make for success, 
 and may often in fact militate against it, but 
 are nevertheless those of which success is the 
 raison d'etre, those which express the animal 
 nature of man and his position among a world 
 of competitors. 
 
 . The life of the mind is the life of pursuit of 
 knowledge, from mere childish curiosity up to 
 the greatest efforts of thought. Curiosity ex- 
 ists in animals, and serves an obvious biolog- 
 ical purpose ; but it is only in men that it passes 
 beyond the investigation of particular objects 
 which may be edible or poisonous, friendly or 
 hostile. Curiosity is the primary impulse out 
 of which the whole edifice of scientific knowl- 
 edge has grown. Knowledge has been found 
 so useful that most actual acquisition of it is 
 no longer prompted by curiosity; innumerable 
 other motives now contribute to foster the in- 
 tellectual life. Nevertheless, direct love of 
 knowledge and dislike of error still play a very 
 large part, especially with those who are most 
 successful in learning. No man acquires much 
 knowledge unless the acquisition is in itself de- 
 lightful to him, apart from any consciousness
 
 226 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 of the use to which the knowledge may be put. 
 The impulse to acquire knowledge and the activ- 
 ities which center round it constitute what I 
 mean by the life of the mind. The life of the 
 mind consists of thought w^hich is wholly or par- 
 tially impersonal, in the sense that it concerns 
 itself with objects on their own account, and 
 not merely on account of their bearing upon 
 our instinctive life. 
 
 The life of the spirit centers round imper- 
 sonal feeling, as the life of the mind centers 
 round impersonal thought. In this sense, all 
 ar,t belongs to the life of the spirit, though its 
 greatness i's'derited ffom its ^^iiig also inti- 
 mately bound up with the life of instinct. Art 
 starts from instinct and rises into the region 
 of the spirit; religion starts from the spirit 
 and endeavors to dominate and inform the life 
 of instinct. It is possible to feel the same in- 
 terest in the joys and sorrows of others as in 
 our own, to love and hate independently of all 
 relation to ourselves, to care about the destiny 
 of man and the development of the universe 
 without a thought that we are personally in- 
 volved. Eeverence and worship, the sense of 
 an obligation to mankind, the feeling of im- 
 perativeness and acting under orders which tra-
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 227 
 
 ditional religion has interpreted as Divine in- 
 spiration, all belong to the life of the spirit. 
 And deeper than all these lies the sense of a 
 mystery half revealed, of a hidden wisdom and 
 glory, of a transfiguring vision in which com- 
 mon things lose their solid importance and be- 
 come a thin veil behind which the ultimate truth 
 of the world is dimly seen. It is such feelings 
 that are the source of religion, and if they were 
 to die most of what is best would vanish out 
 of life. 
 
 Instinct, mind, and spirit are all essential to 
 a full life; each has its own excellence and its 
 own corruption. Each can attain a spurious 
 excellence at the expense of the others; each 
 has a tendency to encroach upon the others; 
 but in the life which is to be sought all three 
 will be developed in coordination, and inti- 
 mately blended in a single harmonious whole. 
 Among uncivilized men instinct is supreme, and 
 mind and spirit hardly exist. Among educated 
 men at the present day mind is developed, as 
 a rule, at the expense of both instinct and spirit, 
 producing a curious inhumanity and lifeless- 
 ness, a paucity of both personal and imper- 
 sonal desires, which leads to cynicism and in- 
 tellectual destructiveness. Among ascetics and
 
 228 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 most of those who would be call saints, the life 
 of the spirit has been developed at the expense 
 of instinct and mind, producing an outlook 
 which is impossible to those who have a healthy 
 animal life and to those who have a love of ac- 
 tive thought. It is not in any of these one- 
 sided developments that we can find wisdom or 
 a philosophy which will bring new life to the 
 civilized world. 
 
 Among civilized men and w^omen at the pres- 
 ent day it is rare to find instinct, mind, and 
 spirit in harmony. Very few have achieved a 
 practical philosophy which gives its due place 
 to each ; as a rule, instinct is at war with either 
 mind or spirit, and mind and spirit are at war 
 with each other. This strife compels men and 
 women to direct much of their energy inwards, 
 instead of being able to expend it all in objec- 
 tive activities. When a man achieves a pre- 
 carious inward peace by the defeat of a part of 
 his nature, his vital force is impaired, and his 
 growth is no longer quite healthy. If men are 
 to remain whole, it is very necessary that they 
 should achieve a reconciliation of instinct, 
 mind, and spirit. 
 
 Instinct is the source of vitality, the oond 
 that unites the life of the individual with the
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 229 
 
 life of the race, the basis of all profound sense 
 of union with others, and the means by which 
 the collective life nourishes the life of the sepa- 
 rate units. But instinct by itself leaves us 
 powerless to control the forces of Nature, either 
 in ourselves or in our physical environment, 
 and keeps us in bondage to the same unthink- 
 ing impulse by which the trees grow. Mind can 
 liberate us from this bondage, by the power of 
 impersonal thought, which enables us to judge 
 critically the purely biological purposes towards 
 which instinct more or less blindly tends. But 
 mind, in its dealings with instinct, is merely 
 critical: so far as instinct is concerned, the un- 
 checked activity of the mind is apt to be de- 
 structive and to generate cynicism. Spirit is an 
 antidote to the cynicism of mind: it universal- 
 izes the emotions that spring from instinct, and 
 by universalizing them makes them impervious 
 to mental criticism. And when thought is in- 
 formed by spirit it loses its cruel, destructive 
 quality; it no longer promotes tlie death of in- 
 stinct, but only its purification from insistence 
 and ruthlessness and its emancipation from the 
 prison walls of accidental circumstance. It is 
 instinct that gives force, mind that gives the 
 means of directing force to desired ends, and
 
 230 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 spirit that suggests impersonal uses for force 
 of a kind that thought cannot discredit by criti- 
 cism. This is an outUne of the parts that in- 
 stinct, mind, and spirit would play in a harmoni- 
 ous life. 
 
 Instinct, mind, and spirit are each a help to 
 the others when their development is free and 
 unvitiated ; but when corruption comes into any 
 one of the three, not only does that one fail, but 
 the others also become poisoned. All three 
 must grow together. And if they are to grow 
 to their full stature in any one man or woman, 
 that man or woman must not be isolated, but 
 must be one of a society where growth is not 
 thwarted and made crooked. 
 
 The life of instinct, when it is unchecked by 
 mind or spirit, consists of instinctive cycles, 
 which begin with impulses to more or less defi- 
 nite acts, and pass on to satisfaction of needs 
 through the consequences of these impulsive 
 acts. Impulse and desire are not directed 
 towards the whole cycle, but only towards its 
 initiation: the rest is left to natural causes. 
 We desire to eat, but we do not desire to be 
 nourished unless we are valetudinarians. Yet 
 without the nourishment eating is a mere mo- 
 mentary pleasure, not part of the general im-
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 231 
 
 pulse to life. Men desire sexual intercourse, 
 but they do not as a rule desire children 
 strongly or often. Yet without the hope of 
 children and its occasional realization, sexual 
 intercourse remains for most people an isolated 
 and separate pleasure, not uniting their per- 
 sonal life with the life of mankind, not continu- 
 ous with the central purposes by which they 
 live, and not capable of bringing that profound 
 sense of fulfilment which comes from comple- 
 tion by children. Most men, unless the impulse 
 is atrophied through disuse, feel a desire to cre- 
 ate something, great or small according to their 
 capacities. Some few are able to satisfy this 
 desire : some happy men can create an Empire, 
 a science, a poem, or a picture. The men of sci- 
 ence, who have less difficulty than any others 
 in finding an outlet for creativeness, are the 
 happiest of intelligent men in the modern 
 world, since their creative activity affords full 
 satisfaction to mind and spirit as well as to the 
 instinct of creation.^ In them a beginning is 
 to be seen of the new way of life which is to be 
 sought ; in their happiness we may perhaps find 
 
 1 1 should add artists but for the fact that most modern 
 artists seem to find much greater difficulty in creation than 
 men of science usually find.
 
 232 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the germ of a future happiness for all man- 
 kind. The rest, with few exceptions, are 
 thwarted in their creative impulses. They can- 
 not build their own house or make their own 
 garden, or direct their own labor to producing 
 what their free choice would lead them to pro- 
 duce. In this way the instinct of creation, 
 which should lead on to the life of mind and 
 spirit, is checked and turned aside. Too often 
 it is turned to destruction, as the only effective 
 action which remains possible. Out of its de- 
 feat grows envy, and out of env}^ grows the im- 
 pulse to destroy the creativeness of more for- 
 tunate men. This is one of the greatest sources 
 of corruption in the life of instinct. 
 
 The life of instinct is important, not only on 
 its own account, or because of the direct use- 
 fulness of the actions w^hich it inspires, but also 
 because, if it is unsatisfactory, the individual 
 life becomes detached and separated from the 
 general life of man. All really profound sense 
 of unity with others depends upon instinct, upon 
 cooperation or agreement in some instinctive 
 purpose. This is most obvious in the relations 
 of men and women and parents and children. 
 But it is true also in wider relations. It is true 
 of large assemblies swayed by a strong common
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHUECHES 233 
 
 emotion, and even of a whole nation in times of 
 stress. It is part of what makes the value of 
 religion as a social institution. Where this 
 feeling is wholly absent, other human beings 
 seem distant and aloof. Where it is actively 
 thwarted, other human beings become objects 
 of instinctive hostility. The aloofness or the 
 instinctive hostility may be masked by religious 
 love, which can be given to all men regardless 
 of their relation to ourselves. But religious 
 love does not bridge the gulf that parts man 
 from man: it looks across the gulf, it views 
 others with compassion or impersonal sympa- 
 thy, but it does not live with the same life with 
 which they live. Instinct alone can do this, but 
 only when it is fruitful and sane and direct. To 
 this end it is necessary that instinctive cycles 
 should be fairly often completed, not inter- 
 rupted in the middle of their course. At pres- 
 ent they are constantly interrupted, partly by 
 purposes which conflict with them for economic 
 or other reasons, partly by the pursuit of pleas- 
 ure, which picks out the most agreeable part of 
 the cycle and avoids the rest. In this way in- 
 stinct is robbed of its importance and serious- 
 ness; it becomes incapable of bringing any real 
 fulfilment, its demands grow more and more
 
 234 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 excessive, and life becomes no longer a whole 
 with a single movement, but a series of detached 
 moments, some of them pleasurable, most of 
 them full of weariness and discouragement. 
 
 The life of the mind, although supremely ex- 
 cellent in itself, cannot bring health into the 
 life of instinct, except when it results in a not 
 too difficult outlet for the instinct of creation. 
 In other cases it is, as a rule, too widely sepa- 
 rated from instinct, too detached, too destitute 
 of inward growth, to afford either a vehicle for 
 instinct or a means of subtilizing and refining 
 it. Thought is in its essence impersonal and 
 detached, instinct is in its essence personal and 
 tied to particular circumstances: between the 
 two, unless both reach a high level, there is a 
 war which is not easily appeased. This is the 
 fundamental reason for vitalism, futurism, 
 pragmatism, and the various other philosophies 
 which advertise themselves as vigorous and 
 virile. All these represent the attempt to find 
 a mode of thought which shall not be hostile to 
 instinct. The attempt, in itself, is deserving of 
 praise, but the solution offered is far too facile. 
 What is proposed amounts to a subordination of 
 thought to instinct, a refusal to allow thought 
 to achieve its own ideal. Thought which does
 
 BELIGION AND THE CHUECHES 235 
 
 not rise above what is personal is not thought 
 in any true sense: it is merely a more or less 
 intelligent use of instinct. It is thought and 
 spirit that raise man above the level of the 
 brutes. By discarding them we may lose the 
 proper excellence of men, but cannot acquire 
 the excellence of animals. Thought must 
 achieve its full growth before a reconciliation 
 with instinct is attempted. 
 
 When refined thought and unrefined instinct 
 coexist, as they do in many intellectual men, 
 the result is a complete disbelief in any impor- 
 tant good to be achieved by the help of instinct. 
 According to their disposition, some such men 
 will as far as possible discard instinct and be- 
 come ascetic, while others will accept it as a ne- 
 cessity, leaving it degraded and separated from 
 all that is really important in their lives. 
 Either of these courses prevents instinct from 
 remaining vital, or from being a bond with oth- 
 ers; either produces a sense of physical soli- 
 tude, a gulf across which the minds and spirits 
 of others may speak, but not their instincts. 
 To very many men, the instinct of patriotism, 
 when the war broke out, was the first instinct 
 that had bridged the gulf, the first that had made 
 them feel a really profound unity with others.
 
 236 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 This instinct, just because, in its intense form, 
 it was new and unfamiliar, had remained unin- 
 fected by thought, not paralyzed or devitalized 
 by doubt and cold detachment. The sense of 
 unity which it brought is capable of being 
 brought by the instinctive life of more normal 
 times, if thought and spirit are not hostile to 
 it. And so long as this sense of unity is ab- 
 sent, instinct and spirit cannot be in harmony, 
 nor can the life of the community have vigor 
 and the seeds of new growth. 
 
 The life of the mind, because of its detach- 
 ment, tends to separate a man inwardly from 
 other men, so long as it is not balanced by the 
 life of the spirit. For this reason, mind with- 
 out spirit can render instinct corrupt or atro- 
 phied, but cannot add any excellence to the life 
 of instinct. On this ground, some men are hos- 
 tile to thought. But no good purpose is served 
 by trying to prevent the growth of thought, 
 which has its own insistence, and if checked in 
 the directions in which it tends naturally, will 
 turn into other directions where it is more harm- 
 ful. And thought is in itself god-like: if the 
 opposition between thought and instinct were 
 irreconcilable, it would be thought that ought 
 to conquer. But the opposition is not irrecou-
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 237 
 
 ciliable: all that is necessary is that both 
 thought and instinct should be informed by the 
 life of the spirit. 
 
 In order that human life should have vigor, 
 it is necessary for the instinctive impulses to 
 be strong and direct; but in order that human 
 life should be good, these impulses must be dom- 
 inated and controlled by desires less personal 
 and ruthless, less liable to lead to conflict than 
 those that are inspired by instinct alone. Some- 
 thing impersonal and universal is needed over 
 and above what springs out of the principle of 
 individual growth. It is this that is given by 
 the life of the spirit. 
 
 Patriotism affords an example of the kind of 
 control which is needed. Patriotism is com- 
 pounded out of a number of instinctive feelings 
 and impulses : love of home, love of those whose 
 ways and outlook resemble our own, the impulse 
 to cooperation in a group, the sense of pride in 
 the achievements of one's group. All these im- 
 pulses and desires, like everything belonging to 
 the life of instinct, are personal, in the sense 
 that the feelings and actions which they inspire 
 towards others are determined by the relation 
 of those others to ourselves, not by what those 
 others are intrinsically. All these impulses
 
 238 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 and desires unite to produce a love of man's 
 own country which is more deeply implanted in 
 the fiber of his being, and more closely united 
 to his vital force, than any love not rooted in 
 instinct. But if spirit does not enter in to gen- 
 eralize love of country, the exclusiveness of in- 
 stinctive love makes it a source of hatred of 
 other countries. What spirit can effect is to 
 make us realize that other countries equally are 
 worthy of love, that the vital warmth which 
 makes us love our own country reveals to us 
 that it deserves to be loved, and that only the 
 poverty of our nature prevents us from loving 
 all countries as we love our own. In this way 
 instinctive love can be extended in imagination, 
 and a sense of the value of all mankind can grow 
 up, which is more living and intense than any 
 that is possible to those whose instinctive love 
 is weak. Mind can only show us that it is ir- 
 rational to love our own country best; it can 
 weaken patriotism, but cannot strengthen the 
 love of all mankind. Spirit alone can do this, 
 by extending and universalizing the love that is 
 born of instinct. And in doing this it checks 
 and purifies whatever is insistent or ruthless 
 or oppressively personal in the life of instinct. 
 The same extension through spirit is neces-
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 239 
 
 sary with other instinctive loves, if they are not 
 to be enfeebled or corrupted by thought. The 
 love of husband and wife is capable of being a 
 very good thing, and when men and women are 
 sufficiently primitive nothing but instinct and 
 good fortune is needed to make it reach a cer- 
 tain limited perfection. But as thought begins 
 to assert its right to criticize instinct the old 
 simplicity becomes impossible. The love of 
 husband and wife, as unchecked instinct leaves 
 it, is too narrow and personal to stand against 
 the shafts of satire, until it is enriched by the 
 life of the spirit. The romantic view of mar- 
 riage, which our fathers and mothers professed 
 to believe, will not survive an imaginative pere- 
 grination down a street of suburban villas, each 
 containing its couple, each couple having con- 
 gratulated themselves as they first crossed the 
 threshold, that here they could love in peace, 
 without interruption from others, without con- 
 tact with the cold outside world. The separate- 
 ness and stuffiness, the fine names for coward- 
 ices and timid vanities, that are shut within the 
 four walls of thousands upon thousands of lit- 
 tle villas, present themselves coldly and merci- 
 lessly to those in whom mind is dominant at 
 the expense of spirit.
 
 240 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Nothing is good in the life of a human being 
 except the very best that his nature can achieve. 
 As men advance, things which have been good 
 cease to be good, merely because something bet- 
 ter is possible. So it is with the life of instinct : 
 for those whose mental life is strong, much that 
 was really good while mind remained less de- 
 veloped has now become bad merely through 
 the greater degree of truth in their outlook on 
 the world. The instinctive man in love feels 
 that his emotion is unique, that the lady of his 
 heart has perfections such as no other woman 
 ever equaled. The man who has acquired the 
 power of impersonal thought realizes, when he 
 is in love, that he is one of so many millions 
 of men who are in love at this moment, that not 
 more than one of all the millions can be right 
 in thinking his love supreme, and that it is not 
 likely that that one is oneself. He perceives 
 that the state of being in love in those whose in- 
 stinct is unaffected by thought or spirit, is a 
 state of illusion, serving the ends of Nature and 
 making a man a slave to the life of the species, 
 not a willing minister to the impersonal ends 
 which he sees to be good. Thought rejects this 
 slavery; for no end that Nature may have in 
 view will thought abdicate, or forgo its right
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 241 
 
 to think truly. ''Better the world should per- 
 ish than that I or any other human being should 
 believe a lie" — this is the religion of thought, 
 in whose scorching flames the dross. of the world 
 is being burnt away. It is a good religion, and 
 its work of destruction must be completed. But 
 it is not all that man has need of. New growth 
 must come after the destruction, and new 
 growth can come only through the spirit. 
 
 Both patriotism and the love of man and 
 woman, when they are merely instinctive,, have 
 the same defects : their exclusions, their enclos- 
 ing walls, their indifference or hostility to the 
 outside world. It is through this that thought 
 is led to satire, that comedy has infected what 
 men used to consider their holiest feelings. The 
 satire and the comedy are justified, but not the 
 death of instinct which they may produce if 
 they remain in supreme command. They are 
 justified, not as the last word of wisdom but as 
 the gateway of pain through which men pass 
 to a new life, where instinct is purified and yet 
 nourished by the deeper desires and insight of 
 spirit. 
 
 The man who has the life of the spirit within 
 him views the love of man and woman, both 
 in himself and in others, quite differently from
 
 242 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 the man wlio is exclusively dominated by mind. 
 He sees, in his moments of insight, that in all 
 human beings there is something deserving of 
 love, something mysterious, something appeal- 
 ing, a cry out of the night, a groping journey, 
 and a possible victory. When his instinct loves, 
 he welcomes its help in seeing and feeling the 
 value of the human being whom he loves. In- 
 stinct becomes a reinforcement to spiritual in- 
 sight. What instinct tells him spiritual insight 
 confirms, however much the mind may be aware 
 of littlenesses, limitations, and enclosing walls 
 that prevent the spirit from shining forth. His 
 spirit divines in all men what his instinct shows 
 him in the object of his love. 
 
 The love of parents for children has need of 
 the same transformation. The purely instinc- 
 tive love, unchecked by thought, uninformed by 
 spirit, is exclusive, ruthless, and unjust. No 
 benefit to others is felt, by the purely instinc- 
 tive parent, to be worth an injury to one's own 
 children. Honor and conventional morality 
 place certain important practical limitations on 
 the vicarious selfishness of parents, since a civ- 
 ilized community exacts a certain minimum be- 
 fore it will give respect. But within the limits 
 allowed by public opinion, parental affection,
 
 EELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 243 
 
 when it is merely instinctive, will seek the ad- 
 vantage of children without regard to others. 
 Mind can weaken the impulse to injustice, and 
 diminish the force of instinctive love, but it can- 
 not keep the whole force of instinctive love and 
 turn it to more universal ends. Spirit can do 
 this. It can leave the instinctive love of chil- 
 dren undimmed, and extend the poignant devo- 
 tion of a parent, in imagination, to the whole 
 world. And parental love itself will prompt 
 the parent who has the life of the spirit to give 
 to his children the sense of justice, the readiness 
 for service, the reverence, the will that controls 
 self-seeking, which he feels to be a greater good 
 than any personal success. 
 
 The life of the spirit has suffered in recent 
 times by its association with traditional reli- 
 gion, by its apparent hostility to the life of the 
 mind, and by the fact that it has seemed to cen- 
 ter in renunciation. The life of the spirit de- 
 mands readiness for renunciation when the oc- 
 casion arises, but is in its essence as positive 
 and as capable of enriching individual existence 
 as mind and instinct are. It brings with it the 
 joy of vision, of the mystery and profundity of 
 the world, of the contemplation of life, and 
 above all the joy of universal love. It liberates
 
 244 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 those who have it from the prison-house of in- 
 sistent personal passion and mundane cares. 
 It gives freedom and breadth and beauty to 
 men's thoughts and feelings, and to all their 
 relations with others. It brings the solution of 
 doubts, the end of the feeling that all is vanity. 
 It restores harmony between mind and in- 
 stinct, and leads the separated unit back into 
 his place in the life of mankind. For those who 
 have once entered the world of thought, it is 
 only through spirit that happiness and peace 
 can return.
 
 vin 
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 
 
 WHAT can we do for the world while we 
 live? 
 
 Many men and women would wish to serve 
 mankind, but they are perplexed and their 
 power seems infinitesimal. Despair seizes 
 them ; those who have the strongest passion suf- 
 fer most from the sense of impotence, and are 
 most liable to spiritual ruin through lack of 
 hope. 
 
 So long as we think only of the immediate 
 future, it seems that what we can do is not much. 
 It is probably impossible for us to bring the war 
 to an end. We cannot destroy the excessive 
 power of the State or of private property. We 
 cannot, here and now, bring new life into edu- 
 cation. In such matters, though we may see 
 the evil, we cannot quickly cure it by any of the 
 ordinary methods of politics. We must recog- 
 nize that the world is ruled in a wrong spirit, 
 and that a change of spirit will not come from 
 
 245
 
 246 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 oue day to the next. Our expectations must 
 not be for to-morrow, but for the time when 
 what is thought now by a few shall have become 
 the common thought of many. If we have cour- 
 age and patience, we can think the thoughts and 
 feel the hopes by which, sooner or later, men 
 will be inspired, and weariness and discourage- 
 ment will be turned into energy and ardor. For 
 this reason, the first thing we have to do is to 
 be clear in our own minds as to the kind of life 
 we think good and the kind of change that we 
 desire in the world. 
 
 The ultimate power of those whose thought 
 is vital is far greater than it seems to men who 
 suffer from the irrationality of contemporary 
 politics. Eeligious toleration was once the soli- 
 tary speculation of a few bold philosophers. 
 Democracy, as a theory, arose among a hand- 
 ful of men in Cromwell's army; by them, after 
 the Eestoration, it was carried to America, 
 where it came to fruition in the War of Inde- 
 pendence. From America, Lafayette and the 
 other Frenchmen who fought by the side of 
 Washington brought the theory of democracy 
 to France, where it united itself with the teach- 
 ing of Rousseau and inspired the Revolution. 
 Socialism, whatever we may think of its merits,
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 247 
 
 is a gTeat and growing power, which is trans- 
 forming economic and political life; and social- 
 ism owes its origin to a very small number of 
 isolated theorists. The movement against the 
 subjection of women, which has become irresist- 
 ible and is not far from complete triumph, be- 
 gan in the same way with a few impracticable 
 idealists — Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, John 
 Stuart Mill. The power of thought, in the long 
 run, is greater than any other human power. 
 Those who have the ability to think and the 
 imagination to think in accordance with men's 
 needs, are likely to achieve the good they aim 
 at sooner or later, though probably not while 
 they are still alive. 
 
 But those who wish to gain the world by 
 thought must be content to lose it as a support 
 in the present. Most men go through life with- 
 out much questioning, accepting the beliefs and 
 practices which they find current, feeling that 
 the world will be their ally if they do not put 
 themselves in opposition to it. New thought 
 about the world is incompatible with this com- 
 fortable acquiescence; it requires a certain in- 
 tellectual detachment, a certain solitary energy, 
 a power of inwardly dominating the world and 
 the outlook that the world engenders. Without
 
 248 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 some willingness to be lonely new thought can- 
 not be achieved. And it will not be achieved to 
 any purpose if the lonelijiess is accompanied by 
 aloofness, so that the wish for union with others 
 dies, or if intellectual detachment leads to con- 
 tempt. It is because the state of mind required 
 is subtle and difficult, because it is hard to be 
 intellectually detached yet not aloof, that fruit- 
 ful thought on human affairs is not common, and 
 that most theorists are either conventional or 
 sterile. The right kind of thought is rare and 
 difficult, but it is not impotent. It is not the 
 fear of impotence that need turn us aside from 
 thought if we have the wish to bring new hope 
 into the world. 
 
 In seeking a political theory which is to be 
 useful at any given moment, what is wanted is 
 not the invention of a Utopia, but the discovery 
 of the best direction of movement. The direc- 
 tion which is good at one time may be super- 
 ficially very different from that which is good 
 at another time. Useful thought is that which 
 indicates the right direction for the present 
 time. But in judging what is the right direc- 
 tion there are two general principles which are 
 always applicable. 
 
 1. The growth and vitality of individuals and
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 249 
 
 communities is to be promoted as far as pos- 
 sible. 
 
 2. The growth of one individual or one com- 
 munity is to be as little as possible at the ex- 
 pense of another. 
 
 The second of these principles, as applied by 
 an individual in his dealings with others, is the 
 principle of reverence, that the life of another 
 has the same importance which we feel in our 
 own life. As applied impersonally in politics, 
 it is the principle of liberty, or rather it includes 
 the principle of liberty as a part. Liberty in 
 itself is a negative principle; it tells us not to 
 interfere, but does not give any basis for con- 
 struction. It shows that many political and so- 
 cial institutions are bad and ought to be swept 
 away, but it does not show what ought to be put 
 in their place. For this reason a further prin- 
 ciple is required, if our political theory is not 
 to be purely destructive. 
 
 The combination of our two principles is not 
 in practice an easy matter. Much of the vital 
 energy of the world runs into channels which 
 are oppressive. The Germans have shown 
 themselves extraordinarily full of vital energy, 
 but unfortunately in a form which seems incom- 
 patible with the vitality of their neighbors.
 
 250 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 Europe in general has more vital energy than 
 Africa, but it has used its energy to drain 
 Africa, through industrialism, of even such life 
 as the negroes possessed. The vitality of 
 southeastern Europe is being drained to supply 
 cheap labor for the enterprise of American mil- 
 lionaires. The vitality of men has been in the 
 past a hindrance to the development of women, 
 and it is possible that in the near future women 
 may become a similar hindrance to men. For 
 such reasons the principle of reverence, though 
 not in itself sufficient, is of very great impor- 
 tance, and is able to indicate many of the po- 
 litical changes that the world requires. 
 
 In order that both principles may be capable 
 of being satisfied, what is needed is a unifying 
 or integration, first of our individual lives, then 
 of the life of the community and of the world, 
 without sacrifice of individuality. The life of 
 an individual, the life of a community, and even 
 the life of mankind, ought to be, not a number 
 of separate fragments but in some sense a 
 whole. When this is the case, the growth of 
 the individual is fostered, and is not incompat- 
 ible with the growth of other individuals. In 
 this way the two principles are brought into 
 harmony.
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 251 
 
 What integrates an individual life is a con- 
 sistent creative purpose or unconscious direc- 
 tion. Instinct alone will not suffice to give unity 
 to the life of a civilized man or woman: there 
 must be some dominant object, an ambition, a 
 desire for scientific or artistic creation, a reli- 
 gious principle, or strong and lasting affections. 
 Unity of life is very difficult for a man or 
 woman who has suffered a certain kind of de- 
 feat, the kind by which what should have been 
 the dominant impulse is checked and made abor- 
 tive. Most professions inflict this kind of de- 
 feat upon a man at the very outset. If a man 
 becomes a journalist, he probably has to write 
 for a newspaper whose politics he dislikes ; this 
 kills his pride in work and his sense of inde- 
 pendence. Most medical men find it very hard 
 to succeed without humbug, by which whatever 
 scientific conscience they may have had is de- 
 stroyed. Politicians are obliged, not only to 
 swallow the party program but to pretend 
 to be saints, in order to conciliate religious sup- 
 porters ; hardly any man can enter Parliament 
 without hypocrisy. In no profession is there 
 any respect for the native pride without which 
 a man cannot remain whole; the world ruth- 
 lessly crushes it out, because it implies inde-
 
 252 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 pendence, and men desire to enslave others 
 more than they desire to be free themselves. 
 Inward freedom is infinitely precious, and a so- 
 ciety which will preserve it is immeasurably to 
 be desired. 
 
 The principle of growth in a man is not 
 crushed necessarily by preventing him from 
 doing some definite thing, but it is often crushed 
 by persuading him to do something else. The 
 things that crush growth are those that produce 
 a sense of impotence in the directions in which 
 the vital impulse wishes to be effective. The 
 worst things are those to which the will assents. 
 Often, chiefly from failure of self-knowledge, 
 a man's will is on a lower level than his im- 
 pulse : his impulse is towards some kind of cre- 
 ation, while his will is towards a conventional 
 career, with a sufficient income and the respect 
 of his contemporaries. The stereotyped illus- 
 tration is the artist who produces shoddy work 
 to please the public. But something of the ar- 
 tist's definiteness of impulse exists in very 
 many men who are not artists. Because the 
 impulse is deep and dumb, because what is 
 called common sense is often against it, because 
 a young man can only follow it if he is willing 
 to set up his own obscure feelings against the
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 253 
 
 wisdom and prudent maxims of elders and 
 friends, it hapjDens in ninety-nine cases out of 
 a hundred that the creative impulse, out of 
 which a free and vigorous life might have 
 sprung, is checked and thwarted at the very- 
 outset: the young man consents to become a 
 tool, not an independent workman; a mere 
 means to the fulfilment of others, not the arti- 
 ficer of what his own nature feels to be good. 
 In the moment when he makes this act of con- 
 sent something dies within him. He can never 
 again become a whole man, never again have 
 the undamaged self-respect, the upright pride, 
 which might have kept him happy in his soul in 
 spite of all outward troubles and difficulties — 
 except, indeed, through conversion and a funda- 
 mental change in his way of life. 
 
 Outward prohibitions, to which the will gives 
 no assent, are far less harmful than the subtler 
 inducements which seduce the will. A serious 
 disappointment in love may cause the most 
 poignant pain, but to a vigorous man it will not 
 do the same inward damage as is done by mar- 
 rying for money. The achievement of this or 
 that special desire is not what is essential : what 
 is essential is the direction, the kind of effec- 
 tiveness which is sought. When the fundamen-
 
 254 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 tal impulse is opposed by will, it is made to feel 
 helpless : it Las no longer enough hope to be 
 powerful as a motive. Outward compulsion 
 does not do the same damage unless it produces 
 the same sense of impotence; and it will not 
 produce the same sense of impotence if the im- 
 pulse is strong and courageous. Some thwart- 
 ing of special desires in unavoidable even in 
 the best imaginable community, since some 
 men's desires, unchecked, lead to the oppres- 
 sion or destruction of others. In a good com- 
 munity Napoleon could not have been allowed 
 the profession of his choice, but he might have 
 found happiness as a pioneer in Western Amer- 
 ica. He could not have found happiness as a 
 City clerk, and no tolerable organization of so- 
 ciety would compel him to become a City clerk. 
 The integration of an individual life requires 
 that it should embody whatever creative impulse 
 a man may possess, and that his education 
 should have been such as to elicit and fortify 
 this impulse. The integration of a community 
 requires that the different creative impulses of 
 different men and women should work together 
 towards some common life, some common pur- 
 pose, not necessarily conscious, in which all the 
 members of the community find a help to their
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 255 
 
 individual fulfilment. Most of the activities 
 that spring from vital impulses consist of two 
 parts: one creative, which furthers one's own 
 life and that of others with the same kind of 
 impulse or circumstances, and one possessive, 
 which hinders the life of some group with a dif- 
 ferent kind of impulse or circumstances. For 
 this reason, much of what is in itself most vital 
 may nevertheless work against life, as, for ex- 
 ample, seventeenth-century Puritanism did in 
 England, or as nationalism does throughout 
 Europe at the present day. Vitality easily 
 leads to strife or oppression, and so to loss of 
 vitality. War, at its outset, integrates the life 
 of a nation, but it disintegrates the life of the 
 world, and in the long run the life of a nation 
 too, when it is as severe as the present war. 
 
 The war has, made it clear that it is impos- 
 sible to produce a secure^kitegration of the life 
 of a single community wnile the relations be- 
 tween civilized countries are governed by ag- 
 gressiveness and suspicion. For this reason 
 any really powerful movement of reform will 
 have to be international. A merely national 
 movement is sure to fail through fear of dan- 
 ger from without. Those who desire a better 
 world, or even a radical improvement in their
 
 256 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 own country, will have to cooperate with those 
 who have similar desires in other countries, and 
 to devote much of their energy to overcoming 
 that blind hostility which the war has intensi- 
 fied. It is not in partial integrations, such as 
 patriotism alone can produce, that any ultimate 
 hope is to be found. The problem is, in na- 
 tional and international questions as in the in- 
 dividual life, to keep what is creative in vital 
 impulses, and at the same time to turn into 
 other channels the part which is at present de- 
 structive. 
 
 Men's impulses and desires may be divided 
 into those that are creative and those that are 
 possessive. Some of our activities are directed 
 to creating what would not otherwise exist, oth- 
 ers are directed towards acquiring or retaining 
 what exists already. The tj^ical creative im- 
 pulse is that of the artist; the tj^pical posses- 
 sive impulse is that of property. The best life 
 is that in which creative impulses play the larg- 
 est part and possessive impulses the smallest. 
 The best institutions are those which produce 
 the greatest possible creativeness and the least 
 possessiveness compatible with self-preserva- 
 tion. Possessiveness may be defensive or ag- 
 gressive : in the criminal law it is defensive, and
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 257 
 
 in criminals it is aggressive. It may perhaps 
 be admitted that the criminal law is less abom- 
 inable than the criminal, and that defensive pos- 
 sessiveness is unavoidable so long as aggressive 
 possessiveness exists. But not even the most 
 purely defensive forms of possessiveness are 
 in themselves admirable; indeed, as soon as 
 they are strong they become hostile to the crea- 
 tive impulses. "Take no thought, saying. 
 What shall we eat? or What shall we drink, or 
 Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" Whoever 
 has known a strong creative impulse has known 
 the value of this precept in its exact and literal 
 sense: it is preoccupation with possessions, 
 more than anything else, that prevents men 
 from living freely and nobly. The State and 
 Property are the great embodiments of posses- 
 siveness; it is for this reason that they are 
 against life, and that they issue in war. Pos- 
 session means taking or keeping some good 
 thing which another is prevented from enjoy- 
 ing; creation means putting into the world a 
 good thing which otherwise no one would be 
 able to enjoy. Since the material goods of the 
 world must be divided among the population, 
 ancTsince some men are by nature brigands, 
 there must be defensive possession, which will
 
 258 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 be regulated, in a good community, by some 
 principle of impersonal justice. But all this 
 is only the preface to a good life or good po- 
 litical institutions, in which creation will alto- 
 gether outweigh possession, and distributive 
 justice will exist as an uninteresting matter of 
 course. 
 
 The supreme principle, both in politics and 
 in private life, should be to promote all that is 
 creative, and so to diminish the impulses and 
 desires that center round possession. The 
 State at present is very largely an embodiment 
 of possessive impulses: internally, it protects 
 the rich against the poor; externally, it uses 
 force for the exploitation of inferior races, and • 
 for competition with other States. Our whole 
 economic system is concerned exclusively with 
 possession; yet the production of goods is a 
 form of creation, and except in so far as it is 
 irredeemably mechanical and monotonous, it 
 might afford a vehicle for creative impulses. 
 A great deal might be achieved towards this 
 end by forming the producers of a certain kind 
 of commodity into an autonomous democracy, 
 subject to State control as regards the price of 
 their commodity but not as to the manner of its 
 production.
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 259 
 
 Education, marriage, and religion are essen- 
 tially creative, yet all three have been vitiated 
 by the intrusion of possessive motives. Edu- 
 cation is usually treated as a means of prolong- 
 ^g the status quo by instilling prejudices, 
 rather than of creating free thought and a noble 
 outlook by the example of generous feeling and 
 the stimulus of mental adventure. In mar- 
 riage, love, which is creative, is kept in chains 
 by jealousy, which is possessive. Religion, 
 which should set free the creative vision of the 
 spirit, is usually more concerned to repress the 
 life of instinct and to combat the subversiveness 
 of thought. In all these ways the fear that 
 grows out of precarious possession has replaced 
 the hope inspired by creative force. The wish 
 to plunder others is recognized, in theory, to 
 be bad ; but the fear of being plundered is little 
 better. Yet these two motives between them 
 dominate nine-tenths of politics and private life. 
 The creative impulses in different men are 
 essentially harmonious, since what one man 
 creates cannot be a hindrance to what another 
 is wishing to create. It is the possessive im- 
 pulses that involve conflict. Although, morally 
 and politically, the creative and possessive im- 
 pulses are opposites, yet psychologically either
 
 260 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 passes easily into the other, according to the 
 accidents of circumstance and opportunity. 
 The genesis of impulses and the causes which 
 make them change ought to be studied; educa^ 
 tion and social institutions ought to be ma(^^ 
 such as to strengthen the impulses which har- 
 monize in different men, and to weaken those 
 that involve conflict. I have no doubt that what 
 might be accomplished in this way is almost un- 
 limited. 
 
 It is rather through impulse than through will 
 that individual lives and the life of the com- 
 munity can derive the strength unity of a 
 single direction. Will is of two kinds, of which 
 one is directed outward and the other inward. 
 The first, which is directed outward, is called 
 into play by external obstacles, eitner the op- 
 position of others or the technical difficulties 
 of an undertaking. This kind of will is an ex- 
 pression of strong impulse or desire, whenever 
 instant success is impossible; it exists in all 
 whose life is vigorous, and only decays when 
 their vital force is enfeebled. It is necessary 
 to success in any difficult enterprise, and with- 
 out it great achievement is very rare. But the 
 will which is directed inward is only necessary 
 in so far as there is an inner conflict of im- 
 
 i
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 261 
 
 pulses or desires; a perfectly harmonious na- 
 ture would have no occasion for inward will. 
 Such perfect harmony is of course a scarcely 
 realizable ideal : in all men impulses arise which 
 Ipre incompatible with their central purpose, 
 and which must be checked if their life as a 
 whole is not to be a failure. But this will hap- 
 pen least with those whose central impulses are 
 strongest ; and it will happen less often in a so- 
 ciety which aims at freedom than in a so- 
 ciety like ours, which is full of artificial incom- 
 patibilities created by antiquated institutions 
 and a tj^rannous public opinion. The power to 
 exert inward will when the occasion arises must 
 always be needed by those who wish their lives 
 to embody some central purpose, but with bet- 
 ter institutions the occasions when inward will 
 is necessary might be made fewer and less im- 
 portant. This result is very much to be de- 
 sired, because when will checks impulses which 
 are only accidentally harmful, it diverts a force 
 which might be spent on overcoming outward 
 obstacles, and if the impulses checked are 
 strong and serious, it actually diminishes the 
 vital force available. A life full of inhibitions 
 is likely not to remain a very vigorous life but 
 to become listless and without zest. Impulse
 
 262 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 tends to die when it is constantly held in check / 
 and if it does not die, it is apt to work under- 
 ground, and issue in some form much worse 
 than that in which it has been checked. For 
 these reasons the necessity for using inward* 
 will ought to be avoided as much as possible, 
 and consistency of action ought to spring rather 
 from consistency of impulse than from control 
 of impulse by will. 
 
 The unifying of life ought not to demand the 
 suppression of the casual desires that make 
 amusement and play; on the contrary, every- 
 thing ought to be done to make it easy to com- 
 bine the main purposes of life with all kinds of 
 pleasure that are not in their nature harmful. 
 Such things as habitual drunkenness, drugs, 
 cruel sports, or pleasure in inflicting pain are 
 essentially harmful, but most of the amusements 
 that civilized men naturally enjoy are either not 
 harmful at all or only accidentally harmful 
 through some effect which might be avoided in 
 a better society. What is needed is, not asceti- 
 cism or a drab Puritanism, but capacity for 
 strong impulses and desires directed towards 
 large creative ends. When such impulses and 
 desires are vigorous, they bring with them, of 
 themselves, what is needed to make a good life.
 
 ^ 
 
 WHAT Wl^ CAN DO 263 
 
 But although amusement and adventure 
 ought to have their share, it is impossible to 
 create a good life if they are what is mainly 
 desired. Subjectivism, the habit of directing 
 thought and desire to our own states of mind 
 rather than to something objective, inevitably 
 makes life fragmentary and unprogressive. 
 The man to whom amusement is the end of life 
 tends to lose interest gradually in the things 
 out of which he has been in the habit of obtain- 
 ing amusement, since he does not value these 
 things on their own account, but on account of 
 the feelings which they arouse in him. When 
 they are no longer amusing, boredom drives 
 him to seek some new stimulus, which fails him 
 in its turn. Amusement consists in a series of 
 moments without any essential continuity; a 
 purpose which unifies life is one which requires 
 some prolonged activity, and is like building a 
 monument rather than a child's castle in the 
 sand. 
 
 Subjectivism has other forms beside the 
 mere pursuit of amusement. Many men, when 
 they are in love, are more interested in their 
 own emotion than in the object of their love; 
 such love does not lead to any essential union, 
 but leaves fundamental separateness undimin-
 
 264 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ished. As soon as the emotion grows less vivid 
 the experience has served its purpose, and 
 there seems no motive for prolonging it. In 
 another way, the same evil of subjectivism was 
 fostered by Protestant religion and morality, 
 since they directed attention to sin and the state 
 of the soul rather than to the outer w^orld and 
 our relations with it None of these forms of 
 subjectivism can prevent a man's life from 
 being fragmentary and isolated. Only a life 
 which springs out of dominant impulses directed 
 to objective ends can be a satisfactory whole, 
 or be intimately united with the lives of others. 
 The pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of 
 virtue alike suffer from subjectivism: Epi- 
 cureanism and Stoicism are infected with the 
 same taint. Marcus Aurelius, enacting good 
 laws in order that he might be virtuous, is not 
 an attractive figure. Subjectivism is a natural 
 outcome of a life in which there is much more 
 thought than action: while outer things are be- 
 ing remembered or desired, not actually experi- 
 enced, they seem to become mere ideas. What 
 they are in themselves becomes less interesting 
 to us than the effects which they produce in our 
 own minds. Such a result tends to be brought 
 about by increasing civilization, because in-
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 265 
 
 creasing civilization continually diminishes the 
 need for vivid action and enhances the opportu- 
 nities for thought. But thought will not have 
 this bad result if it is active thought, directed 
 towards achieving some purpose ; it is only pas- 
 sive thought that leads to subjectivism. What 
 is needed is to keep thought in intimate union 
 with impulses and desires, making it always it- 
 self an activity with an objective purpose. 
 Otherwise, thought and impulse become ene- 
 mies, to the great detriment of both. 
 
 In order to make the lives of average men 
 and women less fragmentary and separate, and 
 to give greater opportunity for carrying out 
 creative impulses, it is not enough to know the 
 goal we wish to reach, or to proclaim the ex- 
 cellence of what we desire to achieve. It is 
 necessary to understand the effect of institu- 
 tions and beliefs upon the life of impulse, and 
 to discover ways of improving this effect by a 
 change in institutions. And when this intellec- 
 tual work has been done, our thought will still 
 remain barren unless we can bring it into rela- 
 tion with some powerful political force. The 
 only powerful political force from which any 
 help is to be expected in bringing about 
 such changes as seem needed is Labor. The
 
 266 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 changes required are very largely such as La- 
 bor may be expected to welcome, especially dur- 
 ing the time of hardship after the war. When 
 the war is over, labor discontent is sure to be 
 very prevalent throughout Europe, and to con- 
 stitute a political force by means of which a 
 great and sweeping reconstruction may be ef- 
 fected. 
 
 The civilized world has need of fundamental 
 change if it is to be saved from decay — change 
 both in its economic structure and in its philos- 
 ophy of life. Those of us who feel the need 
 of change must not sit still in dull despair : we 
 can, if we choose, profoundly influence the fu- 
 ture. We can discover and preach the kind of 
 change that is required — the kind that pre- 
 serves what is positive in the vital beliefs of 
 our time, and, by eliminating what is negative 
 and inessential, produces a synthesis to which 
 all that is not purely reactionary can give alle- 
 giance. As soon as it has become clear what 
 kind of change is required, it will be possible 
 to work out its parts in more detail. But until 
 the war is ended there is little use in detail, 
 since we do not know what kind of world the 
 war will leave. The only thing that seems in- 
 dubitable is that much new thought will be re-
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 267 
 
 quired in the new world produced by the war. 
 Traditional views will give little help. It is 
 clear that men's most important actions are not 
 guided by the sort of motives that are empha- 
 sized in traditional political philosophies. The 
 impulses by which the war has been produced 
 and sustained come out of a deeper region than 
 that of most political argument. And the op- 
 position to the war on the part of those few 
 who have opposed it comes from the same deep 
 region. A political theory, if it is to hold in 
 times of stress, must take account of the im- 
 pulses that underlie explicit thought; it must 
 appeal to them, and it must discover how to 
 make them fruitful rather than destructive. 
 
 Economic systems have a great influence in 
 promoting or destroying life. Except slavery, 
 the present industrial system is the most de- 
 structive of life that has ever existed. Machin- 
 ery and large-scale production are ineradicable, 
 and must survive in any better system which 
 is to replace the one under which we live. In- 
 dustrial federal democracy is probably the best 
 direction for reform to take. 
 
 Philosophies of life, when they are widely be- 
 lieved, also have a very great influence on the 
 vitality of a community. The most widely ac-
 
 268 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 cepted philosophy of life at present is that what 
 matters most to a man's happiness is his in- 
 come. This philosophy, apart from other de- 
 merits, is harmful because it leads men to aim 
 at a result rather than an activity, an enjoy- 
 ment of material goods in which men are not 
 differentiated, rather than a creative impulse 
 which embodies each man's individuality. 
 More refined philosophies, such as are instilled 
 by higher education, are too apt to fix attention 
 on the past rather than the future, and on cor- 
 rect behavior rather than effective action. It 
 is not in such philosophies that men will find 
 the energy to bear lightly the weight of tradi- 
 tion and of ever-accumulating knowledge. 
 
 The world has need of a philosophy, or a re- 
 ligion, which will promote life. But in order to 
 promote life it is necessary to value something 
 other than mere life. Life devoted only to life 
 is animal without any real human value, inca- 
 pable of preserving men permanently from 
 weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If 
 life is to be fully human it must serve some end 
 which seems, in some sense, outside human life, 
 some end which is impersonal and above man- 
 kind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those 
 who best promote life do not have life for their
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 269 
 
 purpose. They aim rather at what seems like 
 a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our hu- 
 man existence of something eternal, something 
 that appears to imagination to live in a heaven 
 remote from strife and failure and the devour- 
 ing jaws of Time. Contact with this eternal 
 world — even if it be only a world of our imagin- 
 ing — brings a strength and a fundamental peace 
 which cannot be wholly destroyed by the strug- 
 gles and apparent failures of our temporal life. 
 It is this happy contemplation of what is eter- 
 nal that Spinoza calls the intellectual love of 
 God. To those who have once known it, it is 
 the key of wisdom. 
 
 What we have to do practically is different 
 for each one of us, according to our capacities 
 and opportunities. But if we have the life of 
 the spirit within us, what we must do and what 
 we must avoid will become apparent to us. 
 
 By contact with what is eternal, by devoting 
 our life to bringing something of the Divine 
 into this troubled world, we can make our own 
 lives creative even now, even in the midst of the 
 cruelty and strife and hatred that surround us 
 on every hand. To make the individual life cre- 
 ative is far harder in a community based on 
 possession than it would be in such a commun-
 
 270 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 ity as human effort may be able to build up in 
 the future. Those who are to begin the regen- 
 eration of the world must face loneliness, op- 
 position, poverty, obloquy. They must be able 
 to live by truth and love, with a rational un- 
 conquerable hope ; they must be honest and wise, 
 fearless, and guided by a consistent purpose. 
 A body of men and women so inspired will con- 
 quer — first the difficulties and perplexities of 
 their individual lives, then, in time, though per- 
 haps only in a long time, the outer world. Wis- 
 dom and hope are what the world needs; and 
 though it fights against them, it gives its respect 
 to them in the end. 
 
 When the Goths sacked Rome, St. Augustine 
 wrote the ''City of God," putting a spiritual 
 hope in place of the material reality that had 
 been destroyed. Throughout the centuries that 
 followed St. Augustine's hope lived and gave 
 life, while Rome sank to a village of hovels. 
 For us, too, it is necessary to create a new hope, 
 to build up by our thought a better world than 
 the one which is hurling itself into ruin. Be- 
 cause the times are bad, more is required of us 
 than would be required in normal times. Only 
 a supreme fire of thought and spirit can save 
 future generations from the death that has be-
 
 WHAT WE CAN DO 271 
 
 fallen the generation which we knew and loved. 
 It has been my good fortune to come in con- 
 tact as a teacher with young men of many dif- 
 ferent nations — young men in whom hope was 
 alive, in whom the creative energy existed that 
 would have realized in the world some part at 
 least of the imagined beauty by which they 
 lived. They have been swept into the war, some 
 on one side, some on the other. Some are still 
 lighting, some are maimed for life, some are 
 dead ; of those who survive it is to be feared that 
 many will have lost the life of the spirit, that 
 hope will have died, that energy will be spent, 
 and that the years to come will be only a weary 
 journey towards the grave. Of all this tragedy, 
 not a few of those who teach seem to have no 
 feeling: with ruthless logic, they prove that 
 these young men have been sacrificed unavoid- 
 ably for some coldly abstract end ; undisturbed 
 themselves, they lapse quickly into comfort 
 after any momentary assault of feeling. In 
 such men the life of the spirit is dead. If it 
 were living, it would go out to meet the spirit 
 in the young, with a love as poignant as the love 
 of father or mother. It would be unaware of 
 the bounds of self; their tragedy would be its 
 own. Something would cry out: ''No, this is
 
 272 WHY MEN FIGHT 
 
 not right; this is not good; this is not a holy 
 cause, in which the brightness of youth is de- 
 stroyed and dimmed. It is we, the old, who 
 have sinned; we have sent these young men to 
 the battlefield for our evil passions, our spiritual 
 death, our failure to live generously out of the 
 warmth of the heart and out of the living vision 
 of the spirit. Let us come out of this death, 
 for it is we who are dead, not the young men 
 who have died through our fear of life. Their 
 very ghosts have more life than we : they hold 
 us up for ever to the shame and obloquy of all 
 the ages to come. Out of their ghosts must 
 eome life, and it is we whom they must vivify. ' ' 
 
 THE END 

 
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