JANUS

OR THE CONQUEST OF WAR

WILLIAM McDOUGALL

JANUS : THE CONQUEST OF WAR

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

For a full list of this Series see the end of this Book

JANUS :

THE CONQUEST OF WAR A Psychological Inquiry

BY

WILLIAM McDOUGALL, F.R.S.

Author of Social Psychology, Outline of Psychology Normal and Abnormal, etc.

,

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & Co.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD., HERTFORD

CONTENTS

CHAP.

FOREWORD

I. LESSONS WAR

OF THE GREAT

II. THE CAUSES OF WAR .

III. PREVENTIVES OF WAR .

IV. PREVENTIVES OF WAR

(continued)

V. THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE AND THE USE OF FORCE IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ....

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V .

PAGE

7

15 32 35

71

96 114

VI. INTERNATIONAL AIR FORCE

AS A PREVENTIVE OF WAR 122

[5]

FOREWORD

In the year 1914 two men, the one a Frenchman, the other a German, met face to face. Both were highly educated sensitive men, cultivated citizens of the world. Both carried arms. The French- man had the better luck and plunged his bayonet into the belly of the German. The German stood erect and, holding in both hands his bleeding bowels as they gushed out through the gaping wound, said in excellent French, " See what you have done to me." The French soldier, who related this incident to me shortly after its occurrence, expected to bear with him to the grave the horror and remorse of that moment. It is unlikely that he long survived his victim, and perhaps he would not have desired to do so. Let the reader as he turns these pages, especially if he be an American citizen, lapped in comfort and security such as no other people has ever known, bear in mind the image of this encounter. Let him try to imagine it repeated a million times, and he will have some faint and inadequate conception of the horrors of war.

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THE CONQUEST OF WAR

On a lovely morning in the year 1915, I walk through a lane rich with the touching beauties of an English spring. I approach a sombre grey stone building. Its windows are heavily barred. I can almost see upon its front the words, " Abandon hope all ye who enter here." I am admitted and the heavy door is locked behind me. I pass through to a yard surrounded by high walls. In this yard saunters a crowd of men of many nationalities, clothed in strange garments ; some are cripples, some are bound about with bandages, and all are mad, made mad by war. They mumble, gibber, grimace ; some approach with menacing cries and gestures, but are kept at a distance by stern men in uniform. The imagination of Dante never depicted a more grotesque and horrible inferno than this ; yet above us are the tender blue sky and fleecy cloudlets of the English spring. I return to the building and enter a neat closely barred room where three men, in the uniforms of officers of three European armies, stand to attention ; all three are defiant, sullen, sad and outwardly respectful, and all are mad. One has a petition to make. He is a German aristocrat from East Prussia, but he can hardly utter his native speech. A shrapnel-bullet has carried away a piece of his skull and a small piece of his brain ;

[8]

FOREWORD

and every day he suffers terrible convulsions, each of which takes away a little more of what intellect and self- control are left to him. With difficulty I make out, as I watch his struggling lips, and the beads of anguish on his pale face, his pitiful petition. It is that somehow we shall make known to his wife and four children, waiting and longing with hope deferred on the far Prussian plain, that he still lives.

Before daybreak on a February morning, the gloom of which is deepened by the booming guns and the fitful gleaming of starshells along the line of the trenches, I enter an improvised hospital bearing one end of a stretcher. On it lies a handsome stalwart young Frenchman from the sunny south. We lay the stretcher among many others on the muddy floor. Our man murmurs without ceasing. Again and again I catch the words, " Marie, je t'adore." He is talking to his sweetheart, far away in the south of France. A beautiful French girl falls on her knees beside him. She holds his hand, whispering words of encouragement ; she kisses his brow ; but he pays no heed and murmurs on. The case is urgent and soon we carry him into a narrow little room and lay him on the operating table. Two surgeons, stern and silent, begin to work upon him. His feet and legs as far as the knees

[9]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

are merely masses of torn flesh and broken bits of bone. A terrible mess for the surgeons to clean up. But before they can finish their job, life gives up the painful struggle and goes out of the strong frame. Marie's adoring lover has passed away.

In a hospital ward lies a big fierce gentle Irishman in the prime of his vigorous manhood. He has been the trusted leader of a troop of bombers, all Irishmen from his own small town. He had led them in many a fierce fight, exalting in their prowess. " They were great boys." He repeats it over and over again. But at last he had led them into a trap, from which he alone escaped, unscathed in body. But his mind is deeply scarred. All day he lies upon his bed, seeing upon the ceiling scene after scene of the fierce contest. Every morning at daybreak he rises to bathe himself religiously ; for he feels that the sins of all those comrades, hurled to death with- out absolution, are upon him. He will not go home on furlough, for everyone will ask him, " Where are the boys who went with you ? " And he has recently married a young girl, and if he goes home and has to leave her again, " Mary's heart will break." So every day he begs me in his soft Irish accents to send him back to the front, that he may finish his work.

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FOREWORD

A young man of stalwart build stands before me, haggard and emaciated, his legs trembling violently with a tremor which he has tried in vain to control during the many weeks since he was sent down from the front. Before the war he was an industrious artisan, happily married, steady, earnest, patriotic, religious. The war has made him a killer of men. He had enlisted voluntarily, and for two years he has fought fiercely ; of those who enlisted with him few survive, and the officer to whom he had become devoted has fallen by his side. He begs me to send him back to the fighting front, in order that he may kill more Germans, and so bring nearer the day of their defeat. He has one other consuming desire that has become a fixed resolution. He has learnt that, during his absence at the front while he risked his life every day and endured the utmost horrors of modern war, men who called themselves his friends have debauched his young wife ; and he is determined to kill them as soon as he shall be released from military service. Patient inquiry at length discovers a more deeply hidden secret. During an advance on an enemy position, in wild excitement and exasperated by seeing his beloved captain fall shattered beside him, he had leapt into an enemy trench, and found crouching there three wounded

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

Germans. He had rushed upon them and, in spite of their cries for mercy, he had thrust his bayonet through each of them. Now, after many months, he still sees their faces wild with terror and hears their piteous last cries. That sound, he says, will never leave him ; it breaks through the stillness of the night and wakes him from his short and fevered sleep.

Multiply these scenes and these figures a millionfold, add the tears and terrors of a hundred million women and children, and you still have an inadequate picture of the Great War. No wonder that multi- tudes have exclaimed, " It shall not be again. War must cease ! " No wonder that the voice of the militarist is stilled, and even professional soldiers are crying aloud for the abolition of war. The masses of the people in all countries demand peace : a multitude of organizations all the world over are preaching peace, discussing how to prevent war, offering peace-prizes, denouncing war, devising world-wide organizations to render war impossible. Yet the next great war draws nearer, and the most famous living pacifist at the head of a Socialist government, representing the labouring masses of a Great Empire, finds himself driven to build new warships, to plan a great development of the air forces, and to refuse to cut down the Army.

[12]

CHAPTER I LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

" Universal Peace is a dream and not even a beautiful dream." In these words the German philosopher Treitsche expressed concisely an opinion which during the nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of the Great War, was widely held. Those who proclaimed the necessity and the virtue of war, asserted that war is the great antiseptic of national life, that the need for self-defence is a bracing tonic influence without which nations must become relaxed in moral tone, their populations given over to the pursuit of comfort, luxury, and pleasure, both physical and mental. They argued therefore that assured and long -continued peace between nations must bring about universal decay of morals and of manners. It was argued further that war was the great instrument of natural selection among States and Nations ; that, just as the progressive evolution of higher types of organisms has been due to the harsh struggle for existence between individual organisms, so the further evolution of national organisms or States [13]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

can be effected only by a similar struggle for existence between them, a struggle in which war must continue to be an essential factor, the indispensable arbitra- ment, the fierce crucible in which alone the virtue, the moral fibre of nations, their fitness to survive, must be proved.

Pacifists have usually brushed aside these arguments as unworthy of a moment's consideration. It is wiser to admit that they have a certain force, that they contain an element of truth. William James had this wisdom when in a famous essay he showed that, if war is to be abolished, we shall need " A Moral Equivalent for War ". Let us admit that in bygone ages war may have served as an instrument of progress ; that, perhaps, the subjugation and partial substitution through war of one people by another has in some cases made for the evolution of human qualities and the progress of civilization ; that the Anglo- Saxons were, perhaps, better men than the Britons whom they conquered and partially destroyed ; that the Spaniards were better men than the Indians of Mexico and Peru ; that the Pilgrim Fathers and the settlers of Virginia were more capable than the Red men of developing a great civilization in the area of the earth best adapted by climate and natural resources to be the headquarters

[14]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

of Western civilization. Let us also recognize unreservedly the moral truth which Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly preached to the American nation. " A just war is in the long run far better for a nation's soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or in injustice." Admitting all this, admitting also the tonic influence of the need for national self-defence, we must recognize, nevertheless, that even before the Great War the argument against war was already strong, the need for its restriction or abolition already urgent. Countless writers have bemoaned the economic burdens imposed by preparations for war and the still greater economic penalties of war itself ; and some, like Mr. Norman Angell, had laboured with some success to show that, in the modern world, war can never again be profitable even to the victors. Others, more far- seeing, had insisted upon the destructive effect of war upon the qualities of the human race. In the good old days when the victor slew the conquered males and led to his tent the women of the van- quished host, war may have done something to improve the qualities of the conquered populations. But, even then, such ruth- less assertion of the rights of the conqueror may more generally have led in the long run to the degradation of the conquering race by immixture of the blood of the [15]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

conquered; as when the Hindu conquerors, in spite of their elaboration of the caste system, gradually absorbed the blood of the Dravidians and other negroid aborigines of India ; or as when the Arabs, mating freely with multitudinous converts made by the force of their arms, sowed the seeds of rapid decay in their brilliant civilization. And in the modern period, as has often been pointed out, the biological effects of war are less equivocal ; they are wholly and disastrously harmful to the race ; for the burden of military service falls upon the strongest males, forcing them to postpone marriage ; while in war itself the fittest to survive and to propagate the race, the flower of the the young manhood of the warring nations, are destroyed, leaving the world forever poorer because deprived, not merely of the contributions to art and science and social betterment which they would have made, but also of its greatest and irreplaceable treasures, the strains of vigorous quality of mind and heart cut off forever in the mud and blood and agony of the fields of War.

If the arguments against war, the economic, the biological, the humanitarian arguments, were already very strong in the opening years of the twentieth century, the recent developments of the art of war, forced and illustrated on a vast scale in the years 1914-1918, have [16]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

rendered them infinitely stronger. Until August 4th, 1914, the world believed that the extreme horrors of the war- fare of earlier ages were abolished for ever ; that war henceforth would remain a scientific duel between highly disciplined troops, in which, no doubt, many strong young men might have to endure some hardships and sufferings and even death, but sufferings greatly mitigated by efficient medical services and the world-wide efforts of the Red Cross societies. The developments of the arts of destruction, combined with the ruthless disregard of all the conventions of war initiated by the Germans, and then reluctantly accepted by their adversaries under the pressure of necessity, these developments have shown that this picture of modern war, as a fierce yet chivalrous game under strict rules that would confine its horrors to the battlefields, was but a pleasing dream. These developments, and especially the development of aircraft, of the explosive bomb and of the poison gases, have made it only too clear that in the next Great War the civilian populations, and especially the populations of the great cities, will be the first and greatest sufferers, that wounds, mutilation and death, terror and famine, will be broadcast among them with awful impartiality ; that no woman, no family, no little child, no church, no treasury of art, no museum

[17] c

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

of priceless antiquities, no shrine of learning and science will be immune ; but that in a few days or hours great cities may be levelled with the dust, while their surviving inhabitants scrape for crusts amid mangled bodies of fair women and the ruins of the monuments of art and science. In the light of this experience, all the civilized peoples, all intelligent men and women in all countries, are agreed that war must if possible be prevented, that the prevention of war has become the most urgent need of our common civilization, the prime concern of statesmen and of the common people, the indispensable condition of all human welfare and of all that con- tributes towards it.

The horrors of the Great War, the vast sum of human suffering caused by it ; the immense destruction of the flower of our manhood ; the terrors and hardships and sorrows imposed upon hundreds of millions of civilians ; the enormous economic destruction, recovery from which is now seen to require the labours and the sacrifices of several genera- tions, the almost total lack of the redeeming features of some earlier wars ; all these have combined to convince mankind that modern war has become an unmitigated horror to be avoided at well-nigh any cost. This then is one, perhaps the only, good result of the [18]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

Great War, namely, a well-nigh universal Will to Peace.

This dominant Will to Peace, rooted both in the strongest emotional reactions against i the horrors of war and in the calmest and most rational calculations of economists and statesmen, has generated and is maintaining a vast amount of public discussion, of writing and lecturing, has brought into existence many associa- tions for the prevention of war, and has stimulated many others into renewed and greater activity. Yet we are told by those who are in the best position to form an opinion, and indeed the fact is only too obvious to all of us, that war clouds are gathering darkly over Europe, and that civilization itself is threatened as never before with destruction by war, a war which, if it shall break out, will far surpass in horror and suffering and destructiveness even the Great War of 1914-1918.1

1 This paragraph was written towards the end of 1924. Since that date the outlook has improved in some degree. The understandings reached at Locarno, the entrance of Germany into the League of Nations, the international industrial agreements recently set in train, the diminution of tension between France and Great Britain, all these are changes for the better. But it would be foolish to allow these recent improvements of the international situation to blind us to the fundamental truth, developed in the following chapter ; namely, that hitherto we have no guarantee against

[19]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

Throughout the nineteenth century many proposals were made for the mitigation and the abolition of war ; and, as the burden of armaments increased and as it was found that the increasing intercourse of nations and the spread of education and of popular government, far from rendering war a more remote possibility, as had been so confidently anticipated, were producing a tremendous growth and spread of the nationalist spirit, were rendering war more imminent and more terrible, and were magnifying the economic burdens of national defence in time of peace, many attempts were made to substitute arbitration for war and to lighten the burden of preparation for war by international agreements for the limitation of armaments. I shall not delay to review these attempts. Those of the former kind, the arbitration agree- ments, achieved some measure of success. The latter, in spite of their very modest nature (proposals for naval holidays, for the restriction of the size and number of battleships, and of the calibre of guns, for reduction of armies by so much per cent., for the proportioning of armies to the numbers of the population of each country), all these and a hundred other similar proposals, made in some cases by

sudden national aggression and that such guarantee is the prime need of the world at the present time.

[20]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

statesmen controlling the affairs of the most powerful nations, all these achieved no appreciable alleviation of the burden under which all agreed that the peoples of Europe were groaning. The vast conflagration of 1914 should have made clear to all the world that such partial and timid steps towards the prevention of war and the amelioration of peace were almost wholly futile then ; and the present efforts along similar lines appear as the ridiculous and puny gestures of a civiliza- tion impotent to arrest its suicidal course. For the outbreak of the Great War showed that the efforts of sincere and democratic statesmen, the vows of serried masses of socialists, the intimate economic relations of industrial nations, the votes of fully enfranchized democracies, the prayers of the Churches, the education of the masses, the softening of manners, the internationalization of culture, all these great and good influences of the modern world, were as unavailing as the arbitration treaties and the Hague conferences to prevent or long to postpone the dreaded outbreak. The Great War showed us also the futility of another form of international agreement. The leading nations of the world had maintained by mutual consent the agreeable fiction that there existed a body of international law governing their relations and their conduct towards one another ; and they [21]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

had for many years subscribed to certain conventions made at Geneva and the Hague, conventions designed to mitigate the horrors of war, to proscribe the more horrible practices of earlier ages, and to protect the lives and property and liberties of civilian populations. But the Germans were out for Weltherrschaft oder Niedergang ; and a hundred years of intensive education of all classes had made the mass of the people capable of seeing that it would be folly to let any weak scruples about inflicting a little extra suffering or about the breaking of international conventions prevent them from asserting their moral and intellectual superiority over all other peoples and from bringing the blessings of Kultur to all the world. In any case the so-called international laws would not and could not be enforced ; for there was no effective sanction behind them, no organized power to prevent or punish the breach of them. The conventions of Geneva and of the Hague were merely polite gestures, harm- less amenities of peace time ; and to risk defeat through the observance of them would have been a crime against Kultur.

And so international laws and conven- tions for the regulation of war were shown to be utterly futile unless backed by organized power and organized will o use that power.

Before proceeding to develop the [22]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

argument let me re-enforce what has been said in this chapter by citing the words of a statesman whose abilities and intimate knowledge of the conduct of war and peace must give to his utterances an unrivalled authority. Mr. Winston Churchill, half American, half English by parentage, has served with distinction both as soldier and war-correspondent. He was First Lord of the British Admiralty when the Great War broke out ; he has been Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air, and now is Chancellor of the Exchequer. In a recent article from his pen, entitled " Shall we Commit Suicide ? ", occur the following passages.1

After briefly reviewing the peculiar horrors of modern warfare as illustrated by the Great War, Mr. Churchill wrote as follows : —

" WHAT WAR IN 1919 WOULD HAVE MEANT "

" But all that happened in the four years of the Great War was only a prelude to what was preparing for the fifth year. The campaign of the year 1919 would have witnessed an immense accession

1 The article was published in Nash's Pall Matt Magazine, September, 1924, i.e. at a time when the League of Nations had been at work for several years, and was a plea for the support of the League.

[23]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

to the power of destruction. Had the Germans retained the moral to make good their retreat to the Rhine, they would have been assaulted in the summer of 1919 with forces and by methods incom- parably more prodigious than any yet employed. Thousands of aeroplanes would have shattered their cities. Scores of thousands of cannon would have blasted their front. Arrangements were being made to carry simultaneously a quarter of a million men, together with all their requirements, continuously forward across country in mechanical vehicles moving ten or fifteen miles each day. Poison gases of incredible malignity, against which only a secret mask (which the Germans could not obtain in time) was proof, would have stifled all resistance and paralyzed all life on the hostile front subjected to attack. No doubt the Germans too had their plans. But the hour of wrath had passed, the signal of relief was given, and the horrors of 1919 remain buried in the archives of the great antagonists.

" The War stopped as suddenly and as universally as it had begun. The world lifted its head, surveyed the scene of ruin, and victors and vanquished alike drew breath. In a hundred laboratories, in a thousand arsenals, factories, and bureaus, men pulled themselves up with a jerk, turned from the task in which they had [24]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

been absorbed. Their projects were put aside unfinished, unexecuted ; but their knowledge was preserved; their data, calculations, and discoveries were hastily bundled together and docketed ' for future reference ' by the War Offices in every country. The campaign of 1919 was never fought ; but its ideas go march- ing along. In every Army they are being explored, elaborated, refined under the surface of peace, and should war come again to the world it is not with the weapons and agencies prepared for 1919 that it will be fought, but with develop- ments and extensions of these which will be incomparably more formidable and fatal. . . .

" Certain sombre facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist. It is established that henceforward whole populations will take part in war, all doing their utmost, all subjected to the fury of the enemy. It is established that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence. It is probable — nay, certain — that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited, and, perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable.

" Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved [25]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermina- tion. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at atten- tion, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse ; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now — for one occasion only — his Master.

" THE NEW CRISIS

" Let it not be thought for a moment that the danger of another explosion in Europe is passed. For the time being the stupor and the collapse which followed the World War ensured a sullen passivity, and the horror of war, its carnage and its tyrannies, have sunk into the soul, have dominated the mind of every class and in every race. But the causes of war have been in no way removed ; indeed they are in some respects aggravated by the so-called Peace Treaty and the reactions following thereupon. Two mighty branches of the European family will never rest content with their existing situation. [26]

LESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

Russia, stripped of her Baltic Provinces, will, as the years pass by, brood incessantly upon the wars of Peter the Great. From one end of Germany to the other an intense hatred of France unites the whole population. This passion is fanned con- tinuously by the action of the French Government. The enormous contingents of German youth growing to military manhood year by year are inspired by the fiercest sentiments, and the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge. These ideas are restrained at the present moment only by physical impotence. France is armed to the teeth. Germany has been to a great extent disarmed and her military system broken up. The French hope to preserve this situation by their technical military apparatus, by their black troops, and by a system of alliances with the smaller States of Europe ; and for the present at any rate overwhelming force is on their side. But physical force alone, unsustained by world opinion, affords no durable foundation for security. Germany is a far stronger entity than France, and cannot be kept in permanent subjugation. . . .

" Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings —nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a [27]

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township at a stroke ? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard ? " As for Poison Gas and Chemical Warfare in all its forms, only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book. Certainly every one of these new avenues to destruction is being studied on both sides of the Rhine, with all the science and patience of which man is capable. And why should it be supposed that these resources will be limited to Inorganic Chemistry ? A study of Disease — of Pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast — is certainly being pursued in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts — such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.

" NEW PERILS TO LIBERTY

" It is evident that whereas an equally contested war under such conditions might work the ruin of the world and cause an immeasureable diminution of the human race, the possession by one side of some overwhelming scientific advantage [28]

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would lead to the complete enslavement of the unwary party. Not only are the powers now in the hand of man capable of destroying the life of nations, but for the first time they afford to one group of civilized men the opportunity of reducing their opponents to absolute helplessness.

" In barbarous times superior martial virtues — physical strength, courage, skill, discipline — were required to secure such a supremacy ; and in the hard evolution of mankind the best and fittest stocks came to the fore. But no such saving guarantee exists to-day. There is no reason why a base, degenerate, immoral race should not make an enemy far above them in quality the prostrate subject of their caprice or tyranny, simply because they happened to be possessed at a given moment of some new death-dealing or terror-working process and were ruthless in its employ- ment. The liberties of men are no longer to be guarded by their natural qualities, but by their dodges ; and superior virtue and valour may fall an easy prey to the latest diabolical tricks. . . . All the hideousness of the Explosive era will continue, and to it will surely be added the gruesome complications of Poison and of Pestilence scientifically applied.

" Such, then, is the peril with which mankind menaces itself. Means of destruc- tion incalculable in their effects, wholesale and frightful in their character, and [29]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

unrelated to any form of human merit : the march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities ; and the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world, fanned by continual provocation and unceasing fear and fed by the deepest sense of national wrong or national danger ! On the other hand, there is the blessed respite of exhaustion, offering to the nations a final chance to control their destinies and avert what may well be a general doom. Surely if a sense of self-preserva- tion still exists among men, if the will to live resides not merely in individuals or nations but in humanity as a whole, the prevention of the supreme catastrophe ought to be the paramount object of all endeavour."

Recognizing that we are all pacifists nowadays, it is my purpose to expound in this little book a plan for the prevention of \Var, which, after much consideration, I believe to be a practicable plan and indeed the only practicable plan. This plan has been very briefly sketched in a former publication.1 I have no evidence that the proposal has evoked the faintest interest or provoked discussion of it in

1 Appendix to my Ethics and Some Modern World Problems, Putnam's Sons, New York, 1924, and also in an article " Psychology, Dis- armament, and Peace " in the North American Review for November, 1924.

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any quarter. Nevertheless, I wish to set it forth rather more fully, to modify it in a way to render it more acceptable, to examine the objections and difficulties in its way, and, by examining very briefly the principal alternative proposals now before the public, to justify the claim that it is the only practicable plan.

Before launching out on the argument, let us take notice of the views of certain soldiers which may seem to run counter to the view expressed in this chapter. These soldiers,1 tell us that, in future, war will be conducted by " mechanized " armies and by air-planes dropping gas- bombs ; and, assuming that some gas which will produce a temporary general paralysis or sleep will alone be used, and drawing a veil over the procedures of the army of tanks, they manage to make it seem that in the future war will be once more a great game for gentlemen. They seem to assume that the peoples attacked by their ingeniously designed armies will at once with one consent throw up their hands and cry " Kamerad". I venture to suggest that this is merely one more of those fancy pictures with which we are apt to delude ourselves when we take no account of the nature of man and scornfully ignore psychology.

1 Notably Col. J. T. C. Fuller, who has been called " the foremost military prophet of the day ", and Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart.

[31]

CHAPTER II THE CAUSES OF WAR

The world is sick with a terrible inter- mittent fever, and we who are living now in one of the periods of intermittence are vastly concerned to find some effective remedy before the next recurrence of the fever ; for the next attack may well prove fatal. And, like a sick man surrounded by anxious friends, we -hear a multitude of counsellors, prescribing prayers and phylacteries, repentance and good resolutions, pills and plasters, douches hot or cold. But, if the sick man is to choose wisely among the clamours of his counsellors, he must know some- thing of the causes of his disease, must be able to distinguish the underlying causes from mere symptoms and aggravating circumstances.

The parallel goes further and deeper. The sickness of the world is primarily a functional and mental disorder. The individual sufferer from such disorder, even if he seeks the advice of learned doctors, is all too likely to be treated as though his trouble were the effect of material causes. Just so the learned doctors of international disorders belong [32]

THE CAUSES OF WAR

for the most part to the materialistic school ; they have learned to accept the economic interpretation of history, to see only economic causes behind the world's disorder, and, forgetting that man does not live by bread alone, to prescribe only economic remedies.

If the individual sufferer turns from such materialistic advice to his spiritual adviser, to the man whose function is the cure of souls, he is too likely to receive only moral exhortation, exhortations that are perfectly futile, because he who gives them does not understand the nature of the disorder and cannot put his finger on the cause. So, also, when the World turns from its economic specialists, weary of their superficial and impracticable prescriptions, to its accepted moral guides, it receives merely moral exhortation and impotent denouncements of its wicked- ness and wrongdoings.

THE WICKEDNESS OF MAN

Let us dwell a moment on the diagnosis of the spiritual advisers. This is a numerous group which flourishes especially in the United States. It includes many, perhaps most, of the extreme " pacifists " or peace-at-any-price people. They are in the main somewhat naive and ignorant persons. Firmly convinced of their righteousness and of the good intentions of themselves and their circle of [33] D

THE CONQUEST OF WAR

like-minded people, they believe that war, like most other evils of the world, is due simply to the wickedness of a large part of mankind. These imaginary wicked people, whom they call variously soldiers, militarists, imperialists, aristocrats, monarchs, or predatory rulers, they conceive to be constituted very differently from themselves, somewhat after the pattern of an ever-hungry wolf of peculiarly vicious disposition that con- stantly rights from sheer "cussedness". Or they imagine that a large part of their fellow men are thirsting for military glory and the fun and excitement of killing other men, that, in fact, for some large part of the human race war is a highly esteemed sport pursued by these men by reason of their bloodthirsty nature, utterly regardless of the sufferings they may inflict or endure.

These good people remind me of a middle-aged spinster of my acquaintance who seriously believes that all women are born good and all men born bad. They have been taught to divide all mankind into sheep and goats, into the saved and the damned ; and they apply this simple philosophy when they discuss the problems of war and peace.

There is a small element of truth in this

view. To some primitive peoples war

has been a sport ; and there still exist

a few such tribes (as, for example, the

[34]

THE CAUSES OF WAR

Sea Dayaks of Borneo) and a few such men among the civilized nations. But their influence is negligible in the present age. Modern nations do not go to war without believing that they have some more serious reason for it than the sporting reasons, without some other and more powerful motive.

Some of the " pacifists " are rather closer to reality when they assert that certain groups of individuals, more especially armament-makers and certain financial and business groups, make war for the sake of the profiteering they hope to indulge in, or, more vaguely, for the sake of fishing in troubled waters. These (who form a transition to the group of ecomomic interpreters) grossly exaggerate the influence of such persons. It is absurd to suppose that those who desire peace (including as they do the vast majority of the populations, the politicians and the statesmen of the world) can be led willy-nilly to the slaughter by the sub- terranean influence of these few goats.

This view has lately been elaborated by a man who must command a respectful hearing by reason of his abilities and experience and also because he brings to bear on the problem a psychology rather less crude than that of other exponents of this view ; for, as I have implied in the sub-title to this little volume, the problem of war and peace is wholly [35]

THE CONQUEST OF WAR