type, greed, resentment, and suspicion. The greatest of
these vague oppositions is that want of faith which makes man say war
has always been and must always be, which makes them prophesy that
whatever we do will become corrupted and evil, even in the face of
intolerable present evils and corruptions.
When at the outbreak of the war I published an article headed "The War
That Will End War," at once Mr. W.L. George hastened to reprove my
dreaming impracticability. "War there has always been." Great is the
magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed
completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen
centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war
and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have
about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a
motor car--namely, that they may all be the means of death.
If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it
altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America,
it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr.
George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their
somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the
great task of settlement before the world.
It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who
render possible the continuation of war dangers. They give scope for
the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride
and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war
and more. And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the
disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands. "What do we
know about the nuance of such things?" they will ask, with that laziness
that apes modesty. It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out
the armaments people. Probably all the private armament firms in the
world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers
will shake their heads and say: "Then there will only be something else
instead."
Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater
settlement. Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is
imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile. Russia is a land of
strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality
of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the
Wilhelm-Nap
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