tly an attempt to cure that maladjustment, can be averted only
by policies which provide some other cure. To destroy war one must
find some alternative regulator or governor of societies.

In their failure to provide such a regulator, or even to recognise that
such a regulator is necessary, lies the vital defect of many of the
peace plans to-day. Pacifism may be either static or dynamic; it may
seek to keep things as they are, to crystallise international society
in its present forms, or on the other hand may base itself on the
assumption that these forms will change. It may address itself to the
problem of stopping the world as one stops a clock, of forbidding
unequal growth of nations, of discountenancing change, or it may seek
to find an outlet and expression for the discontent and unrest which
all growth {223} brings. Pacifism that is static is doomed. Our only
hope lies in a dynamic, evolutionary pacifism, based on a principle of
the ever-changing adjustment of nations to an ever-changing environment.

At the bottom of static pacifism lies a conception somewhat as follows.
The nations of the earth have an interest in maintaining peace, but are
forced, tricked or lured into war by the tyranny or craft of princes
and capitalists or by their own prejudices and sudden passions. Some
nations are peaceful and some, by reason of an evil education, hostile;
wherefore the hostile nations must be restrained by the peaceful, as
the anti-social classes are restrained by the community. Honest
differences of opinion among nations must be arbitrated; angry passions
must be allowed to cool, and the nations must go about unarmed that
there may be no indiscriminate shooting. Given these precautions we
shall have peace.

But it is a peace without change, and such a peace, apart from its
being impossible, is not even desirable. What the static pacifist does
not perceive is that he is hopelessly conservative and stationary in a
swiftly moving world. He would like to build a wall against Time and
Change, to put down his stakes and bid evolution cease. It is this
pathetic clinging to fixity, to a something immutable, that vitiates
his proposals. Nations that hate war prefer it nevertheless to the
preservation of unendurable conditions, and the best conditions, if
they remain unaltered, speedily become unendurable. We should not be
satisfied to-day with the best constitution of the world agreed upon a
hundred years ago, bef