War antagonizes some principle which is
religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no
justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any
price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to
commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of
this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds
of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask
them to go.

The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less
emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker
undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the
cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and
produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects
unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many,
among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in
which he calls war _dysgenic_. The psychologist tends to see in war a
reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original
savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say.
War lingers because of man's love of old institutions. We cling to old
habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the aesthetic, because
of their antiquity and old associations. This is the explanation by
Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and
despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery.
MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.

Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer
senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational
desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil. The working man
and all the masses are likely to concur in this opinion. When they
examine war they see that they themselves as they think are used in
the interest of the few, that they shed their blood for a glory in
which they do not share. They say, all men are brothers, and so why
should they kill one another. Men seem more real to them than do
boundaries of countries which they never see, and the interests of
wealth that is also invisible.

Such thought as this has behind it some of the most powerful minds, as
we know. It is Tolstoi's philosophy, and it is the argument of such
men as Novicow. The professional economist and the student of history
add their protests. They say that military peoples fade away, while
the pe