o
a predatory and parasitic class war seems only a logical extension of
the principles upon which it habitually acts; and for this reason
privileged orders seldom feel much moral compunction about a war-policy.
Lastly, among the causes of the war must be reckoned one which has
received far too little attention from social and political
philosophers--the tenacious and half-unconscious memories of a race.
Injustice comes home to roost, sometimes after an astonishingly long
interval. The disaffection of Catholic Ireland would be quite
unintelligible without the massacres of the sixteenth century and the
unjust trade-legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth. The
bitterness of the working class in England has its roots in the earlier
period of the industrial revolution (about 1760-1832), when the
labourer, with his wife and children, was treated as the 'cannon-fodder'
of industry. Similarly, the seeds of Prussian brutality and
aggressiveness were sown at Jena and in the raiding of Prussia for
recruits before the Moscow expedition. If such were the causes of the
great world-war, how little can be hoped from courts of international
arbitration!

These considerations have, perhaps, made it clear that the main causes
of international conflicts are what the Epistle of St. James declares
them to be--'the lusts that war in your members,' the pugnacious and
acquisitive instincts which pervade our social life in times of peace,
and not least in those nations which pride themselves on having advanced
beyond the militant stage. There are some who accept this state of
things as natural and necessary, and who blame Christianity for carrying
on a futile campaign against human nature. This is a very different
indictment from that which condemns Christianity for tolerating a
preventible evil; and it is, in our opinion, even less justified. The
argument that, because war has always existed, it must always continue
to exist, is justly ridiculed by Mr. Norman Angell. 'It is commonly
asserted that old habits of thought can never be shaken; that, as men
have been, so they will be. That, of course, is why we now eat our
enemies, enslave their children, examine witnesses with the thumbscrew,
and burn those who do not attend the same church.'

The long history of war as a racial habit explains why a ruinous and
insane anachronism shows such tenacity; for the conditions which
established the habit among primitive tribes demonstrably no longer