* *

At one time I was absolutely certain that the Great War was caused by
economic factors; British and German capital were competing, and the
losing party took up the sword. I am not so certain now. It may be
that the cataclysm was a natural ebullition of human nature, and as a
cause the economic rivalry may have been just as insignificant as the
murder of the Archduke.

During the last few decades education has been almost wholly
intellectual and material; intellectual education gave us the don, and
material education gave us the cotton-spinner. The emotional and the
spiritual in mankind had no outlet. In the unconscious of man there is
a God and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of
expression to either. And when any godlike or devilish libido can find
no outlet it regresses to infantile primitive forms; thus, while the
brain of man was concerned with mathematics and logic, the heart of man
was seeking primitive things--cruelty, hate, and blood.

It may be then that the war was the direct result of the world's bad
system of education. No boy will destroy property if he is free to
create property, and no nation will take to killing if it is free to be
creative. Intellectual education allows no freedom for the creative
impulse; it not only starves the creative impulse but it drives it into
rebellion. An outlet is always a door to purification. The old men
who sat at home hated the Hun because their libido was being bottled
up, but the young men who were using up their libido in fighting talked
cheerfully of "Old Fritz." The chained dog soon becomes savage, and
the chained libido reverts to savagery also.

I have often said that the outrages of the German troops in Belgium
became understandable to me when I studied a Scots school where
suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of
the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their
discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the national soul.
Intellectualism and materialism were the Prussian drill-sergeants who
enslaved the emotional life of the citizen and of the nation. War was
a means of releasing this pent-up emotion.

The ultimate cure for war is the releasing of the beast in the heart of
mankind . . . not the releasing after chaining him up, but the
releasing of the beast from the beginning. Personally I do not believe
that he is a wild beast until we make him one by chain