ons what the street
fight is between individual citizens. War is futile, because it can
settle no questions of principle; it is immoral, because it is an
offence against the membership of a moral community. There is abundant
evidence in Blue Books and in the overt acts of Germany that war
releases and encourages the elementary brutality of the individual which
is normally inhibited by the consciousness of social relations. I have
tried to show in a former chapter that war serves the lowest interests
of a parasitic commercial class at the expense of the better part of the
community. War fosters at the same time the basest elements in the
individual, and the basest individuals in the community. War is a crime
against the peace of the people.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 86: _Supra_, I, Sec. 5.]

[Footnote 87: Mr. Gilbert Cannan has noted somewhere that "a 'straight'
fight between Great Britain and Germany will be like a fight between two
drunken women in a slum."]

[Footnote 88: See, for example, the quite definite and complete report
on _International Government_, published by the Fabian Society (1916):
and compare Mr. J. A. Hobson's book _Towards International Government_,
and Mr. H. G. Wells' _The World Set Free_.]

Sec. 8

Imperialism and Capitalism through War and Trade the Enemies: Socialism
to the Rescue

It is the most remarkable fact in political bibliography that all the
Utopias worth mentioning have been written by Socialists. The fact is
not surprising to anyone who has considered that the Socialists are the
only political party in the State who ever attempt to look more than a
dozen years ahead. The ordinary politician steers the ship by keeping a
look-out for rocks and squalls, and does not trouble to make for any
distant landmark. Only the Socialist looks ahead to a harbour attainable
perhaps in a hundred years, from which a happier voyage may be begun.
Only the Socialist seems to realise that in the world conceived, as
modern thought must conceive it, as a continuous process, Government
rather than Trade, Science and Art rather than Industry are the chief
activities of the citizen. Government is nothing less than the
organisation of the State to take its place among the other States of
the world. It includes of course education, being itself a form of
education: for the State must be educated to fulfil its duty to other
States, just as the citizen must be (and more or less is) educated in
duty toward