ammunition no man of the white
race in the United States would be able to think of such a
catastrophe without horror and remorse." All of the
contending nations say that they are fighting for existence,
which means that if they do not win in the end they will be
wiped out. With such an alternative staring us in the face
very few tears would be shed by Americans, of any color, if
both the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, with all their
belongings, should be wiped off the face of the earth.

War and Non-Resistance

The pacifist "mollycoddle," as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him in his
San Francisco Exposition speech, finds expression in these words of
Bertrand Russell in the August number of the Atlantic Monthly:

All these three motives for armaments--cowardice, love of
dominion, and lust for blood--are no longer ineradicable in
civilized human nature. All are diminishing under the
influence of modern social organization. All might be
reduced to a degree which would make them almost innocuous,
if early education and current moral standards were directed
to that end. Passive resistance, if it were adopted
deliberately by the will of a whole nation, with the same
measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in
war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is
good in national life than armies and navies can ever
achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter
of brutality involved in modern war.

But it is hardly to be expected, Mr. Russell reluctantly concludes,
that progress will come in this way, because "the imaginative effort
required is too great." He adds:

It is much more likely that it will come, like the reign of
law within the state, by the establishment of a central
government of the world, able and willing to secure
obedience by force, because the great majority of men will
recognize that obedience is better than the present
international anarchy.

A central government of this kind would command assent not
as a partisan, but as the representative of the interests of
the whole. Very soon resistance to it would be seen to be
hopeless and wars would cease. Force directed by a neutral
authority is not open to the same abuse or likely to cause
the same long-drawn conflicts as force exercised by
quarreling