Peace Theories and the Balkan War

of religion-A few ideas have changed the face of the world-The simple ideas the most important-The "theories" which have led to war-The work of the reformer to destroy old and false t

part responsible for this war, that it is their false theories which have made it necessary, that like

ht and not the wrong in human affairs, it is impossible for each one of us individuals to be wrong; that if the great mass is animated by temper, blindness, ignorance, passion, small and mean prejudices, it is not possible for "England" to stand for something quite different and for its influence to be ought but evil. To say that we are "for our country right or wrong" does not get over the matter at all; rather is it equivalent to saying that we would as readily have it stand for evil as for good. And we do not in the least seem to realize that for an Englishman to go on talking wicked nonsense a

t-if we persist in believing that it is no good discussing these matters, trying to find out the truth about them, writing books and building churches-our civilization is going to drift just precisely as those other civilizations which have been guided by the same dreadful fatalism

s, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment at all, fata

ord is just one of those three-shies-a-penny brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to correct errors in medicine or surgery, or edu

ome very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the mi

n; that is a very good reason why we should compose our differences in Europe. Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious questions, bigo

ressors; those who abolished slavery did a good work, though much of the world was left in industrial servitude; it was a good thing to abolish judicial torture, though much of our penal system did yet remain barbaric; it was a real advance to recognise the errors upon which these things rested, although

issues involved will render any decision save the sheer clash of physical force impossible; that the fiel

in the interests of all force should be withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was stronger. So in such things as witchcraft. The learned and astute judges of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the probabilities are against an old woman having caused

him hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the learned men of the subject. Had he read these volumes, that he talked so disrespectfully of their contents? No, replied Montaigne, he had not read them, and he was not going to, because they

oints of finance and economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real character of international relationship, why then public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound opinion and instincts i

ilitary confiscation, and needs the defence of military power, then the wealth of those small states should be insecure indeed-and Belgian national stocks stand 20 points higher than the German. If nations are rival units, then we should benefit by the disappearance of our rivals-and if they disappeared, something like a third of our population would starve to death. If the growth and prosperity of rival nations threatens us, then we should be in fa

plain facts which underlie them which will lead to sound

onents, the military mystics, who persistently shut their eyes to the great outstanding facts of history and of our time. And these fantastic theor

out undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a financial genius present weird columns of figures, which demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which they emb

time. It requires an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies, whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the same time. It is so much easier to seize on one fact and forget the other. Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered Alsace-Lorraine she has "captured" a province worth, "cash value," in my critic's phra

ty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to fight-and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate-Great Britain, in the interest

Jones, that you do not

tri

have said no such thi

d lay down my life for

s that I didn't k

ove America into a war that would have been disas

as a mile a vague frontier running through a South American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and America. The present writer happened at

tegrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe" is one. Just think of it! Take in the ful

ly-as all fundamental conceptions are held, and ought to be. The general conceptions in question are precisely the ones I have indicated: that nations are rival and strug

dom, and given the conditions which now obtain, the development will go on pari passu in all natio

ions do it first" is, of course, to condemn us all to impotence-for the other nations use the same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affa

policy just as did any considerable body of thought, whether French political thought of the eighteenth century, or German religious thought of the sixteenth century, even at a time when the means of producing that reaction, the book, liter

n village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution was not confined to France. The ideas which animated it re-acted directly upon our Empire, upon the American Colonies, upon the Spanish Colonies, upon Italy, and the formation of United Italy, upon Germany-the world over. These miracles, almost t

cal groups into which force does not enter, will lead the way to a better condition of things in Christendom. We have demonstrated that five independent nations, the nations of the British Empire, can settle their differences as between one another without the use of force. We have definitely decided that whatever the attitude Au

e so none of those things could have been accomplished. The greatest work of the renaissance was the elimination of physical force in the struggle of religious groups, in religious struggles generally; the greatest work of our generation will be elimination of physical force from the struggle of the political groups and from political struggles gener