What interests us most in all the war literature is any proposed method of union. The importance of an international league as a peace plan is that you can never aim directly at peace, peace is what you get through other things. Much of the peace propaganda urges us to choose peace rather than war. But the decision between “war” or “peace” never lies within our power. These are mere words to gather up in convenient form of expression an enormous amount that is underneath. All sorts of interests compete, all sorts of ideas compete or join: if they can join, we have peace; if they must compete, we have war. But war or peace is merely an outcome of the process; peace or war has come, by other decisions, long before the question of peace or war ever arises.
All our hope therefore of future international relations lies, not in the ethical exhortations of the pacifists, nor in plans for an economic war, but in the recognition of the possibility of a community of nations.
In making a plea for some experiment in international cooperation, I remember, with humiliation, that we have fought because it is the easy way. Fighting solves no problems. The problems which brought on this war will all be there to be settled when the war ends. But we have war as the line of least resistance. We have war when the mind gives up its job of agreeing as too difficult.145 It is often stated that conflict is a necessity of the human soul, and that if conflict should ever disappear from among us, individuals would deteriorate and society collapse. But the effort of agreeing is so much more strenuous than the comparatively easy stunt of fighting that we can harden our spiritual muscles much more effectively on the former than the latter. Suppose I disagree with you in a discussion and we make no effort to join our ideas, but “fight it out.” I hammer away with my idea, I try to find all the weakest parts of yours, I refuse to see anything good in what you think. That is not nearly so difficult as trying to recognize all the possible subtle interweavings of thought, how one part of your thought, or even one aspect of one part, may unite with one part or one aspect of one part of mine etc. Likewise with cooperation and competition in business: cooperation is going to prove so much more difficult than competition that there is not the slightest danger of anyone getting soft under it.
The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down together after browsing on the consciousness of their happy agreements. We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. I knew a young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply obeyed commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since he left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life.
If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from bloodshed, if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the fight of employer and employed, the fight of different interests in the legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a different matter. But if you are going to try to solve the problems of capital and labor, of competing business interests, of differing nations, it is a tougher job than standing up on the battlefield.
We are told that when the North Sea fishermen found that they were bringing flabby codfish home to market, they devised the scheme of introducing one catfish into every large tank of codfish. The consequent struggle hardened the flesh of the fish and they came firm to market. The conclusion usually drawn from all such stories is that men need fighting to keep them in moral condition. But what I maintain is that if we want to train our moral muscles we are devising a much harder job for them if we try to agree with our catfish than to fight him.
Civilization calls upon us to “Agree with thine adversary.” It means a supreme effort on our part, and the future of the world depends upon whether we can make this effort, whether we are equal to the cry of civilization to the individual man, to the individual nation. It is a supreme effort because it is not, as sometimes thought, a matter of feeling. To feel kindly, to desire peace—no, we must summon every force of our natures, trained minds and disciplined characters, to find the methods of agreement. We may be angry and fight, we may feel kindly and want peace—it is all about the same. The world will be regenerated by the people who rise above both these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people can agree.
What has this young twentieth century
