These pacifists or internationalists of Britain have strongly in them the English hatred of cruelty, and they have in high development the national habit of shortcuts in thought; as, for instance, when you may hear them say that war is wrong, which is as much as to say that a house on fire is wrong.
This habit of taking shortcuts in thought is often called, not only by foreigners who are unused to the English habit of mind, but by Englishmen themselves, an incapacity for clear thinking. I do not quite agree. As it seems to me, the essential characteristic of this way of speaking and thinking is not its lack of lucidity—for, though that is evident enough, it is not the essential. The essential is the taking for granted of a great many things which are not expressed. This habit of taking shortcuts in speech is in some way a habit common to all this group of islands; for the Scotch have it, too, though not so strongly marked as the English; and the Irish have it very pronouncedly indeed: it is far more marked in them than in the English, and is the root of the “bull.”
For instance, when a man says that war is wrong, he is saying something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonsense. But if we expand the phrase, it has full and definite meaning. He means “for one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon the organisation of another such community, with the object of gain or increase of power, is wrong.” And so it undoubtedly is. Or, when he says that war is silly and not worth while, he again means (when we fully expand his phrase for him) that such action is commonly so expensive and hurtful, even to those who successfully use it, that it is a bad speculation. In this, indeed, he is not so certainly right as in his first proposition, for most victorious wars in history have handsomely paid the victors; but my point is that this kind of talk, whether about war or anything else, is not due to muddleheadedness; though it goes with muddleheadedness. It is due to a clotting of thought through compression.
One phrase which I very often hear (and which, as it stands, is apparently a piece of bestial unintelligence) may further my point. It is the phrase: “Some religion ought to be taught in the schools.”
It is obvious that this phrase as it stands is a contradiction in terms; for the word “ought” can only apply to a moral good; and if such and such a religious system is of good effect, then an opposite and contradictory religious system will be of evil effect. If I think it wrong to murder, if my religion teaches me that murder is a great moral evil, then I teach children in schools that this is so. But if my religion is that of an Oriental body I have heard of, called Thugs, with whom murder is a high religious act, then I teach an opposite set of morals. Both religions cannot be good. One must be good and the other evil. But when you hear people say, “Some religion should be taught in the schools,” what they mean is that “the general Protestant ethics of the English people should, on their broader lines, be taught in the English schools.” They take for granted that everyone using the word “religion” means English Protestantism. Having taken that for granted, they shorten their speech in the fashion I have just quoted.
And really such wandering of the mind over this, that, and the other, as I have thus indulged before sleep, in the pleasant little cabin of the Nona (pleasant to me, odious to the pernickety, for it is a hugger-mugger home), watching between the open skylight and the combing a little belt of nightly sky with stars, is a poor adjunct to the scent of the sea, and to the Devon air. To the devil with all reasonings and counter-reasonings and abstractions and argufying: I am for sleep.
We woke early next morning to the noise of the loud clapping of water upon the bows, and I put my head out of the skylight to see little dusty clouds going too quickly across the heavens, and a freshening breeze blowing up from a little south of west, so that all the harbour water was dancing and alive. But the glass was high, and there was no reason why we should not take the sea again, only we must wait for the ebb (which would come in about three hours’ time, nearer nine than eight o’clock). For, in that blanketed part of the river down below, we should never get the Nona out against the flood. Nevertheless, I asked my companion whether it might not be wise to take another man, for we were going down the coast, where the rare harbours were shoal, and not easy to enter, and also small, and lay so that, with such a wind, one would have to beat up to them. An extra hand, such as we had with us during the never-to-be-forgotten business of Bardsey, would be an advantage. Such a hand, therefore, after minute enquiry and searching questions, did we ship; then, all things having been done in their order, and sail set with the second jib and two reefs in the mainsail and one reef forward, we got up the anchor and let her down for the sea.
The hand we had shipped (promising him his journey home by rail within three days at the most) was very well got up in sailor fashion, with his jersey and his peaked cap, the latter worn a trifle to one side, after the fashion of those who are daring, and challenge Aeolus. His trousers, it was true, did not spread out at the bottom,
