In our own times a philosophy not very dissimilar has been voiced in the public declarations of ex-President Roosevelt. I choose a few phrases from his speeches and writings, at random:
We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who submits to insult. What is true of a man ought to be true of a nation.44
We must play a great part in the world, and especially … perform those deeds of blood, of valor, which above everything else bring national renown.
We do not admire a man of timid peace.
By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
In this world the nation that is trained to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound to go down in the end before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.45
Professor William James covers the whole ground of these claims in the following passage:
The war party is assuredly right in affirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more universal and enduring competitive passion. … Pacifism makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality, nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth these things; that, taking human nature as a whole, war is its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace economy. … Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life without hardihood would be contemptible. … This natural feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of army writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a biological or sociological necessity. … Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.46
Even famous English clergymen have voiced the same view. Charles Kingsley, in his defence of the Crimean War as a “just war against tyrants and oppressors,” wrote: “For the Lord Jesus Christ is not only the Prince of Peace, He is the Prince of War, too. He is the Lord of Hosts, the God of armies, and whoever fights in a just war against tyrants and oppressors is fighting on Christ’s side, and Christ is fighting on his side. Christ is his captain and his leader, and he can be in no better service. Be sure of it, for the Bible tells you so.”47
Canon Newbolt, Dean Farrar, and the Archbishop of Armagh, have all written not dissimilarly.
The whole case may be summarized thus:
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Nations fight for opposing conceptions of right: it is the moral conflict of men.
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They fight from non-rational causes of a lower kind: from vanity, rivalry, pride of place, the desire to occupy a great situation in the world, or from sheer hostility to dissimilar people—the blind strife of mutually hating men.
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These causes justify war, or render it inevitable. The first is admirable in itself, the second is inevitable, in that the peoples readiest to fight, and showing most energy in fighting, replace the more peacefully inclined, and the warlike type tends thus permanently to survive; “the warlike nations inherit the earth.”
Or it may be put deductively, thus: Since struggle is the law of life, and a condition of survival as much with nations as with other organisms, pugnacity, which is merely intense energy in struggle, a readiness to accept struggle in its acutest form, must necessarily be a quality marking those individuals successful in the vital contests. It is this deep-seated, biological law which renders impossible the acceptance by mankind of the literal injunction to turn the other cheek to the smiter, or for human nature ever to conform to the ideal implied in that injunction; since, were it accepted, the best men and nations—in the sense of the kindliest and most humane—would be placed at the mercy of the most brutal, who, eliminating the least brutal, would stamp the survivors with their own brutality and reestablish the militarist virtues. For this reason a readiness to fight, which means the qualities of rivalry and pride and combativeness, hardihood, tenacity, and heroism—what we know as the manly qualities—must in any case survive as the race survives, and, since this stands in the way of the predominance of the purely brutal, it is a necessary part of the highest morality.
Despite the apparent force of these propositions, they are founded upon a gross misreading of certain facts, and especially upon a gross misapplication of a certain biological analogy.
II
The Psychological Case for Peace
The shifting ground of pro-war arguments—The narrowing gulf between the material and moral ideals—The non-rational causes of war—False biological analogies—The real law of man’s struggle: struggle with Nature, not with other men—Outline sketch of man’s advance and main operating factor therein—The progress towards elimination of physical force—Cooperation across frontiers and its psychological result—Impossible to fix limits of community—Such limits irresistibly expanding—Break up of State homogeneity—State limits no longer coinciding with real conflicts between men.
Those who have followed at all closely the peace advocacy of the last few years will have observed a curious shifting of ground on the part of its opponents. Until quite recently, most peace advocacy being based on moral, not material grounds, pacifists were generally criticized as unduly idealistic, sentimental, oblivious to the hard necessities of men in a hard world of struggle, and disposed to ask too much of human nature in the way of altruistic self-sacrifice on behalf of an idealistic dogma. We were given to understand that while peace might represent a great
