1. Where life is, there is strife. So it has been from the beginning, and so it will be always. In the world of animals there is incessant bloodshed: they prey one upon another: and “the end of every wild creature’s life is a tragedy.” They fight for their mates, for their young, for their food: they die, every year, millions of them, wounded or starved out. Everywhere, it is strife: every hawk is an aeroplane, every spider’s-web is a wire entanglement. Even in the world of plants and flowers, it still is a sort of war. Each seed in the ground, each blade of grass, each separate bud on a spray of hawthorn, must stand up for itself, to get all that it needs of light and air and nourishment: it must enforce its rights, if it would enjoy them: or it will be defeated. You may be sitting in a garden, with all the magic of hills and moorland round you; but you are in the midst of strife, for all that: you are in the zone des armees: and the sound of the fighting will be in your ears—if only you could hear it—till you are where no life is.
I remember one Sunday, when Dr. Guthrie was haranguing in Evangelical style on the evils of war, a theme in my opinion often treated in a rather shallow fashion by pulpit haranguers, he launched forth the unqualified proposition that “man is the only animal that goes to war with his kind.” The very next day I happened to be dining in the country at Craigcrook with my esteemed friend, John Hunter, Auditor of the Court of Session; and after tea, in the cool of the evening, we walked out, mine host and hostess with myself, into the domain of the garden and the adjacent grounds. After walking a little, suddenly we came in view of a heap of rubbish and straw, and other shades of things that were, on the top of which was standing a cock in a very dilapidated and displumed condition. “What’s the matter with that poor animal?” said I to the lady. “Oh, Mr. Blackie!” said she, “Mr. Blackie! it is a very sad sight that we see: if you had only been here this day last week, it was a magnificent animal!” “And what happened then,” said I, “in a single week to make such an awful change in its public presentment?” “Well, you see, Professor, it was just this: there was only one cock here before, and this was he; and oh! but he was a grand animal, a very earl or duke among cocks; but somehow we took an unhappy fancy to order another, and they fell to fighting, and the grand old fellow was dilapidated and ‘disjaskit’ in the sad style you see.” “Alas, poor cock!” said I, and then, reversing the key, I burst suddenly into a loud laugh. “What makes you laugh, Professor?” said the lady; “I think you might rather have cause to weep.” “Indeed I do both,” said I; “I weep for the poor brute, and I laugh at myself for having been so facile as for a day and an hour to believe what Dr. Guthrie said yesterday afternoon in his sermon!” “What could that be?” rejoined the lady. I then told her the facts of the anti-war sermon: she smiled, and I returned to the house pondering the power of the spoken word that will teach the most sober-minded men to give credence for an hour to the most unquestionable nonsense. [Note: John Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life, 299.]
2. Is man also by nature a fighting animal? Is it true that fighting instincts are given to him by inheritance, and that the law of his nature compels him from time to time to wage war?
To the first part of this question we must at once give an affirmative reply; i.e., we must agree that, so far as we can read the story of his development, man as he has existed has been, and as he exists today still is, a fighting animal; that is to say, that he has in the past answered, and still answers, certain stimuli by the immediate reactions which constitute fighting. In his lowest state man was little removed from his gorilla-like cousins who have left their descendants for our study. We see every reason to believe that he was as ready as they are to fight his neighbours that he might gain the immediate satisfaction of his needs and of his desires; and, so far as existing savages live what we picture to have been the lives of primitive men, we find them exemplifying these same characteristics.
Our permanent enemy is the rooted bellicosity of human nature. Man, biologically considered, and whatever else he may be into the bargain, is the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematicailly on his own species. We are once for all adapted to the military status. A millennium of peace would not breed the fighting disposition out of our bone and marrow, and a function so ingrained and vital will never consent to die without resistance, and will always find impassioned apologists and idealizers? [Note: William James, Memories and Studies, 300.]
At present the principles by which Puthans especially are guided in their intercourse with each other are those of retaliation —blood for blood, injury for injury, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”
An amusing instance of this occurred in a visit Edwardes paid one day in the hills. His host, a man of gigantic stature, to do honour to his visitor drew out his bed for a seat; and Edwardes was in his own mind amused for some time at the ridiculous disproportion of its size, being a very short one. At last he said to his host, “It surprises me how you, so tall a man, can lie upon a bed so very short.” “Oh,” said he, “I have a short bed in order to oblige me to sleep with my knees up, that I may sleep lightly! Do you see that smoke curling up from the hill below?” Edwardes looked where he pointed, and he saw a slight curl of smoke rising in the air. “That smoke is from the house of my enemy,” said the man; “I am two ahead of that man now, and I must sleep lightly. If I were to stretch myself out straight upon my charpoy, I should sleep so soundly that he would catch me asleep; but by sleeping with my knees up, I wake easily!”
“Two ahead” meant that he had killed two members of the other man’s family, that had to be paid off. [Note: Major-Gen. Herbert B. Edwardes, i. 300.]
3. We find evidence of the existence of this fighting instinct in the ordinary men around us. Remove but for a moment the restraints given in our civilized lands and this tendency is likely to become prominent upon the slightest stimulation. We see this exemplified in the lives of the pioneer and adventurer the world over: in that of the cowboy of the far West, in that of the rubber collector on the Amazon, in that of the ivory trader on the Congo. Then, too, the prize-fighter is still a prominent person in our community taken as a whole; and even in our sports, as engaged in by “gentlemen amateurs,” we find it necessary to make rigid rules to prevent the friendly contest from developing into a fierce struggle for individual physical dominance.
“The state of peace between men who live near one another,” says Kant, “is not the state of nature. The natural state is rather one of war.” This statement is too broad to be strictly accurate; for under certain conditions the stimuli which lead to the instinctive reaction may be lacking, and then the fighting propensities of the man, or nation, will not be evidenced. Such exceptional cases, however, do not take from the weight of the evidence going to show that deeply embedded in man’s nature are instincts that lead him to fight; to fight as an individual, and to fight with others of his kind in groups.
We are led to overlook this fact that war is based upon man’s instinctive fighting tendencies by the complexity of the modern fighting machine, and the equal complexity of the governmental processes which nowadays culminate in the initiation of war. The early man invented crude weapons which he himself handled to serve his direct hostile purpose. The modern man has devised methods of warfare on a grand scale which involve the use of men as parts of the complex weapon. So the personal initiation of attack has given place to action under the command of officers who treat the individual men as their agents; and these officers are subject to control from those still higher in position, who direct the beginnings and the processes of the fighting. But behind it all lies the tendency of the individual to fight, complicated enormously and masked by the fact that he has acquired a willingness to be guided by the judgment of others as to the best mode of gaining the victory.
Like Ruskin, Watts felt the horrors of war had a redeeming grandeur that an inglorious peace was without. He wished to trace for himself the larger forces behind the men of the moment who appeared to bear the responsibility of it. On this subject he said, “They might just as well say when they look at the clock, that the hands made the hour.” “The poet,” he thought, “too often ignores the condition of conflict and its necessity, especially that state of effervescence amongst men which leads to war. Wars can never cease, because men are driven to it periodically by a force they cannot control, and which is inherent in nature. They will recur and recur again, unless co-operation brings about a revolution in the natural character of the human being.” [Note: George Frederick Watts, ii. 295.]
4. But, although instincts can rarely if ever be obliterated, their manifestations may be so altered as to give the animal quite new characteristics. And this means that if the characteristics which we describe as the expression of man’s fighting instincts could be so changed that these expressions were inhibited, or turned into quite new channels, the man would no longer be describable as a fighting animal.
Before Christ came there was no peace, either in principle or in expression, among men. War was the normal condition and practice of mankind. The strong ruled the weak. The world was divided into two classes, oppressors and slaves. Wrong had become systematized. Civil government, which should be a fountain of peace, was a source of war; and nations were as wild animals that have no law but their appetites and their fears. Men in their individual relations were antagonistic and rude. Humane impulse had not been born. Brotherly love, as of one stock and race, was unknown. The Jew hated the Gentile, and the Gentile retaliated on the Jew. Even religion begat animosities, and men inspired by it became cruel and perverse. Now, Christ came to change all this, and the angelic heralds truly proclaimed His mission. He came to introduce a new and higher order of life and feeling, to awaken the dormant power of sympathy in man, to bridge the chasm of hatred which divided nations and races, and bring at last the acknowledgment and practice of universal brotherhood.
But the struggle is not over yet. Sometimes it seems as though it had hardly begun. For the symbol of the wild beast still seems the best symbol for the great nations of the modern world. The British lion, the Russian bear, the German eagle, the Chinese dragon—we are familiar with them all. But what do they imply? Do they not imply that the appeal is still to brute force, that rapacity and carnage still rule the relations of nation to nation? Where is the Kingdom of the Son of Man? It is an appalling thing to realize how thin is the crust that civilization has spread over the volcanic fires of primitive savagery in modern life, how little it needs to change the voices of men into the wild howls of beasts of prey. Man holds his kingdom by a precarious tenure. It is because these things are so that there lies on us, who call ourselves Christians, so tremendous a responsibility. For our appeal can never be to the beast, but always to the man. That is what evolution means—the subjugation of the brute in us to the purposes of the spirit:
If my body came from brutes, tho’ somewhat finer than their own,
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute?
No; but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne,
Hold the sceptre, human soul, and rule thy province of the brute.
We know that this is true of our own lives, that the first Christmas Day began the fulfilment of the prophet’s dream of the brute world ruled by the hand of a little child. But are we sufficiently alive to the truth that the same law holds good for the life of the world?
