1. “The world,” says the Archbishop of Armagh, “undoubtedly owes much to war. To take a few outstanding instances: the vast conquests of Alexander spread the influences of the Greek genius over the whole East: the march of the Roman legions consolidated the ancient civilization and produced a great social order which became the foundation of the modern world: the shattering inroads of the white barbarians of the north brought into Europe a new vigour and prepared mankind for a new birth. These instances are so remote from our modern life that we can judge of their value with clear and unprejudiced vision. It is probable that if we could estimate with equal definiteness the value of more recent wars we should find that they performed functions of almost equal importance in the making of mankind. Certainly, the Napoleonic wars remodelled Europe and gave Great Britain her chance of world-wide empire, and the more recent Russo-Japanese war lifted the Far East to a new position in history and gave Japan the opportunity to shape her own destiny. Perhaps we are too near to these events to judge of their value: their importance cannot be questioned.” [Note: C. F. D’Arcy, in The Irish Church Quarterly, viii. 1.]
“We cannot forget,” says Maurice, “that every nation now existing in Europe became a nation through war. Britain was a part of the Roman Empire; a civilized province of that Empire; growing in luxuries. It was christianized when the rest of the Empire was christianized; it had its bishops as well as its prefects. It rebelled frequently against its masters; it was fertile, the saying is, in tyrants. It was not free therefore from petty wars by sea or land. But it was no nation. By battles—to what degree exterminating or subversive of the previous civilization historians may dispute, but certainly by battles severe and bloody—the Saxons established their supremacy here. It seemed to the old inhabitants mere destruction, a relapse into barbarism and Paganism. We say that a mighty blessing came out of this apparent relapse. First, a truer wholesome family life took the place of the corrupt family life which the Satirists of Rome describe and which passed from the capital into the provinces. Secondly, a people strong in the sense of neighbourhood, strong in the sense of personal existence, capable therefore of Law, of Government, bringing with them the roots of a vital native speech, overthrew colonists in whom there was a feeble sense of neighbourhood, a feeble feeling of personal responsibility, who merely received Laws, Government, Language, Religion, from Foreigners. The Saxon wars, destructive as they might be, yet were in the strictest sense the commencement of a new life in our island.” [Note: F. D. Maurice, Social Morality, 174.]
H. F. Wyatt, in War as the Supreme Test of National Life, says: “In the past history of man, war—so far from having been an unmixed evil as it has often been represented—has been the absolutely necessary condition of human advance. If, at any given period in the past, war could have been abolished (which was impossible) social evolution must have been arrested, because the only practicable means of effecting change and movement among nations would have been removed. In other words, the then existing political conditions would have been stereotyped.”
Ez fer the war, I go agin it,—
I mean to say I kind o’ du,—
Thet is, I mean thet, bein’ in it,
The best way wuz to fight it thru;
Not but wut abstract war is horrid,
I sign to thet with all my heart,—
But civlyzation doos git forrid
Sometimes upon a powder-cart. [Note: J. R. Lowell, Poems, 49.]
How came we to conquer India? Was it not a direct consequence of trading with India? And that is only the most conspicuous illustration of a law which prevails throughout English history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the law, namely, of the intimate interdependence of war and trade, so that throughout that period trade leads naturally to war and war fosters trade. I have pointed out already that the wars of the eighteenth century were incomparably greater and more burdensome than those of the Middle Ages. In a less degree those of the seventeenth century were also great. These are precisely the centuries in which England grew more and more a commercial country. England indeed grew ever more warlike at that time as she grew more commercial. [Note: J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 127.]
2. But there is another side. The economic case against war has been emphasized so repeatedly in pacifist literature ever since the publication of Mr. Norman Angell’s epoch-making work, The Great Illusion, that one would be justified in assuming that the supreme cause of war has been its supposed promise of economic gain, and that once this theory has been permanently refuted, war will have lost its greatest incentive. President Butler of Columbia University puts this universally accepted theory in effective language.
“We have now reached a point,” he says, “where unparalleled enthusiasm having been aroused for a rational and orderly development of civilization through the co-operation of the various nations of the earth, it remains to clinch that enthusiasm and to transform it into established policy by proving to all men that militarism does not pay, and that peace is profitable. Just so long as the great mass of mankind believe that military and naval rivalry between civilized nations creates and protects trade, develops and assures commerce, and gives prestige and power to people otherwise weak, just so long will the mass of mankind be unwilling to compel their governments to recede from militaristic policies whatever may be their vocal professions as to peace and arbitration and as to goodwill and friendship between men of different tongues and of different blood.”
What is the value of our institutions, our civilisations, if it leads only to the slaughter of millions, to suffering for all, to the reversal of every humane impulse, of all teaching founded in the Religion of Love?
“If civilisation be not in men’s hearts, then it is nowhere, it does not exist.”
So speaks a character in a book by a French doctor, marked by a note of fierce prophetic warning and by terrible clearness of sight. That is what the Coming Revolution will teach.
“I often think of civilisation, real civilisation. In my mind it is like a choir of tuneful voices singing, or a marble statue on a bare hill, or a man who says, ‘Love one another,’ or ‘Return good for evil.’ But men have done no more than repeat these things for two thousand years. The kings and priests have far too many interests in this world to think of others like them.” [Note: H. H. Fyfe, The Meaning of the World Revolution, 28.]
