in present-day society. It is significant that every absolute pacifist, although he hopes that the propagation of his philosophy will prevent war, will never surrender his philosophy even if he is compelled by the evidence to admit that it cannot be successful. In other words, the ground on which he holds it, ultimately, has nothing to do with its instrumental efficacy in preventing war.
Does this mean that we must accept a law to the effect that there will always be wars between nations and classes in world society? Yes, if we accept the major institutions, economic, educational, ethnic, political, that have so far existed in history as permanent features of the social scene. No, if we believe that we can use our knowledge of other laws of human behaviour to modify these institutions, to experiment and devise new ones, and to correct them in the light of their consequences. The frequency and intensity of wars can be diminished in a world society in which through peaceful social processes men can actually get at a lesser cost the things they believe—often mistakenly—that war can win for them. It is not a matter of fate that men must war on one another. Nor are men altogether free not to fight when conflicts of basic interests cannot be resolved to their mutual satisfaction through means other than war.
4. The philosophy and practices of modern democracy to a large extent developed with the growth of a capitalist society. As the capitalist economy matured through the phase of industrial capitalism to finance and monopoly capitalism, a great many of the freedoms associated with the democratic philosophy became progressively restricted. The economic and social restrictions flowed from the consequences of large-scale industrial organization under capitalism. Political restrictions resulted when the State actively intervened in industry, sometimes to co-operate with, and sometimes to curb, monopolistic practices. Equality of opportunity, central to the philosophy and practice of democracy, was much more in evidence in the agrarian economy of Jefferson’s day than in the twentieth-century era of gigantic corporations, trusts, cartels, and monopolies.
Many who are loyal to Jefferson’s democratic philosophy believe that it is dying in the present-day capitalist world and that it will certainly be dead in the collectivist world of to-morrow. Unable to convince themselves that his philosophy can be modified so as to vivify and redirect the world of modern
