machinery for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade life and property on a scale that surpasses the experience of the savage as much as a Dreadnought surpasses a canoe.
It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest. Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a cultivation of reason and sympathy.[1]
Many a reform has been actually retarded by the use of rhetoric. An outpour of vehement language seems to release, both in the speaker and in the assenting audience, a part of that energy which ought to issue in action. It has been one of the grave blunders of the Churches that they thought their function ended with the eloquent announcement that men were
- ↑ Let me again guard myself against misrepresentation. Were I of military age, I should to-day be in the trenches. The men who, as long as the military system is retained, expose their lives in our defence have my entire respect and gratitude. It is the system I impugn.
