Why War? 





My case is that war is not something 
that is inevitable, but is the result of 
certain man-made circumstances ; that 
man can abolish them, as he abolished 
the circumstances in which the plague 
flourished 



NEW REVISED EDITION 




C. E. M. Joad 

C. E. M. Joad, M.A., D.Lit., was born 
in 1 891 , educated at BlundelPs School, 
Tiverton, and Balliol College, Oxford, 
and entered the Civil Service in 
August 1914. He was in the Ministry 
of Labour from 1914 to 1930. He 
then resigned and became Head of 
the Department of Philosophy and 
Psychology at Birkbeck College, 
University of London. He is the 
author of numerous original books 
of philosophy, having chiefly estab- 
lished his reputation as an interpreter 
of philosophy for the general public. 
His Guide to Philosophy, published in 
1936, has been reprinted nine times. 
Is also the author of two unusual 
autobiographical books, the Book of 
Joad and the Testament of Joad. 
Finally, he is well known as a pacifist. 
He is a keen rider, a great walker, 
plays hockey and tennis. 



WHY WAR? 



by 
C. E. M. JOAD 

AUTHOR OF 

Guide to Philosophy 

Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics 

The Book of Joad 

Guide to Modern Thought, etc. 




PUBLISHED AS A PENGUIN SPECIAL' BY 

PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED 

HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND 



First published 1939 
Reprinted September 1939 



MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR PENGUIN'^BOOKSIlIMITED 
BY PURNELL AND SONS, LTD., PAULTON (SOMERSET)*AND LONDON 



WHY WAR? 

CHAPTER I 

THE CRISIS REHASHED 

INTRODUCTORY 

The Author's Background. 

For most of my life I have been a Socialist ; my opinions 
and convictions are those of a man of the Left. When 
at the end of last September we felt the breath of war, 
most of those who share my political views, whose 
hopes are mine, who, as individuals acknowledge the 
same values, and as reformers desire the same changes 
in society as I do, and with whom, therefore, I am in 
the habit of discussing public affairs — in a word, the 
great majority of my friends and acquaintances, were 
urgent that we should "take a firm stand" with France 
and Russia against "Fascist aggression". We were to 
intimate to Hitler in plain language that, if he persisted 
in his designs for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, 
we would fight him. 

They did not believe that this "stand" would in fact 
result in war, for faced by a combination of England, 
France, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, with only Italy 
as a doubtful ally, Hitler must, they thought, inevitably 
withdraw. His bluff would be called, his prestige dimmed, 
his power shaken ; but should he, in spite of these con- 
siderations, nevertheless persist, then we were to fight. 

I found myself unable to agree with this reasoning, 
or, subscribe to the course of policy which it recom- 
mended. I am by tradition and conviction a pacifist. 

7 



26 WHY WAR? 

arguments which I summarized earlier in the Chapter, 
Fascism is incurably aggressive; it must continue to 
expand. Sooner or later a conflict with the British 
Empire sprawling defencelessly across the face of the 
world is inevitable. The longer it is put off, the weaker 
we shall be. Therefore we must take the risk of war 
now in order to avoid the certainty of war later. In 
other words, we should offer war in order to preserve 
peace. 




CHAPTER V 

THE CASE AGAINST WAR P/^V 

Summary of the Argument 

If you are not proposing to fight a war, it is foolish to 
prepare tor it, since your preparations will be interprete d^ 
^by your neighbours as a threat. Therefore the arguments 
which, in the discussion that follows, are used to estab- 
lish the case against war are, with unimportant excep- 
tions, equally relevant to the case against armaments. 
In this chapter and the next, I shall treat the two cases 
as if they were the same. I shall argue : 

(I) That preparedness for fighting and willingness to 
fight do not give security to the nation which is prepared 
and willing. Armaments, in fact, do not give safety in 
the short run. 

(II) That the disposition to achieve its ends by violence 
is not a characteristic that promotes survival either in 
an organism or in a community. Belligerence, in fact, 
has no survival value in the long run. 

(III) That nations who go to war do not, even if 
victorious, succeed under modern conditions in achieving 
the aims for which they were ostensibly fighting, and 
that the effects of war are in general other than those 
which are either wished or intended. 

(IV) That this generalization is convincingly illustrated 
by the results of the last war. 

(V) That it will be illustrated even more convincingly 
by the results of the next. 

Finally, I shall try to show that war is irrational and 
amoral ; that it promotes stupidity, puts a premium upon 
vice, discourages intelligence and diminishes virtue ; that, 

64 



70 WHY WAR? 



Europe's Suicide Race. 

The process of out-arming your supposedly dangerous 
neighbour, and so provoking him to defend himself by 
out-arming you, has been the outstanding characteristic 
of the history of post-war Europe. We fought the last 
war because we believed ourselves to be threatened by 
the German army. We won and, having won, we pro- 
ceeded to disarm Germany, sinking her navy and reduc- 
ing her army to a mere hundred thousand men. Observ- 
ing that the allies did not keep their promise to disarm, 
and finding her attempts to conciliate them unsuccessful, 
Germany starts to rearm herself, at first secretly and 
presently openly. She introduces conscription and 
builds an air force which is superior to that of any other 
power. Terrified by this resurgence of her old enemy, 
the English, who have never in any single year since 
the last war spent less than £100 million on preparations 
for the next, begin themselves to rearm in earnest. As 
the years pass, the pace grows hotter. A short time ago 
the British Prime Minister announced a programme of 
£1,500 million to be spent on armaments over a period 
of five years. In the year of writing (1938) we have 
spent £370 million, but it is now generally recognized 
that this is not enough. In 1939 we are to spend more, 
far more than we spent in 1938. 

And, inevitably, our preparations start the sequence of 
cause and effect which I have described. During the 
week in which these paragraphs are being written, the 
accelerated pace of our rearmament has been unfavour- 
ably commented upon by Hitler. Why, he asks, if we 
are peacefully inclined, do we require these burdensome 
armaments ? To him, at least, it is not clear. What is 
clear, is that Germany cannot allow herself to be out- 
done. She has had a start in the race and she must keep 
it. And so Germany is rearming more feverishly than 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 71 

ever and, calling the foundries of the newly acquired 
Sudeten German territory and the chemical works at 
Aussig to her assistance, bends her back to the shoul- 
dering of new burdens. 

Mr. Churchill and Sir Norman Angell VYim^ « '/ y 



*>»•*• 



The process, it is obvious, is not one that makes for 
security. One does not, if one is wise, insure oneself 
against fire by devoting all one's savings to the storing 
up of explosives. Apart from the vested interest in war 
of the armament makers, the professional interest in 
war of young men trained in the use of modern weapons 
and anxious to exhibit their technical skill, is it not 
obvious that those nations which possess great arma- 
ments will, sooner or later, use them as surely as children 
will use elaborate and exciting toys ? The most con- 
vincing comment that I have heard on the whole lunatic 
business was made at a meeting which I attended as an 
undergraduate at Oxford in the year before the war. 
The meeting was addressed by a Cabinet Minister. 
"There is," he said, "just one way in which you can 
make your country secure and have peace, and that is 
to be so much stronger than any prospective enemy that 
he dare not attack you, and this is, I submit to you, 
gentlemen, a self-evident proposition." A small man 
got up at the back of the hall and asked him whether 
the advice he had just given was the advice he would 
give to Germany. A faint titter ran through the meeting — 
— the audience was, I suppose, above the average in 
political intelligence — but there was no applause. 
Presently, the time came for speeches by the audience. 
In a speech equally devastating to the Cabinet Minister, 
and convincing to me, the questioner proceeded to drive 
home the moral which his question had implied. "Here," 
he pointed out, "are two nations or groups of nations 
likely to quarrel. How shall each be secure and keep 



f 72 WHY WAR? f 

j the peace ? Our Cabinet Minister tells us in the pro- 
fundity of his wisdom, that both will be secure, both 
will keep the peace when each is stronger than the 
other. And this, he thinks, is a self-evident proposi- 
tion." This time there was loud applause. It remains 
to add that the Cabinet Minister was Winston Churchill, 

1 his questioner Sir Norman Angell. 



The Gapers at the Guns. 

And what of the peoples who not only rely upon the 
possession of the instruments of destruction to protect 
them from their neighbours, but even appear to take a 
pride in their possession ? 

Four-fifths of the news-reels visited by me on the day 
on which these words were written were devoted to an 
exhibition of the activities of instruments of slaughter, 
to cannons firing, mines exploding, torpedoes torpedoing, 
tanks breaking through hedges and knocking down 
houses, aeroplanes bombing. At the end the announcer, 
thinking, perhaps, that this display might have disquieted 
those members of the audience who were not entirely 
destitute of the power to connect, delivered himself as 
follows: "If, as seems to be the case, we are all going 
to be bombed in the next war, we may as well be bombed 
by first-class bombers which can fly at over 400 miles 
per hour." 
| In H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come there | 
is an account of the future destruction of the penguins. 
As the guns mowed fines of dead in the serried ranks of 
birds standing on the beach, observers noted with interest 
that the penguins showed no sign either of fright or of 
resistance. With a mild and unsuspicious curiosity 
they watched the preparations for their own destruction, 
watched the slaughter of their fellows, went on watching 
until their own end came. Foolish imbecile birds, 
defective in intelligence ? Certainly ! But what of 



88 WHY WAR? 

These truths are again vividly exemplified by the effects 
of the last war, effects to which it seems equally impos- 
sible to assign a termination in point of time or a limit 
in point of evil. Surveying the contemporary European 
and Asiatic scene, it is difficult to discern a single unde- 
sirable feature which cannot be plausibly regarded as a 
long-term product of the last war. Arabs are fighting 
with Jews in Palestine, a country claimed by both. 
" Why ? In war statesmen make promises to whomsoever 
they think may be induced to support them. Sometimes 
these promises are inconsistent. Thus Lord Balfour , 
promised Palestine as a national home Tor the Jews ; 
"Trat in order to obtain their support against the Turks~ 
Colonel Lawrence made promises to the Arabs, the " 
implications of which were inconsistent with those of 
Balfour's promise to the Jews, _ 1jt\ty£ *tiy$*$llf 

Italy is an aggressive nation and aims at the hegemdily 
of the Mediterranean. Why ? In order to induce Italy 
to "come in" on their side, the allies made promises 
involving the cession to Italy of German and Austrian 
territory. These promises were insufficiently fulfilled, 
and Italy, finding that she had done badly out of the 
war, has entertained a grievance ever since. Her sense of 
grievance has induced a mood of aggressive belligerence, 
and has led her to seek compensation by obtaining 
an empire in Africa and achieving the hegemony of the 
Mediterranean. The desire for empire in Africa was 
responsible for the Abyssinian affair and the collapse of 
the League ; the ambition to achieve the hegemony of the 
Mediterranean, for the constant friction with England. 

But the clearest illustration of the impossibility of 
setting bounds to the evil generated by war is once 
again afforded by the case of Germany. I have already 
referred to the treatment meted out to Germany at the 
end of the war ; let us follow the course of events a little 
further. 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 89 

The Post- War Generation in Germany. ~ p &&* i 
Germany was made to subscribe to a grossly unfair 
clause saddling her with the whole responsibility for the 
war; her colonies were taken away from her, and out- 
lying parts of the Fatherland shorn off; a wedge of 
alien territory was driven through her eastern provinces 
by the Polish Corridor; her representatives were sub- 
jected to continuous humiliation at Geneva. At long 
last, and with infinite reluctance, she was admitted into 
the League. Meanwhile the allies, having starved her 
people by a blockade protracted without mercy and 
beyond reason for months after the signing of the 
Armistice, had failed to fulfil their moral promise to 
disarm. They had extracted grossly extortionate sums 
by way of reparations, and had continued to occupy the 
Rhineland with troops for twelve years after the war was 
over. As if this were not enough, the Ruhr was occupied 
by the French till 1923, and black troops were billeted 
on German households. In 1924 the mark depreciated 
so catastrophically that middle-class savings were utterly 
destroyed. In 1929 the economic blizzard descended 
with such force upon Germany that it was the exception 
and not the rule for a young man of the middle class to 
find work. Unemployment stalked the streets and 
presently broke out into the political brawling which 
became continuous in the three years preceding the Nazi 
revolution. What a chapter of misery and suffering ! What 
an atmosphere in which to bring up the rising generation ! 
Oppressed by guilt, overcome with shame, poor and 
without hope of careers, the war-born generation in 
Germany came to maturity. The results are visibly 
before us in a brutality and savagery which have made 
the contemporary Nazi a by-word among the nations. 
Demanding a scape-goat for Germany's supposed guilt, 
he persecutes and tortures the Jews ; seeking compensa- 



90 WHY WAR? 

tion for her supposed inferiority, he boasts of her ruth- 
lessness and prates of her power ; determined to remedy 
the weakness which he deems responsible for her 
humiliation, he has helped her to build a military force 
so prodigious that his country has become the terror 
of Europe and a menace to the world. The horrors 
that have disgraced Nazi Germany have been per- 
petrated very largely by young men. It is the young 
men of the post-war generation, the young men born 
of suffering and shame, who have baited and flogged 
and tortured the men who went through the war. No, 
it is not possible to assign a limit to the evils which the 
war has wrought. 



The Special Nemesis that Overtakes Wars for Ideal Ends. 

It seems scarcely necessary to add that wars for ideal 
ends are not, under modern conditions, even if they are 
victorious, more successful in their results than wars for 
power, wealth or territory. Whatever the motives of 
the governments who declare them, the motives of the 
men who fight wars are often honourable. It was 
impossible for those who knew the men who volun- 
teered to fight Germany in 1914 not to recognize that 
they were good men doing what they believed to be 
the right thing. It is one of the tragedies of war, as 
Sir Norman Angell has well said, that it is fought not 
by bad men knowing themselves to be wrong, but by 
good men passionately convinced that they are right. 
Many of the 1914 volunteers were animated by high 
ideals. It wa,s not merely that they wished to protect 
hearth and home, to defend their country, to fight for 
freedom, to preserve democracy. These ends no doubt 
were admirable. But for some the response to the call 
was even more disinterested. They sought to establish 
the rule of right in the world and to free men once and 
for all from the domination of force. It was the belief 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 91 

fostered by press, platform and pulpit, encouraged in 
the home and the school, engendered by a thousand 
speeches, instilled by a hundred sermons, the belief that 
they were to free the world from, the rule of force, that 
gave men strength and hope, the strength to endure, 
the hope which sustained, during the appalling suffering 
and boredom of those four years. 

Never again, was the exclamation of the men who 
won the war. Never again ! It was not so much a cry 
wrung from them by their agony, as an assertion based 
upon their conviction that by winning the war they 
would put an end to war for ever. And now, it turns 
out that the belief was false, the hope a delusion, the 
conviction without foundation. 

If we ask why the sufferings of the war were wasted, why 
the hopes of the sufferers were betrayed, we are often 
told that it was because of the wickedness of politicians, 
who after the soldiers had won the war, betrayed the 
peace. The explanation is, I suggest, totally inadequate. 

Why The Fruits of War are Bitter. 

The reason lies deeper, and is to be found in the 
character of war itself which determines also the 
character of its results. It has happened before in 
history that wars have been begun for the sake of ideals ; 
it has happened before that they have been succeeded 
by disillusion and frustration. Why is this? War 
engenders an atmosphere in which hatred and bitterness 
flourish and ideals are forgotten. It throws into promin- 
ence and elevates to positions of power a managing and 
executive type of man very different from the young 
idealists who, in the early days, flock so eagerly to 
the standards to fight for honourable ends. When the 
end of the war is reached, the executives are found to 
be in control and the idealists, if any survive, are derided 
and ignored. Moreover, the fruits of victory are not 



92 WHY WAR? 

those which the idealists desired and for which they 
fought. They are such as appeal to the hard-faced men 
by whose efforts victory has been won. They are power, 
wealth, pride of place and humiliation of the enemy by 
revenge. Can anyone doubt that another war fought in 
defence of democracy, to arrest Fascist aggression, to 
re-establish the authority of the League, to preserve 
liberty, to introduce Socialism, or in response to any 
one of the appeals to idealism by which good men are 
induced to further the schemes of cynical statesmen, 
would fail in its object as lamentably as the wars of the 
past? Reflecting on this past record of war, one is driven 
to the conclusion that it cannot be right to use human 
beings as food for cannon, even if the motives which 
lead to the declaration of war are good. But, as I have 
tried to show, however good the motives from which war 
springs, the ends which war achieves are not good, but 
bad. Men have hoped to get many things by war, power and 
wealth for themselves, glory and honour for their country, 
and freedom and happiness for mankind. All that they 
have succeeded in getting are, to quote an eighteenth- 
century wit, "widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt". 



(V) THAT THE RESULTS OF THE NEXT WAR WILL NOT BE 
DIFFERENT EXCEPT IN SO FAR AS THEY ARE WORSE THAN 

THE RESULTS OF PAST WARS 

In the light of the results achieved by wars in the 
recent past, it is difficult to deny oneself the pleasure 
of asking those who would have us wage another, why 
it is that they imagine that its results will be different. 
As we saw in Chapter II, there was, in September, 1938, 
a strong body of opinion in favour of "standing up" 
to Hitler, even at the risk of war. This same opinion 
would now have us increase our armaments, in order 
that we may "stand up" to Hitler with greater effect 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 93 

at some future date. ^ Standing up" to Hitler means 

being prepared to figftt a war wnose~ object would, 

presumably, be to preserve liberty and democracy, to 

overthrow fascism and — we must, I supposeTadd — to 

lay the foundations of a l asti ng peace. History, as I 

have tried to showTaffords no war rant for supposing 

^hat the wa r would have any such" results. But while 

"It is impossible to predici ihe ultim ate results of a modern 

war, those which .seem reason abl y probableT include the" 

destruction of most of what goes byAthe na me of 

ci vilization in the conte mp orary wo rld. \ 

The Char acter of the Next Wa r. y^^EPcFT' 

Theliorrors with which the invention" or L the bombing 
aeroplane has invested war are by now familiar, but 
few of us, in spite of the crisis through which we lived 
in September, 1938, have any conception of the nature 
and effects of the large-scale bombing of London. 
It is not merely that gas and explosive bombs will 
Rill civilians and""destroy houses; it i s not m erely the 

"horror of the direct hit upon the hospita l full of wounded , 
or of the thermite bomb That sets fir e to the asylum. 
Scarcely less harrowing, though I think, less generally 
regarded, is the prospect of the destruction of the 
lighting and heating systems of London with the resultant 
dark streets and unwar med houses, of the .ventilating 
apparatus that operates In the t ubes by the bombing of 
the power stations with the resultant suffocation ot those 
who have taken refuge in the tunne ls,"of the smashing 
oi the draIns~to let loose into the streets thelfTJurderT 
of sewage laden with the "g er ms of dTs^ e^toJcom^ 
plete the destruction wroug ht by men, of~the3am™ 
ming of tie roads leading fro m Londorno^ThTcountry 
by hordes of panic-stricken ~fugitiyes. fleeing from the 
terrorjnjhe LSSL t ^|t|^2it^etrdLfor their cars, witEout 

Tood, without shelter, of the crowds of starving men 



94 WHY WAR? 

who, presently, will spread over the countryside, looting 
and plundering. ... I have read a number of books 
on this subject and the weight of opinion seems to be 
decisively in favour of the view that whatever protection 
we may devise for civilians, we cannot preserve the 
fabric of the civilization in which we live. Water, gas 
and light mains, sewers, roads, transport offices, fac- 
tories, homes, railway stations, telephone exchanges, 
standing crops, cattle — all are vulnerable. 

We must, then, it is clear, face the possibility of 
the breakdown of the social services, the cutting of 
the nerves which keep our social system alive, and the 
relapse of society into a chaos of panic-stricken individuals 
fighting each for his own hand, save on one condition, 
the establishment of a military dictatorship which 
imposes upon the country an iron discipline, suppresses 
the right of criticism, stifles grievances and shoots 
grumblers and dissidents at sight. Such is the most 
probable result of a war fought under modern conditions 
for idealistic ends. In a word, all the liberties that we 
now cherish and would be fighting to preserve would 
disappear. Through sheer pressure of circumstances, 
the war to save democracy would kill democracy within 
twenty-four hours of its declaration. 

The Necessity to Maintain Chilian Morale. 

It is, of course, maintained that the suppression of 
liberty which would follow the outbreak of war would be 
temporary only. We should be deprived of our liberty 
only "for the duration of the war". "After all," it is said, 
"our liberties were restored to us after the last war." 

Were they restored wholly and fully? I think that 
they were not. Even in England, the history of the last 
twenty years has been a history of the continual erosion 
of liberty, the Official Secrets Act and the Incitement 
to Disaffection Act being only two of the more out- 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 95 

standing straws to show which way the wind is blowing. 1 
On the continent, the effects of the last war for liberty 
have been so disastrous that a nineteenth century 
Victorian dropped from the womb of time into con- 
temporary Germany would inevitably suppose that it 
was into the fifteenth and not into the twentieth century 
that he had strayed. A more serious objection to the 
view that the loss of liberty would be temporary is that 
it fails to take fully into account the distinctive character 
of the next war. I have argued that because the target 
of attack will be the civilian population, because, in 
other words, the great cities will be in the front line, 
a dictatorship will be necessary in order to prevent 
panic. If civilians are so unfortunate as to find them- 
selves in the positions of danger and discomfort hitherto 
occupied only by armies, they will have to be disciplined 
as armies are disciplined, or else they will run away, 
"rat", revolt, lynch the members of the government, 
do anything and everything to put an end to their 
intolerable sufferings. Hence the stress which is already 
beginning to be laid upon civilian morale, which may 
be defined as the willingness to die and to suffer quietly 
without lynching the government. 

With a view to the establishment of such morale, the 
activities of the government will be all-pervasive and 
all-embracing. It will regulate the individual's actions 
and control his utterances. Nothing will be permitted 
in speech, writing or act, which will tend to the dis- 
couragement of fellow citizens or to the discrediting of 
the government, or in any way hasten the end of the 
war. For in war time nothing can be permitted to 
hasten the end of the war. In the middle of the last 
war two men were fined £100 or two months' imprison- 
ment for publishing a leaflet demanding peace by 

1 1 would recommend those who wish to know how far the loss 
of liberty has gone to read Kingsley Martin's admirably informative 
pamphlet, Fascism, Democracy and the Press. 



96 WHY WAR? 

negotiation. At the trial the Crown Prosecutor (Mr.* 
Bodkin) said that "war would become impossible if the 
view that war was wrong and it was wrong to support 
the carrying on of war was held generally". "War 
would become impossible !" What a terrible thought ! 
To prevent such an appalling consummation, the 
government, to use the language of its own politicians, 
would leave "no stone unturned". Assuredly it would 
not hesitate to assume dictatorial powers extending over 
the whole civilian population. 

No Warrant in History for Supposing that Dictatorial 
Powers will be Voluntarily Abandoned. 

Now what warrant does history give for supposing 
that such powers once assumed will be voluntarily 
abandoned ? Of all human appetites, the appetite for 
power grows most with what it feeds on. The conten- 
tion which we are examining would have us suppose 
that after a dictatorial government has during a period 
of years made the deliberate suppression of liberty part 
of its policy, it will, at a given point in time, deliberately 
reverse its policy and restore the liberty which has 
hitherto been withheld, with the result that views dis- 
tasteful to the government will suddenly obtain publicity, 
and those who have been hitherto immune from criticism 
will suddenly find themselves assailed. Is this likely? 
Does history afford a single example which would 
permit us to regard it as likely ? Have those who have 
won power by violence ever been known voluntarily to 
relinquish power, those who have been above criticism 
voluntarily to permit criticism? Yet the view we are 
considering asks us to believe that those whom power 
has placed above criticism will by their voluntary and 
deliberate action suddenly permit the criticism which 
may lead to their relinquishment of power. 

On an earlier page, 1 1 gave reasons for the view that 

1 See pp. 17-20. 



THE CASE AGAINST WAR 97 

dictatorships tend as they grow older to become not 
less but more extreme, not less but more sensitive to 
and impatient of criticism. History supports this view. 
Yet the argument which we are here considering main- 
tains, and asks us to believe, the opposite — namely, 
that at a given moment a dictatorial government can 
reverse the engines, relinquish power, declare itself 
superfluous, and, having denied liberty, concede it. 

Gangsters and Troglodytes. 

There is one further possibility. If, as may well be 
the case, the next war, or the next war but one, brings 
about the destruction of our civilization, it will be 
succeeded by a series of governments of the gangster 
type envisaged in Mr. Wells's Shape of Things to Come. 
In a half-starved world gangs will fight for food and 
plunder, and the most successful will become the govern- 
ment. What sort of end is this to a war for liberty, 
for democracy, and for civilization ? And what sort of 
life will our descendants be living after a series of such 
wars ? The question shall be answered by Mr. Eden : — 

"Unless something can be done, the people of this world 
in the latter part of this century are going to live as troglo- 
dytes and go back to the days of cave-dwelling. I sometimes 
wonder how the world to-day would strike a visitor from 
another planet who would find us preparing means for 
our own destruction and even exchanging information on 
how we are to do it." 

Such in brief is the case against a war arising out 
of the present international situation and fought in 
pursuance of certain concrete objectives. I will call 
it the case against war by a European nation in the 
contemporary situation. I now come to the more 
general case, the case against war waged by any nation 
at any time, the case against war as such. This demands 
a chapter to itself. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DENUNCIATION OF WAR 

In this chapter I shall try to exhibit some of the many 
beastlinesses of war. The subject is one upon which it 
is difficult to write with restraint, but that I may keep 
my head as cool and my statement as moderate as I 
can, I shall begin quietly with some of the minor 
beastlinesses, and only approach the more repulsive 
aspects of war gradually and with circumspection. 



(a) the lost glamour of war 

In the years that have succeeded the Great War, 
war has been "debunked". In war plays, war books 
and war films, in the stories of soldiers and refugees, 
in the contemporary reports of bombings and their 
results, the bubble of war's glory has been pricked and 
its glamour shorn utterly away. What, indeed, of 
glamour or romance, could survive such announcements 
as the following ? 

"Medals for sale — medals for acts of heroism by 
soldiers and sailors all over the world, to be auctioned 
on June 10th, at Glendining's, in Argyll Street, W.l." 
And what price does glory fetch? "When Bo'sun 
Shepherd put off in a punt to blow up Russian battle- 
ships sheltering at Sebastopol, his grateful country 
awarded him the V.C. It was sold at Glendining's, 
London, yesterday, with other decorations he won, for 
£96, a little less than was realized when they first came 
under the hammer several years ago." 

98 



120 WHY WAR? 

That the Price is always too High. 

It is difficult to believe that it is. Even if war achieved 
every single one of the aims which it professes to achieve, 
even if it conferred every one of the goods which its 
apologists claimed for it, if it settled disputes, cleansed 
the national life, left the world happier and more 
vigorous, restored manliness and courage, gave security 
and laid the foundations of a lasting peace — even if it 
did all these things, they would not be worth the price 
that must be paid for them. In fact, as we have seen, 
it does none of them, and the flood of human misery 
and boredom which the last war let loose flowed to no 
purpose; the men who won the war were betrayed by 
the peace, their ideals were derided, their hopes mocked, 
their sufferings wasted. 

I would go further and maintain that, even if the 
suffering that war involves were enormously and in- 
credibly diminished, so that it fined itself down to the 
sufferings of a few, a very few people, of one family 
even, that still those things for the sake of which the 
suffering was endured would not be worth the endurance. 

The Idol Who Exacts the Sacrifice. 

The ends for which wars are fought are not concrete 
but abstract; they are such ends as national prestige, 
national honour, national security, ends begotten of 
pride and born of fear. And the nations whose prestige 
must be flattered, whose honour must be safeguarded, 
whose security must be guaranteed, are not real things 
but figments. They are the embodiments of a philo- 
sophical theory which holds that the State is an entity 
possessed of a personality, and that its well-being is more 
important than that of its individual citizens. To it 
individuals must be subordinated, and to its alleged 
welfare men and women sacrificed. 



CHAPTER XI 



A QUESTION OF FAITH : 
THE FAITH OF THE PACIFIST 

There is one matter which I have left to the end. It 
is not a matter of immediate political concern and 
does not, therefore, form part of the body of the book ; 
nor is it a matter which can be explored by the method 
of argument which I have tried hitherto to follow. 
Nevertheless, it does in a very real sense belong to the 
book, since, because of it, the book has been written, 
and without it, it could not have been written. The 
matter is one that touches on a question of faith. It is, 
I think, clear that the arguments I have used, the position 
I have adopted, the methods I have recommended, fall 
within a certain framework of belief, spring, if you 
will, from a philosophy, are inspired, if you prefer it 
put that way, by a faith. 

It is, in the first, place, a faith in regard to ends. I 
believe that it is men and women and not States who 
have value, and that it is the sole business of the State 
to promote their happiness. This belief has been 
developed in an earlier chapter. Secondly, it is a faith 
in regard to means. I believe that human beings are at 
bottom reasonable andrbelieving this7 1 believe in the 
efficacy of reason as a means of persuasion, and of argu- 
ment as a means of conyjgjjmv This belief belongs, 
and must of necessity belong, tcfahe category of personal 
avowal. It is, I repeat, a matteA of faith rather than of 
argument. One may hope that oWs avowal may strike 
a chord of sympathetic response\in one's reader, but 

229 \A^t tfiTLefiiit 

■M ■' — * *# 



230 WHY WAR? 

one cannot hope to convince him if it does not. Never- 
theless, as this faith in means informs the opinions, and 
dictates, at least in part, the arguments of this book, 
some account of it is necessary to its completion. 

ASSW+ZS P&fl-t Gov® £ W&bfaNS gtf])l 

The Belief in Human Reasonableness. r&0& L*>G) U( 

The faith, then, which, as a pacifist, I hold, is in the 
last resort a faith in the ultimate reasonableness of 
mankind; I would have said once, in the ultimate 
goodness of mankind, but I have come of recent years 
to believe in the doctrine of man's natural wickedness, 
and to doubt whether evil can ever be eradicated from 
human nature so long as it remains human. But though 
I think men are wicked as well as stupid, it has been 
my contention throughout this book that war is the 
result of man's stupidity rather than of his wickedness ; 
it is born of thick heads rather than of hard hearts. 
Hence to believe that man is in essence reasonable in 
the sense that he can be made ultimately to see reason, 
is to believe that war may one day be banished from 
his life. 

The belief in human reasonableness was common 
enough in the nineteenth century. Our fathers, taking 
an optimistic view of themselves, as of the world, 
believed that they were reasonable beings. This belief 
involved two corollaries. In the first place, reason was 
free. Its deliverances might be, and no doubt in practice 
frequently were, biased by prejudice and distorted by 
desire; but the fact that reason could be deflected by 
these influences was a temporary defect due to man's 
incomplete evolution. It was, indeed, a basic assumption 
of the age that reason in theory could, and in practice 
often did, operate freely. It could arrive at an impartial 
and "reasoned" choice between alternative courses of 
action ; it could take a disinterested survey of evidence