3.17. WAR.
I do not think a discussion of man's social relations can be considered
at all complete or satisfactory until we have gone into the question of
military service. To-day, in an increasing number of countries, military
service is an essential part of citizenship and the prospect of war lies
like a great shadow across the whole bright complex prospect of human
affairs. What should be the attitude of a right-living man towards his
State at war and to warlike preparations?
In no other connexion are the confusions and uncertainty of the
contemporary mind more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that in
Great Britain and Western Europe generally, just those parties that
stand most distinctly for personal devotion to the State in economic
matters, the Socialist and Socialistic parties, are most opposed to the
idea of military service, and just those parties that defend individual
self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere of property are most
urgent for conscription. No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the
mixing in of private interests with public professions, but much more is
it, I think, the result of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient
grasp of the implications of the propositions under discussion. The
ordinary political Socialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose
every sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal peace, the merger
of national partitions in loyalty to the World State. But he does not
recognize that the way to reach that goal is not necessarily by
minimizing and specializing war and war responsibility at the present
time. There he falls short of his own constructive conceptions and
lapses into the secessionist methods of the earlier Radicals. We have
here another case strictly parallel to several we have already
considered. War is a collective concern; to turn one's back upon it, to
refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those
who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit.
In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways
military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the
contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere
advertisement, push, adulteration, under-selling and intermittent
employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane,
into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more
honourable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment
to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They
are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here a man is at
least supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by
self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research
by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by
innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and
rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military
affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil
conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the
progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house
appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty
years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly
heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house
of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory
places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle
or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to
those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a
use now for such superannuated things.
