SCIENCE AND WAR 37 adopted by civilised peoples as the ostensible principle of their internal private relationships, it has never been adopted by any nation in its international relationships. The principle of force as ultimate arbiter in international quarrels remained unchallenged through the nineteenth century, though a strong, if politically impotent, revulsion against it grew in this country, through the development of a stronger public conscience, as it appeared to us, through satiety in conquest and physical deterioration, as our enemies preferred to believe. But do not make the fatal mistake of supposing that what always has been, necessarily always will be. When man rose to the intellectual stature at which he could command the waterfall to do his will, kindle a fire and marshal the chaos of motion we call heat into the rhythmic working movement of a fuel-fed engine, irrigate the desert and make two grains of corn grow where one grew before, he broke with his past, for good or evil, once for all. The physical factors of life till the nineteenth century had been practically stereotyped. But now a new factor is at work in the world which alters its whole economy, and in light of which everything old, whether appertaining to peace or war, to the body, the brain or the soul, awaits its turn to be reexamined, and, if found wanting, discarded. Science multiplied man's physical powers ten thousand-fold, and increased his capacity both of construction and destruction in like ratio. He spent the vast increase of wealth, which had accrued to him from the peaceful applications of science, in preparing, like his ancestors, for war. The war has come. As to its results, there is nothing in history that can give the slightest clue. The principle of force as the ultimate arbiter is now undergoing its re-examination. It has survived nineteen centuries G of Christianity. Is it to be perpetuated or destroyed by science? Some thought science had already made war impossible. As it has not, it may be concluded that no future development of science, however world-shattering, will of itself have that effect. Others thought that the sensitive and elaborate ramifications of international commerce and credit would effectually prevent war, or quench it quickly if it broke out, relying, as it seems, on a cobweb to stop the rush of a tiger. Everyone of us will carry to our graves some real knowledge of what modern war is and means. Future generations, let us hope at least, will know as little about it as we ourselves knew a couple of years ago. They will read about it in books, as we read, and it will mean as little in comparison to them as the Napoleonic Wars meant to us. It is our duty, therefore, to spend our lives. and brains thinking this thing out for ourselves. It must not be left for our successors to relearn all over again. We are faced with a new factor of unlimited possibilities of development. Science will not stand still, even though the foreshadowed release of interatomic energy be delayed for centuries. The increasing horrors and the certain ruin of war both to victor and vanquished will not stop it, though it must make it of necessity less frequent. The more deeply we ponder on this as a practical question we shall find, I think, that the first step is to narrow the issue and to ask whether, and if so how, wars, such as this war that is now being waged, can be prevented from ever occurring again. Then we come to grips with a practical problem. For consider the absolute stupidity and wantonness of the present war. We are fighting Germany as we would fight a homicidal maniac who has suddenly started to run amok, and we have to kill the maniac or he will kill us. There is no great question of irreconcilable principle involved, I mean in the sense that there was in the great American Civil War, or that was at issue when contending religions—as the Cross and the Crescent-came to death - grips. Before the war the Germans were our friends and equals. We intermarried without social stigma or disability. There are some nationalities — the Jews are an example which do not mix with any other even after centuries of life together. There are others- the negro race of the United States offer an example—with whom, rather than mix, a nation will break every law, human and divine. Again there are others—the British Empire affords as good and as perplexing examples as any against whom, for fear of being cheapened economically and socially, preventive measures are taken to forbid or hamper their free immigration into our territories. These are a few examples of what for comparison I will describe as racial causes of war. I indicate them merely to show how very far from practical politics any attempt to banish war and the thought of war from the world at one step is likely for long to remain, unless we are content to solve the simpler problem first. But the present war does not come within their category. Let us take Germany at her own valuation, as a virile and expanding people, denied a place in the sun, hemmed in on all sides by decadent and stagnant populations in possession of the fairest parts of the earth. Individually her people were peculiarly capable of fighting for their own hands according to the recognised, if lax, standards of private law and commercial morality, and so they had already peacefully penetrated far and wide into the less crowded countries of the earth. Everywhere they were treated as friends and equals. There were no restrictions as to their owning property or intermarrying with nationals in their adopted countries. The feelings of Germans towards neighbouring nations, and those whose hospitality they sought, would be better described as the ordinary one of national contempt rather than racial horror-the contempt which no nation, least of all ours, is free from in its estimate of others. She thought she could win, she knew what she wanted-I am not sure that we yet know-and as, since the FrancoPrussian War, she has always declared frankly was the German method, she struck when she was ready to strike, with no more thought or compunction than if her neighbours had not been human beings. It is commonly supposed that the completion of the Kiel Canal fixed the exact time. The war has already lasted long enough to show that she had to wait for something vastly more fundamental. A group of chemical processes-technically referred to as the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen-had to be perfected and put into practice in the especial form necessary for her war needs, before she had any chance of success, for on these new processes, cut off as she is from most outside supplies, she depends for the raw materials of explosives. It all seems to have been nationally thought out in cold blood to the dotting of the last z. Had it been successful they would have gloried in it, as some of the more sanguine still are glorying. We expect, of course, professional soldiers to think along these lines and to act, under civil control, according to these tenets. But for an entire nation-once great in philosophy, literature and the arts, once possessing an empire vastly wider than the material possessions that can be seized and THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 41 fought over by soldiers-for such a nation to have adopted militarism as the national soul and conscience, and to take its orders and ideas from soldiers, appears to us to-day, however it may be viewed by the historian, to have brought the world to a parting of the ways. Whether it is because of our more fortunate geographical position, or whether it is because we are an older nation than Germany, whatever fate the future holds for us individually and as a nation, we cannot accept that as the end. It means, simply, that man has risen in intellectual stature to the point at which he is in league rather than at war with mighty Nature, in order that nations may never be able to live mutually at peace again. It is not a war between irreconcilable principles. It is a war between the fundamental principle of all national co-existence and its contemptuous negation. If we concern ourselves, when the time comes, merely with the relatively small task of making wars of this sort more difficult or impossible to recur, we can leave with a good conscience to our successors the wider and more complex task of dealing with the racial causes of internecine strife, wherein peoples of different colours and civilisations strive for mastery. No doctor talks at large about the termination of disease. He knows too well the almost infinite variety of disease. But where would you find a doctor who, knowing leprosy, let us say, to be incurable, not only discountenanced any attempt to cure it, but also would not hear of any attempt to cure, let us say, consumption. So it is with war. Its causes are as manifold and as ineradicated as the causes of disease. But there are many kinds of war, each requiring totally different consideration. If we are either unduly discouraged on the one hand, or unduly sanguine on the other, as the result |