The Great Illusion quotes

Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsatia, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war.

Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x.

For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

This classification by strata involves necessarily a redirection of human pugnacity, based rather on the rivalry of classes and interests than on State divisions.

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit.

The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man’s advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.

it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man’s advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.

The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element.

The diminishing role of physical force in all spheres of human activity carries with it profound psychological modifications.

that Germany with her expanding population must feel cramped; that she must fight for elbow-room; and that if he does not defend himself he will illustrate that universal law which makes of every stomach a graveyard.

He has a natural preference for being the diner rather than the dinner.

As it is universally admitted that wealth and prosperity and well-being go with strength and power and national greatness, he intends, so long as he is able, to maintain that strength and power and greatness, and not to yield it even in the name of …

we may be perfectly certain that the prize which we offer will go into the mouth of somebody powerful enough to overcome our resistance and to swallow a considerable portion of us up.

What is good for the beehive is good for the bee.

Whatever brings rich lands, new ports, or wealthy industrial areas to a State enriches its treasury, and therefore the nation at large, and therefore the individual.

… with its hundred and twenty million souls and its four million army, are quoted at 81, while the Three and a Half percents of Norway, which has not an army at all (or any that need be considered in this discussion), are quoted at 102.

All of which carries with it the paradox that the more a nation’s wealth is militarily protected the less secure does it become.

The late Lord Salisbury, speaking to a delegation of business men, made this notable observation:

there could be no confiscation. And that is why the stocks of the lesser States, not in reality threatened by confiscation, yet relieved in part at least of the charge of armaments, stand fifteen to twenty points higher than those of the military States.

Belgium, politically, might disappear tomorrow; her wealth would remain practically unchanged.

Yet, by one of those curious contradictions we are frequently meeting in the development of ideas, while a fact like this is at least subconsciously recognized by those whom it concerns, the necessary corollary of it—the positive form of the merely negative truth that a …

… we are frequently meeting in the development of ideas, while a fact like this is at least subconsciously recognized by those whom it concerns, the necessary corollary of it—the positive form of the merely negative truth that a community’s wealth cannot be stolen—is not recognized.

We admit that a people’s wealth must remain unaffected by conquest, and yet we are quite prepared to urge that we can enrich ourselves by conquering them!

But if we must leave their wealth alone, how can we take it?

We admit that a people’s wealth must remain unaffected by conquest, and yet we are quite prepared to urge that we can enrich ourselves by conquering them!

But if we must leave their wealth alone, how can we take it?

I do not speak merely of “loot.” It is evident, even on cursory examination, that no real advantage of any kind is achieved for the mass of one people by the conquest of another.

I have never examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for twenty francs. Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested in his figures.

If they were worth examination they would not be for sale.

And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain.

We have multiplied by x, it is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide by x, and that the result is consequently, so far as the individual is concerned, exactly what it was before.

My critic remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the division.

Let us apply the test fact.

During the Victorian Jubilee procession an English beggar was heard to say:

I own Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, Burma, and the Islands of the Far Pacific; and I am starving for want of a crust of bread.

I am a citizen of the greatest Power of the modern world, and all people should bow to my greatness. And yesterday I cringed for alms to a negro savage, who repulsed me with disgust.

What is the meaning of this?

The meaning is that, as very frequently happens in the history of ideas, our terminology is a survival of conditions no longer existing, and our mental conceptions follow at the tail of our vocabulary.

International politics are still dominated by terms applicable to conditions which the processes of modern life have altogether abolished.

It is true the German Jingoes might wonder what they had made war for, and this elementary lesson in international finance would do more than the greatness of the British navy to cool their blood.

For it is a fact in human nature that men will fight more readily than they will pay, and that they will take personal risks much more readily than they will disgorge money, or, for that matter, earn it.

“Man,” in the language of Bacon, “loves danger better than travail.”

For it is a fact in human nature that men will fight more readily than they will pay, and that they will take personal risks much more readily than they will disgorge money, or, for that matter, earn it.

“Man,” in the language of Bacon, “loves danger better than travail.”

Events which are still fresh in the memory of business men show the extraordinary interdependence of the modern financial world.

but if they spend their income on themselves, what is there, therefore, for the taskmasters? In other words, consumption is a necessary factor of the whole thing.

Cut out consumption, and you cut out the profits.

This glittering wealth, which so tempted the invader, has disappeared. If this is not intangibility, the word has no meaning. Speaking broadly and generally, the conqueror in our day has before him two alternatives:

In other words, consumption is a necessary factor of the whole thing. Cut out consumption, and you cut out the profits. This glittering wealth, which so tempted the invader, has disappeared.

If this is not intangibility, the word has no meaning.

Speaking broadly and generally, the conqueror in our day has before him two alternatives: to leave things alone, and in order to do that he need not have left his shores;

In the end the Americans will imitate it, or they will suffer from a hopeless disadvantage in their financial competition with England.

Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest.

If English banks and insurance companies have become absolutely honest in their administration, it is because the dishonesty of any one of them threatened the prosperity of all.

In the end the Americans will imitate it, or they will suffer from a hopeless disadvantage in their financial competition with England. Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest.

If English banks and insurance companies have become absolutely honest in their administration, it is because the dishonesty of any one of them threatened the prosperity of all.

Must we assume that the Governments of the world, which, presumably, are directed by men as farsighted as bankers, are permanently to fall below the banker in their conception of enlightened self-interest?

… of the Franco-German War—Disregard of Sir Robert Giffen’s warning in interpreting the figures—What really happened in France and Germany during the decade following the war—Bismarck’s disillusionment—The necessary discount to be given an indemnity—The bearing of the war and its result on German prosperity and progress.

In politics it is unfortunately true that ten dollars which can be seen bulk more largely in the public mind than a million which happen to be out of sight but are none the less real.

Thus, however clearly the wastefulness of war and the impossibility of effecting by its means any permanent economic or social advantage for the conqueror may be shown, the fact that Germany was able to exact an indemnity of a billion dollars from France at the …

An addition of wealth and power to the Mother Country. But if we compel the Colonies to submit to disadvantageous fiscal arrangements, which result in their poverty, how can they possibly be a source of wealth and power to the Mother Country?

A Colony which can sell nothing is a Colony which can buy nothing: it is a customer lost to French industry.

Every feature of the foregoing is significant and pregnant: this change of policy is not taking place because France is unable to impose force—she is perfectly able to do so;

Petersburg. Why, therefore, do we tolerate the loose talk which assumes that the master of London is also master of Montreal, Vancouver, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Melbourne, and Sydney?

Have we not had about enough of this ignorant chatter, which is persistently blind to the simplest and most elementary facts of the case?

And have not the English, of all people of the world, a most direct interest in aiding the general realization of these truths in Europe? Would not that general realization add immensely to the security of their so-called Empire?

France is today a better Colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic Colony which France owns.

“They tell me,” said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite original mot), “that the Germans are at Agadir. I know they are in the Champs-Élysées.”

Which, of course, is in reality a much more serious matter.

Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or make their living out of countries to which their political dominion in no way extends.

The modern German exploits South America by remaining at home.

Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through political power, he approaches futility. German Colonies are Colonies pour rire. The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her trade with them is microscopic;

The modern German exploits South America by remaining at home. Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through political power, he approaches futility.

German Colonies are Colonies pour rire.

The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her trade with them is microscopic;

But until it does, it is quite evident that the two—the army and the police force—have in reality diametrically opposed roles.

The police exist as an instrument of social cooperation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by “capturing” or “subjugating” another, in some unexplained way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another.

In the existing condition of things in England this illustration covers the whole case; the citizens of London would have no imaginable interest in “conquering” Birmingham, or vice versa.

and last of all, and to a very small extent, with the countries concerned in this squabble for the open door—territories in which the trade really is so small as hardly to pay for the making and upkeep of a dozen battleships.

When the man in the street, or, for that matter, the journalistic pundit, talks commercial diplomacy, his arithmetic seems to fall from him.

Some years since the question of the relative position of the three Powers in Samoa exercised the minds of these wiseacres, who got fearfully warlike both in England and in the United States.

The illusion underlying that case arises from the indiscriminate application of scientific formulae.

Struggle is the law of survival with man, as elsewhere, but it is the struggle of man with the universe, not man with man.

Dog does not eat dog—even tigers do not live on one another. Both dogs and tigers live upon their prey.

The vague talk of national honor, as a quality under the especial protection of the soldier, shows, perhaps more clearly than aught else, how much our notions concerning international politics have fallen behind the notions that dominate us in everyday life.

When an individual begins to rave about his honor, we may be pretty sure he is about to do some irrational, most likely some disreputable deed.

The word is like an oath, serving with its vague yet large meaning to intoxicate the fancy. Its vagueness and elasticity make it possible to regard a given incident, at will, as either harmless or a casus belli.

The survival, where national prestige is concerned, of the standards of the code duello is daily brought before us by the rhetoric of the patriots. Our army and our navy, not the good faith of our statesmen, are the “guardians of our national honor.”

Like the duellist, the patriot would have us believe that a dishonorable act is made honorable if the party suffering by the dishonor be killed.

The patriot is careful to withdraw from the operation of possible arbitration all questions which could affect the “national honor.” An “insult to the flag” must be “wiped out in blood.”

… industry and peace are so much in excess of those which would develop the qualities we associate with war that that excess has almost now passed beyond any ordinary means of visual illustration, and has entirely passed beyond any ordinary human capacity fully to appreciate.

Peace is with us now nearly always; war is with us rarely, yet we are told that it is the qualities of war which will survive, and the qualities of peace which will be subsidiary.

I am not forgetting, of course, the military training, the barrack life which is to keep alive the military tradition. I have dealt with that question in the next chapter.

Perhaps the militarist will argue that, while useless and unjust wars make for degeneration, just wars are a moral regeneration.

But did a nation, group, tribe, family, or individual ever yet enter into a war which he did not think just?

The British, or most of them, believed the war against the Boers just, but most of the authorities in favor of war in general, outside of Great Britain, believed it unjust.

as men become less and less disposed to make unjustifiable attacks, they will become more and more degenerate.

In such incoherence are we landed by the pessimistic and impossible philosophy that men will decay and die unless they go on killing each other.

What is the fundamental error at the base of the theory that war makes for the survival of the fit—that warfare is any necessary expression of the law of survival? It is the illusion induced by the hypnotism of a terminology which is obsolete.

War, therefore, does not make for the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the fit.

It would be truer to say that it makes for the survival of the unfit.

What is the real process of war?

The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea, which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other cooperation.

Those who confound the power of a nation with the size of its army and navy are mistaking the checkbook for the money.

A child, seeing its father paying bills in checks, assumes that you need only plenty of checkbooks in order to have plenty of money; it does not see that for the checkbook to have power there must be unseen resources on which to draw.

… circumstances of the last surrender are eloquent in this connection as showing how even in warfare itself the industrial training and the industrial tradition—the Cobdenite ideal of militarist scorn—are more than a match for the training of a society in which military activities are predominant.

If it be true that it was the German schoolmaster who conquered at Sedan, it was the Chicago merchant who conquered at Manila.

The writer happens to have been in touch both with Spaniards and Americans at the time of the war, and well remembers the scorn with which the Spaniards referred to the notion that the Yankee pork-butchers could possibly conquer a nation of their military tradition, …

He talks and dreams of Castilian bravery and Spanish honor, and is above shopkeeping details. … A writer on contemporary Spain remarks that any intelligent middle-class Spaniard will admit every charge of incompetence which can be brought against the conduct of public affairs. “

Yes, we have a wretched Government. In any other country somebody would be shot.

” This is the hopeless military creed: killing somebody is the only remedy.

… A writer on contemporary Spain remarks that any intelligent middle-class Spaniard will admit every charge of incompetence which can be brought against the conduct of public affairs. “Yes, we have a wretched Government. In any other country somebody would be shot.”

This is the hopeless military creed: killing somebody is the only remedy.

Here we see a trace of that intellectual legacy which Spain has left to the New World, and which has stamped itself so indelibly on the history of Spanish America. On a later occasion in this connection I wrote as follows:

A large army may, indeed, be a sign of a national—that is, military—weakness. Warfare in these days is a business like other activities, and no courage, no heroism, no “glorious past,” no “immortal traditions,” will atone for deficient rations and fraudulent administration.

Good civilian qualities are the ones that will in the end win a nation’s battles.

The Spaniard is the last one in the world to see this. He talks and dreams of Castilian bravery and Spanish honor, and is above shopkeeping details.

In all and every one of them we may see the same process, which is this:

If it remains military it decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it ceases to be military.

There is no other reading of history.

Yet what Prussia, in the opinion of the Chancellor, is not yet fit for, Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, have fitted themselves for without the aid of military victory and subsequent regimentation.

Did not someone once say that the war had made Germany great and Germans small?

When we ascribe so large a measure of Germany’s social progress (which no one, so far as I know, is concerned to deny) to the victories and regimentation, why do we conveniently overlook the social progress of the small States which I have just mentioned, …

Thus Mr. Roosevelt, who expresses with such admirable force and vigor the average thoughts of his hearers or readers, takes generally this line:

We must be peaceful, but not too peaceful; warlike, but not too warlike; moral, but not too moral.

By such verbal mystification we are encouraged to shirk the rough and stony places along the hard road of thinking. If we cannot carry a principle to its logical conclusion, at what point are we to stop?

One will fix one and another will fix another with equal justice. What is it to be “moderately” peaceful, or “moderately” warlike? Temperament and predilection can stretch such limitations indefinitely. This sort of thing only darkens counsel.

If a theory is right, it can be pushed to its logical conclusion; indeed, the only real test of its value is that it can be pushed to its logical conclusion.

If it is wrong in practice, it is wrong in theory, for the right theory will take cognizance of all the facts, not only of one set.

If he increased in numbers, cooperation between the various parts of the organism would be impossible; he makes for disintegration. He must be restrained, and so long as the police use their force in such restraint they are merely insuring cooperation.

The police are not attempting to settle things by force; they are preventing things from being settled in that way.

Now, suppose that this police-force becomes the army of a political Power, and the diplomats of that Power say to a smaller one: “We outnumber you; we are going to annex your territory, and you are going to pay us tribute.”

He would probably have declared that “a good cowhide whip beats all economic pressure”—pretty much the sort of thing that one may hear from the mouth of the average militarist today.

Very “practical” and virile, of course, but it has the disadvantage of not being true.

The presumed necessity for physical compulsion did not stop at slavery. As we have already seen, it was accepted as an axiom in statecraft that men’s religious beliefs had to be forcibly restrained, and not merely their religious belief, but their very clothing;

Indeed, the use of physical force usually involves in those employing it the same limitation of freedom (even if in lesser degree) as that which it is desired to impose. Herbert Spencer illustrates the process in the following suggestive passage:

The exercise of mastery inevitably entails on the master himself some sort of slavery more or less pronounced.

The uncultured masses and even the greater part of the cultured will regard this statement as absurd, and though many who have read history with an eye to essentials rather than to trivialities know that this is a paradox in the right sense—that is, true …

… of intelligence, of hard work, of character, of patience, self-control, and a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness, will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of rationally-directed effort.

The virile impulses become, not the tyrant and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.

The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a very slow process. All man’s history reveals this. The theologian has always felt this difficulty.

Printing was regarded, in the first instance, as merely a newfangled process which threw a great many copying scribes and monks out of employment.

Who realized that in the simple invention of printing there was the liberation of a force greater than the power of kings?

It is only here and there that we find an isolated thinker having a glimmering of the political bearing of such inventions of the conception of the great truth that the more man succeeds in his struggle with nature, the less must be the role …

And even without the superior armament the larger intelligence would still do it; for what the Englishman and American do, the Roman did of old, with the same arms as the inhabitants of his vassal worlds.

Force is indeed the master, but it is the force of intelligence, character, and rationalism.

I can imagine the contempt with which the man of physical force greets the foregoing. To fight with words, to fight with talk! No, not words, but ideas. And something more than ideas.

Would they urge going to war unnecessarily or unjustly merely because it is good for us? Emphatically no. Their argument, in the last analysis, resolves itself into this: that war, though bad, has redeeming qualities, as teaching staunchness, courage, and the rest.

Well, so has cutting our legs off, or an operation for appendicitis.

Whoever composed epics on typhoid fever or cancer? Such advocates might object to the efficient policing of a town because, if it was full of cutthroats, the inhabitants would be taught courage.

Emphatically no. Their argument, in the last analysis, resolves itself into this: that war, though bad, has redeeming qualities, as teaching staunchness, courage, and the rest. Well, so has cutting our legs off, or an operation for appendicitis.

Whoever composed epics on typhoid fever or cancer?

Such advocates might object to the efficient policing of a town because, if it was full of cutthroats, the inhabitants would be taught courage.

Somebody betrayed the position of the reserve camels. … His followers took to killing one another. … The whole population of the Khalifa’s capital was now racing to pilfer the Khalifa’s grain. …

Wonderful workings of the savage mind! Six hours before they were dying in regiments for their master; now they were looting his corn.

Six hours before they were slashing our wounded to pieces; now they were asking us for coppers.

Piracy interfered seriously with the trade and industry of those who desired to earn for themselves as good a living as they could get, and to obtain from this imperfect world all that it had to offer.

Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business.

We are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the high seas; and some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his due place in poetry and legend and romance, quite prepared to admit, with Mr.

The phenomenon is a commonplace of individual relationship:

“I never noticed his collars were dirty till he got in my way,” said someone of a rival.

The second point of difference with Professor McDougal’s savage is that when we get to grips our conflict does not include the whole tribe; we do not, in the Biblical fashion, exterminate men, women, children, and cattle.

Now, our international hostilities are largely based on the notion of a collective responsibility in each of the various States against which our hostility is directed, which does not, in fact, exist. There is at the present moment great ill-feeling in England against “the German.”

Now, “the German” is a nonexistent abstraction.

Englishmen are angry with the German because he is building warships, conceivably directed against them;

Britain is disunited; Germany is homogeneous. We are quarrelling about the Lords’ Veto, Home Rule, and a dozen other questions of domestic politics. We have a Little Navy Party, an Anti-Militarist Party; Germany is unanimous upon the question of naval expansion.

It would be difficult to pack a more dangerous untruth into so few lines.

What are the facts? If “Germany” means the bulk of the German people, Mr. Blatchford is perfectly aware that he is not telling the truth.

In no department of human activity is internationalization so complete as in finance.

The capitalist has no country, and he knows, if he be of the modern type, that arms and conquests and jugglery with frontiers serve no ends of his, and may very well defeat them.

But employers, as apart from capitalists, are also developing a strong international cohesive organization.

We have here, at present in merely embryonic form, a group of motives otherwise opposed, but meeting and agreeing upon one point: the organization of society on other than territorial and national divisions.

When motives of such breadth as these give force to a tendency, it may be said that the very stars in their courses are working to the same end.

Great Britain owed her commercial superiority then to the armed control of the sea, which had sheltered her commerce and industrial fabric from molestation by the enemy.

Ergo, military force has commercial value, a result which is arrived at by this method: in deciding a case made up of two parties you ignore one.

England’s superiority was not due to the employment of military force, but to the fact that she was able to prevent the employment of military force against her; and the necessity for so doing arose from Napoleon’s motive in threatening her.

… the fact that if Germans are convinced that they will obtain no benefit by the conquest of the English they will not attempt that conquest, and there will be no question of the English living under German rule either less or more happily or prosperously.

It is not a question of Englishmen saying, “Let the German come,” but of the German saying, “Why should we go?”

As to the critic’s second point, I have expressly explained that not the rival’s real interest but what he deems to be his real interest must be the guide to conduct.

“Not the facts, but men’s opinions about the facts, are what matter,” one thinker has remarked. And this is because men’s conduct is determined, not necessarily by the right conclusion from facts, but the conclusion they believe to be right.

When men burned witches, their conduct was exactly what it would have been if what they believed to be true had been true.

The truth made no difference to their behavior, so long as they could not see the truth. And so in politics.

and these increases will still further tend to strengthen Bernhardi’s school, and still further silence his critics.

The process by which force tends to crush reason is, unhappily, cumulative and progressive. The vicious circle can only be broken by the introduction somewhere of the factor of reason.

And this is precisely, my critics urge, why we need do nothing but concentrate on the instruments of force!

Why should it be assumed that Germany will do it? That she will be less persistent in protecting her national interest, her posterity, be less faithful than the British themselves to great national impulses?

Has not the day gone by when educated men can calmly assume that any Englishman is worth three foreigners?

And yet such an assumption, ignorant and provincial as we are bound to admit it to be, is the only one that can possibly justify this policy of concentrating upon armament alone.

John’s thoughts of murder are appeased, not because he has changed his nature, but because the recognition of a simple fact has changed the direction of his passion.

What we in this matter hope to do is to show that the nations are mistaking Peter for James.

Well, the last entrenchment of those who oppose the work is the dogmatic assertion that though we are right as to the material fact, its demonstration can never be made; that this political reformation of Europe the political rationalists talk about is a hopeless matter;

Depend upon it, if “we” can see these things, so can the mere statesmen and diplomats and those who do the work of the world.

Moreover, if what “we” write in reviews and books does not touch men’s reasons, does not affect their conduct, why do we write at all?

We do not believe it impossible to change or form men’s ideas; such a plea would doom us all to silence, and would kill religious and political literature. “Public Opinion” is not external to men; it is made by men;

We do not believe it impossible to change or form men’s ideas; such a plea would doom us all to silence, and would kill religious and political literature.

“Public Opinion” is not external to men; it is made by men; by what they hear and read and have suggested to them by their daily tasks, and talk and contact.

If it were true, therefore, that the difficulties in the way of modifying political opinion were as vast as my critics would have us believe, that would not affect our conduct;

“Men are savage, bloodthirsty creatures, and will fight for a word or a sign,” the Spectator tells us, when their patriotism is involved. Well, until yesterday, it was as true to say that of them when their religion was involved.

Patriotism is the religion of politics.

And as one of the greatest historians of religious ideas has pointed out, religion and patriotism are the chief moral influences moving great bodies of men, and “the separate modifications and mutual interaction of these two agents may almost be said to constitute the moral …

If this is possible as the result of the effort of a single obscure person working without means and without leisure, what could not be accomplished by an organization adequately equipped and financed? Mr. Augustine Birrell says somewhere: “

Some opinions, bold and erect as they may still stand, are in reality but empty shells. One shove would be fatal. Why is it not given?

”

And surprise is expressed that such schemes do not succeed.

French politics have given us this proverb, “I am the leader, therefore I follow.”

This is not mere cynicism, but expresses in reality a profound truth. What is a leader or a ruler in a modern parliamentary sense?

There is no royal road of this kind to a better state.

It seems decreed that we shall not permanently achieve improvement which we as individuals have not paid for in the coin of hard thinking.

Nothing is easier to achieve in international politics than academic declarations in favor of Peace.

But governments being trustees have a first duty in the interests of their wards, or what they conceive to be such interests, and they disregard what is still looked upon as a conception having its origin in altruistic and self-sacrificing motives.

“Self-sacrifice” is the last motive governments can allow themselves to consider. They are created to protect, not to sacrifice, the interests of which they are placed in charge.

It is impossible for governments to base their normal policies on conceptions which are in advance of the general standard of the political opinion of the people from whom they derive their power.

… guess, but as an absolute conviction after very close observation—the ideal of peace is conceived as a demand that he weaken his own defences on no better assurance than that his prospective rival or enemy will be well-behaved and not wicked enough to attack him.

It appeals to him as about equivalent to asking that he shall not lock his doors because to suppose people will rob him is to have a low view of human nature!

Though he believes his own position in the world (as a colonial Power, etc.)

Indeed, the very earnestness of the men who burnt, tortured, and imprisoned and stamped out human thought with the very best motives, was precisely the factor which stood in the way of improvement.

Improvement came finally, not from better intention, but from an acuter use of the intelligence of men, from hard mental work.

So long as we assume that high motive, a better moral tone is all that is needed in international relations, and that an understanding of these problems will in some wonderful way come of itself, without hard and systematic intellectual effort, we shall make little …

… emotion are among the most precious things in life, but they are qualities possessed by some of the most retrograde nations in the world, because in them they are not coupled with the homely quality of hard work, in which one may include hard thinking.

This last is the real price of progress, and we shall make none of worth unless we pay it.

A word or two as to the role of “friendship” in international relations. Courtesy and a certain measure of good faith are essential elements wherever civilized men come in direct contact; without them organized society would go to pieces.

But if they are not vehicles of intellectual comprehension, if the parties go away with as little understanding of the factors and nature of international relationship as they had before such meetings took place, they have served no purpose whatsoever.

The work of the world does not get done merely by being good friends with everybody; the problems of international diplomacy are not to be solved merely by a sort of international picnic; that would make the world too easy a place to live in.

However ungracious it may seem, it is nevertheless dangerous to allow to go unchallenged the notion that the cultivation of “friendship and affection” between nations, irrespective of the other factors affecting their relationship, can ever seriously modify international politics.

Wilson, your railroad striker for the employer of labor, your Suffragette for your anti-Suffragette, and so on ad infinitum. Patriotism has nothing to do with it.

The patriot is often the person who had the heartiest detestation for a large mass of his fellow-countrymen.

Consider any anti-administration literature. As an English instance a glance at Mr.

It is too large an order.

We might as well be asked to entertain feelings of affection for the Tropic of Capricorn.

As I have already hinted, we have no particular affection for the great mass of our own countrymen—your lobbyist enthusiast for Mr. Wilson, your railroad striker for the employer of labor, your Suffragette for your anti-Suffragette, and so on ad infinitum.

Leo Maxse’s monthly masterpieces of epithet-making, or at what the pan-Germans have to say of their own Empire and Government (“poltroons in the pay of the English” is a choice titbit I select from one German newspaper), will soon convince one.

Why, therefore, should we be asked to entertain for foreigners a sentiment we do not give to our own people?

And not only to entertain that sentiment, but to make (always in the terms of the present political beliefs) great sacrifices on behalf of it!

Need it be said that I have not the least desire to deprecate sincere emotion as a factor in progress?

Emotion and enthusiasm form the divine stimulus without which no great things would be achieved; but emotion divorced from mental and moral discipline is not the kind on which wise men will place a very high value.

Some of the intensest emotion of the world has been given to some of the worst possible objects.

Emotion and enthusiasm form the divine stimulus without which no great things would be achieved; but emotion divorced from mental and moral discipline is not the kind on which wise men will place a very high value.

Some of the intensest emotion of the world has been given to some of the worst possible objects.

Just as in the physical world, the same forces—steam, gunpowder, what you will—which, controlled and directed may do an infinitely useful work—may, uncontrolled, cause accidents and catastrophes of the gravest kind.

From that fact, which is not complex or difficult in the least, will emerge the truth that modern government is a matter of administration, and that it can no more profit a community to annex other communities, than it could profit London to annex Manchester.

These things will not need argument to be clear to the schoolboy of the future⁠—they will be self-evident, like the improbability of an old woman causing a storm at sea.

Of course, it is true that many of the factors bearing on this improvement will be indirect. As our education becomes more rational in other fields, it will make for understanding in this;

That extension cannot be made by military means. The English conquest of great military nations is a physical impossibility, and it would involve the collapse of the principle upon which the Empire is based if it were.

The day for progress by force has passed; it will be progress by ideas or not at all.

Because these principles of free human cooperation between communities are, in a special sense, an Anglo-Saxon development, it is upon us that there falls the responsibility of giving a lead.

In any case Great Britain would not now carry upon her shoulders the responsibility of having during half a century supported the Turk against the Christian and of having tried uselessly to prevent what has now taken place—the breakup of the Turk’s rule in Europe.

War is not impossible, and no responsible Pacifist ever said it was; it is not the likelihood of war which is the illusion, but its benefits.

It is likely or unlikely according as the parties to a dispute are guided by wisdom or folly.

… the discussion of and interest in principles, the ideas that govern human relationship, they are the only things that can prevent future wars, just as they were the only things that brought religious wars to an end—a preponderant power “imposing” peace playing no role therein.

Just as it was false religious theories which made the religious wars, so it is false political theories which make the political wars.

War is only inevitable in the sense that other forms of error and passion—religious persecution for instance—are inevitable; they cease with better understanding, as the attempt to impose religious belief by force has ceased in Europe.

“Polite and good-natured people think it rude to say ‘Balkans’ if a Pacifist be present. Yet I never understood why, and I understand now less than ever. It carries the implication that because war has broken out that fact disposes of all objection to it.

The armies are at grips, therefore peace is a mistake. Passion reigns in the Balkans, therefore passion is preferable to reason.

“I suppose cannibalism and infanticide, polygamy, judicial torture, religious persecution, witchcraft, during all the years we did these ‘inevitable’ things, were defended in the same way, and those who resented all criticism of them pointed in triumph to the cannibal feast, the dead child, the …

and yet, when in our day their representatives, seated round a table, could have had it for the asking, they did not deem it worth the asking, so little of the ancient passion was there left.

The very nature of man seemed to be transformed. For, wonderful though it be that orthodox should cease killing heretic, infinitely more wonderful still is it that he should cease wanting to kill him.

“Just as most of us are certain that the underlying causes of this conflict are ‘inevitable’ and ‘inherent in unchanging human nature,’ so are we certain that so un-human a thing as economics can have no bearing on it.

as the interdependence widens and deepens it necessarily means the cessation of certain hostilities.

If the neighboring tribe wants to trade with you it must not kill you; if you want the services of the heretic you must not kill him, you must keep your obligation towards him, and mutual good faith is death to long-sustained hatreds.

“You cannot separate the moral from the social and economic development of a people.