rejoiced as they did on that August Bank Holiday long ago. A nation which has had a recent experience of war, and has come to know that a war is almost always more painful than it is expected to be at the outset, becomes much less liable to war-fever, until a new generation grows up. The element of rationality in war-fever is recognized by governments and journalists who desire war, as may be seen by their invariably minimizing the perils of a war which they wish to provoke. At the beginning of the South African War, Sir William Butler was dismissed for suggesting (so I understand) that 60,000 men and three months might not suffice to subdue the Boer republics. And when the war proved long and difficult, the nation turned against those who had made it. We may assume, I think, without attributing too great a share to reason in human affairs, that a nation would not suffer from war-fever in a case where every sane man could see that defeat was very probable. The importance of this lies in the fact that it would make aggressive war very unlikely if its chances of success were very small.

The economic and political forces which make for war could be easily curbed, if the will to peace existed strongly in all civilized nations. But so long as the populations are liable to war-fever, all work for peace must be precarious; and if war-fever could not be, aroused, political and economic forces would be powerless to produce any long or very destructive war. The fundamental problem for the pacifist is to prevent the impulse toward war which seizes whole communities from time to time. And this can be done only by far-reaching changes in education, in the economic structure of society, and in the moral code by which public opinion controls the lives of men and

women.

III

A great many of the impulses which lead nations to go to war are in themselves essential to any vigorous or progressive life. Without imagination and love of adventure, a society soon becomes stagnant and begins to decay. Conflict, provided it is not destructive and brutal, is necessary in order to stimulate men's activities, and to secure the victory of what is living over what is dead or merely traditional. The wish for the triumph of one's cause, the sense of solidarity with large bodies of men, are not things which a wise man will wish to destroy. It is only the outcome in death and destruction and hatred that is evil. The problem is, to keep these impulses, without making war the outlet for them.

All Utopias that have hitherto been constructed are intolerably dull. Any man with any force in him would rather live in this world, with all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato's Republic or among Swift's Houyhnhnms. The men who make Utopias proceed upon a radically false assumption as to what constitutes a good life. They conceive that it is possible to imagine a certain state of society and a certain way of life which should be once for all recognized as good, and should then continue forever and ever. They do not realize that much the greater part of a man's happiness depends upon activity, and only a very small remnant consists in passive enjoyment. Even the pleasures which do consist in enjoyment are satisfactory, to most men, only when they come in the intervals of activity. Social reformers, like inventors of Utopias, are apt to forget this very obvious fact of human nature.

It would, of course, be easy to produce peace if there were no vigor in the world. Pacifism, if it is to be both victorious and beneficent, must find an

outlet, compatible with humane feeling, for the vigor which now leads nations into war and destruction. This problem was considered by William James, in an admirable address on 'The Moral Equivalent of War,' delivered to a congress of pacifists during the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. His statement of the problem could not be bettered; and, so far as I know, he is the only writer who has faced the problem adequately. But his solution is not adequate; perhaps no adequate solution is possible. The problem, however, is one of degree: every additional peaceful outlet for men's energies diminishes the force which urges nations toward war, and makes war less frequent and less fierce. And as a question of degree, it is capable of more or less partial solutions.

Every vigorous man needs some kind of contest, some sense of resistance overcome, in order to feel that he is exercising his faculties. Under the influence of economics, a theory has grown up that what men desire is wealth; this theory has tended to verify itself, because people's actions are more often determined by what they think they desire than by what they really desire. For this reason, public opinion has a great influence in directing the activities of vigorous men. In America, a millionaire is more respected than a great artist; this leads men who might have become either the one or the other to choose to become millionaires. In Renaissance Italy, great artists were more respected than millionaires, and the result was the opposite of what it is in America.

Some pacifists and all militarists deprecate social and political conflicts. In this the militarists are in the right, from their point of view; but the pacifists seem to me mistaken. Conflicts of party politics, conflicts between capital and labor, and generally all those conflicts of principle which do not involve

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war, serve many useful purposes, and do very little harm. They increase men's interest in public affairs, they afford a comparatively innocent outlet for the love of contest, and they help to alter laws and institutions when changing conditions or greater knowledge create the wish for an alteration. Everything that intensifies political life tends to bring a peaceful interest of the same kind as the interest which leads to desire for war. And in a democratic community, political questions give to every voter a sense of initiative and power and responsibility which relieves his life of something of its narrow unadventurousness. The object of the pacifist should be to give men more and more political control over their own lives, and in particular to introduce democracy into the management of industry, as the syndicalists advise.

The problem for the reflective pacifist is twofold: how to keep his own country at peace, and how to preserve the peace of the world. It is impossible that the peace of the world should be preserved while nations are liable to the mood in which Germany entered upon the war- unless, indeed, one nation were so obviously stronger than all others combined as to make war unnecessary for that one and hopeless for all the others. As this war has dragged on its weary length, many people must have asked themselves whether national independence is worth the price that has to be paid for it.

There is a degree of interference with liberty which is fatal to many forms of national life-for example, Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was crushed by the supremacy of Spain and Austria. If the Germans were actually to annex French provinces, as they did in 1871, they would probably inflict a serious injury upon those provinces, and make them less fruitful for civilization in general. For

such reasons, national liberty is a matter of real importance, and a Europe actually governed by Germany would probably be very dead and unproductive. But if 'hegemony' merely means increased weight in diplomatic questions, more coaling stations and possessions in Africa, more power of securing advantageous commercial treaties, then it can hardly be supposed that it would do any vital damage to other nations; certainly it would not do so much damage as the present war is doing. I cannot doubt that, before the war, a hegemony of this kind would have abundantly satisfied the Germans. But the effect of the war, so far, has been to increase immeasurably all the dangers which it was intended to avert. We have now only the choice between the certain exhaustion of Europe in fighting Germany and possible damage to the national life of France by German tyranny. Stated in terms of civilization and human welfare, not in terms of national prestige, that is now in fact the issue.

IV

Assuming that war is not ended by one state conquering all the others, the only way in which it can be permanently ended is by a world-federation. So long as there are many sovereign states, each with its own army, there can be no security that there will not be war. There will have to be in the world only one army and one navy before there will be any reason to think that wars have ceased. This means that, so far as the military functions of the state are concerned, there will be only one state, which will be world-wide.

The civil functions of the state legislative, administrative, and judicial have no very essential connection with the military functions; and there is no reason why both kinds of functions should normally be exer

cised by the same state. There is, in fact, every reason why the civil state and the military state should be different. The greater modern states are already too large for most civil purposes, but for military purposes they are not large enough, since they are not worldwide. This difference as to the desirable area for the two kinds of state introduces a certain perplexity and hesitation when it is not realized that the two functions have little necessary connection: one set of considerations points toward small states, the other toward continually larger states. Of course, if there were an international army and navy, there would have to be some international authority to set them in motion. But this authority need never concern itself with any of the internal concerns of national states: it need only declare the rules which should regulate their relations, and pronounce judicially when those rules have been so infringed as to call for the intervention of the international force. How easily the limits of the international authority could be fixed, may be seen by many actual examples.

The civil and the military state are often different, in practice, for many purposes. The states of America are sovereign except in certain respects, but they do not have separate armies and navies. The South American republics' are sovereign for all purposes except their relations with Europe, in regard to which they are subject to the United States: in dealings with Europe, the army and navy of the United States are their army and navy. The self-governing dominions of Great Britain depend for their defense, not upon their own forces, but upon our navy. Most governments, nowadays, do not aim at formal annexation of a country which they wish to incorporate, but only at a protectorate; that is, civil autonomy subject to military

control. Such autonomy is, of course, in practice incomplete, because it does not enable the 'protected' country to adopt measures which are vetoed by the power in military control. But it may be very nearly complete, as in the case of our self-governing dominions. At the other extreme, it may become a mere farce, as in Egypt. In the case of an alliance, there is complete autonomy of the separate allied countries, together with what is practically a combination of their military forces into one single force.

The great advantage of a large military state is that it increases the area over which internal war is not possible except by revolution. If England and Canada have a disagreement, it is taken as a matter of course that a settlement will be arrived at by discussion, not by force. Still more is this the case if Manchester and Liverpool have a quarrel, in spite of the fact that each is autonomous for many local purposes. No one would have thought it reasonable that Liverpool should go to war to prevent the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal, although almost any two great powers would have gone to war over an issue of the same relative importance. England and Russia would probably have gone to war over Persia if they had not been allies; as it is, they arrived by diplomacy at much the same iniquitous result as they would otherwise have reached by fighting. Australia and Japan would probably fight if they were both completely independent; but both depend for their liberties upon the British navy, and therefore they have to adjust their differences peaceably.

The chief disadvantage of a large military state is that, when external war occurs, the area affected is greater. The Quadruple Entente forms, for the present, one military state; the result is that, because of a dispute between

Austria and Serbia, Belgium is devastated and Australians are killed in the Dardanelles. Another disadvantage is that it facilitates oppression. A large military state is practically omnipotent against a small state, and can impose its will, as England and Russia did in Persia. It is impossible to make sure of avoiding oppression by any purely mechanical guarantees; only a liberal and humane spirit can afford a real protection. It has been perfectly possible for England to oppress Ireland in the past, in spite of democracy and the presence of Irish members at Westminster. Nor has the presence of Poles in the Reichstag prevented the oppression of Prussian Poland. But democracy and representative government undoubtedly make oppression less probable: they afford a means by which those who might be oppressed can make their wishes and grievances publicly known; they make it certain that only a minority can be oppressed, and then only if the majority are nearly unanimous in wishing to oppress them. Also the practice of oppression affords much more pleasure to the governing classes, who actually carry it out, than to the mass of the population. For this reason, the mass of the population, where it has power, is likely to be less tyrannical than an oligarchy or a bureaucracy.

In order to prevent war and at the same time to preserve liberty, it is necessary that there should be only one military state in the world, but that it should act, in different countries, according to the wishes of the civil government of those countries, except when disputes between different countries are involved, which should be decided by some central authority. This is what would naturally result from a federation of the world, if such a thing ever came about. But the prospect is remote, and it is worth while to consider why it is so remote.

The unity of a nation is produced by similar habits, instinctive liking, a common history, and a common pride. The unity of a nation is partly due to intrinsic affinities between its citizens, but partly also to the pressure and contrast of the outside world: if a nation were isolated, it would not have the same cohesion or the same fervor of patriotism. When we come to alliances of nations, it is seldom anything except outside pressure that produces solidarity. England and America, to some extent, are drawn together by the same causes which often make national unity: a (more or less) common language, similar political institutions, similar aims in international politics. But England, France, and Russia were drawn together solely by fear of Germany: if Germany had been annihilated by a natural cataclysm, they would at once have begun to hate one another, as they did before Germany was strong. For this reason, the possibility of coöperation in the present alliance against Germany affords no ground whatever for hoping that all the nations of the world might coöperate permanently in a peaceful alliance. The present motive for cohesion, namely, a common fear, would be gone, and could not be replaced by any other motive unless men's thoughts and purposes were very different from what they are now.

The ultimate fact from which war results is not economic or political, and does not rest upon any mechanical difficulty of inventing means for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. The ultimate fact from which war results is the fact that a large proportion of mankind have an impulse to conflict rather than harmony, and can be brought to coöperate with others only in resisting or attacking a common enemy. This is the case in private life as well as in the relations of states. Most men, when they feel themselves suffi

ciently strong, set to work to make themselves feared rather than loved: the wish to obtain the good opinion of others is confined, as a rule, to those who have not yet acquired secure power. The impulse to quarreling and selfassertion, the pleasure of getting one's own way in spite of opposition, is native to most men. It is this impulse, rather than any motive of calculated self-interest, which produces war, and makes the difficulty of bringing about a world-state. And this impulse is not confined to one nation: it exists, in varying degrees, in all the vigorous nations of the world.

But although this impulse is strong, there is no reason why it should be allowed to lead to war. It was exactly the same impulse which led to dueling; yet now civilized men conduct their private quarrels without bloodshed. If political contest within a world-state were substituted for war, men's imaginations would soon accustom themselves to the new situation, as they have accustomed themselves to absence of dueling. Through the influence of institutions and habits, without any fundamental change in human nature, men would learn to look back upon war as we look upon the burning of heretics or upon human sacrifice to heathen deities. If I were to buy a revolver costing several pounds, in order to shoot my friend with a view to stealing sixpence out of his pocket, I should be thought neither very wise nor very virtuous. But if I can get sixty-five million accomplices to join me in this criminal absurdity, I become one of a great and glorious nation, nobly sacrificing the cost of my revolver, perhaps even my life, in order to secure the sixpence for the honor of my country. Historians, who are almost invaribly sycophants, will praise me and my accomplices if we are successful, and say that we are worthy successors of