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WAR AS AN INSTITUTION

BY BERTRAND RUSSELL

I

In spite of the fact that most nations, at most times, are at peace, war is one of the permanent institutions of most free communities, just as Parliament is one of our permanent institutions in spite of the fact that it is not always sitting. It is war as a permanent institution that I wish to consider: why men tolerate it, what hope there is of their coming not to tolerate it, and how they could abolish it if they wished to do so. War is a conflict between two groups of men, each of which attempts to kill and maim as many as possible of the other group, in order to achieve some object which it desires. The object is generally either power or wealth. It is a pleasure to exercise authority over other men, and it is a pleasure to live on the produce of other men's labor. The victor in war can enjoy more of these pleasures than the vanquished. But war, like all other natural activities, is not so much prompted by the end which it has in view as by an impulse to the activity itself. Very often men desire an end, not on its own account, but because their nature demands the actions which will lead to the end. And so it is in this case: the ends to be achieved by war appear, in prospect, far more important than they will appear when they are realized, because war itself is a fulfillment of one side of our nature. If men's actions sprang from desires for what would in fact bring happiness, the purely rational arguments against war would have long

ago put an end to it. What makes war difficult to suppress is that it springs from an impulse rather than from a calculation of the advantages to be derived from war.

War differs from the employment of force by the police through the fact that the actions of the police are ordered by a neutral authority, whereas in war it is the parties to the dispute themselves who set force in motion. This distinction is not absolute, since the state is not always wholly neutral in internal disturbances. When strikers are shot down, the state is taking the side of the rich. When opinions adverse to the existing state are punished, the state is obviously one of the parties to the dispute. And from the suppression of individual opinion up to civil war, all gradations are possible. But, broadly speaking, force employed according to laws previously laid down by the community as a whole may be distinguished from force employed by one community against another on occasions of which the one community is the sole judge.

I have dwelt upon this difference, because I do not think that the use of force by the police can be wholly eliminated, and I think that a similar use of force in international affairs offers the best hope of permanent peace. At present, international affairs are regulated by the principle that a nation must not intervene unless its interests are involved: diplomatic usage forbids intervention for the mere maintenance of international law. America may protest when

American citizens are drowned by German submarines, but must not protest when no American citizens are involved. The case would be analogous in internal affairs if the police would only interfere with murder when it happened that a policeman had been killed. So long as this principle prevails in the relations of states, the power of neutrals cannot be effectively employed to prevent war.

In every civilized country two forces coöperate to produce war. Only educated men are likely to be warlike at ordinary times, since they alone are vividly aware of other countries or of the part which their own nation might play in the affairs of the world. But it is only their knowledge, not their nature, that distinguishes them from their more ignorant compatriots. To take the most obvious example, German policy, in recent years before the war, was not averse from war, and not friendly to England. It is worth while to try to understand the state of mind from which this policy sprang.

The men who direct German policy are, to begin with, patriotic to an extent which is almost unknown in more civilized countries, such as France and England. The interests of Germany appear to them unquestionably the only interests they need consider. What injury may, in pursuing those interests, be done to other nations, what destruction may be brought upon populations and cities, what irreparable damage may be done to civilization, it is not for them to consider. If they can confer what they consider benefits upon Germany, everything else is of no account.

The second noteworthy point about German policy is, that its conception of national welfare is purely competitive. It is not the intrinsic wealth of Germany, whether materially or mentally, that the rulers of Germany consider important: it is the comparative

wealth, in the competition with other civilized countries. For this reason, the destruction of good things abroad appears to them exactly as desirable as the creation of good things in Germany. In most parts of the world, the French are regarded as the most civilized of nations: their art and their literature and their way of life have an attraction for foreigners which those of Germany do not have. The English have developed political liberty, and the art of maintaining an empire with a minimum of coercion, in ways for which Germany, hitherto, has shown no aptitude. These are grounds for envy, and envy wishes to destroy what is good in other countries. The Germans, quite rightly, judged that what was best in France and England would probably be destroyed by a great war, even if France and England were not in the end defeated in the actual fighting. I have seen a list of young French writers killed on the battlefield; probably the German authorities have also seen it, and have reflected with joy that another year of such losses will destroy French literature for a generation perhaps, through loss of tradition, forever. Every outburst against liberty in our more bellicose newspapers, every incitement to persecution of defenseless Germans, every mark of growing ferocity in our attitude, must be read with delight by German patriots, as proving their success in robbing us of our best, and forcing us to imitate whatever is worst in Prussia.

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erage of intelligence and knowledge is far superior to ours. Their capacity for pursuing an attainable end, unitedly and with forethought, is infinitely greater than ours. Yet we, merely (as they think) because we had a start in the race, have achieved a vastly larger empire than they have, and an enormously greater control of capital. All this is unbearable; and nothing but a great war can alter it.

Besides all these feelings, there is in many Germans, especially in those who know us best, a hot hatred on account of our pride. Farinata degli Uberti surveyed Hell 'come avesse lo inferno in gran dispitto.' Just so, by German accounts, English officer prisoners look round them among their captors holding aloof, as though the enemy were noxious unclean creatures, toads or slugs or centipedes, which a man does not touch willingly, and shakes off with loathing if he is forced to touch them for a moment. It is easy to imagine how the devils hated Farinata, and inflicted greater pains upon him than upon his neighbors, hoping to win recognition by some slight wincing on his part, driven to frenzy by his continuing to behave as if they did not exist. In just the same way the Germans are maddened by our spiritual immobility. At bottom, we have regarded the Germans as one regards flies on a hot day

they are a nuisance, one has to brush them off, but it would not occur to one to be turned aside by them. Now that the initial certainty of victory has faded, we begin to be affected inwardly by the Germans. In time, if we continue to fail in our military enterprises, we shall realize that they are human beings, not just a tiresome circumstance. Then perhaps we shall hate them with a hatred which they will have no reason to resent. And from such a hatred it will be only a short journey to a genuine rapprochement.

The problem which must be solved, if the future of the world is to be less terrible than its present, is the problem of preventing nations from getting into the moods of England and Germany at the outbreak of the war. These two nations, as they were at that moment, might be taken as almost mythical representatives of pride and envy — of cold pride and hot envy. Germany declaimed passionately, 'You, England, swollen and decrepit, overshadow my whole growth-your rotting branches keep the sun from shining upon me and the rain from nourishing me. Your spreading foliage must be lopped, your symmetrical beauty must be destroyed, that I too may have freedom to grow, that my young vigor may no longer be impeded by your decaying mass.' England, bored and aloof, unconscious of the claims of outside forces, attempted absent-mindedly to sweep away the upstart disturber of meditation; but the upstart was not swept away, and remains so far with every prospect of making good his claim. The claim and the resistance to it are alike folly. Germany had no good ground for envy; we had no good ground for resisting whatever in Germany's demands was compatible with our continued existence. Is there any method of averting such reciprocal folly in the future?

II

I think that if either the English or the Germans were capable of thinking in terms of individual welfare rather than national pride, they would have seen that, at every moment during the war, the wisest course would have been to conclude peace at once, on the best terms that could have been obtained. This course, I am convinced, would have been the wisest for each separate nation as well as for civilization in general. The utmost evil that the enemy

could inflict through an unfavorable peace would be a trifle compared to the evil which all the nations inflict upon themselves by continuing to fight. What prevents the acknowledgment of this obvious fact is pride, the pride which cannot bear to admit defeat.

The mood in which Germany embarked upon the war was abominable, but it was a mood fostered by the habitual mood of England. If we had realized the futility of empire, if we had shown a willingness to yield colonies to Germany without waiting for the threat of force, we might have been in a position to persuade the Germans that their ambitions were foolish, and that the respect of the world was not to be won on imperialist lines. But by our resistance we showed that we shared their standards. We, being in possession, became enamored of the status quo. The Germans were willing to make war to upset the status quo; we were willing to make war to prevent its being upset in Germany's favor. So convinced were we of the sacredness of the status quo that we never realized how advantageous it was to us, or how, by insisting upon it, we shared the responsibility for the war. In a world where nations grow and decay, where forces change and populations become cramped, it is not possible or desirable to maintain the status quo forever. If peace is to be preserved, nations must learn to accept unfavorable alterations of the map without feeling that they must first be defeated in war, or that in yielding they incur a humiliation.

It is the insistence of legalists and friends of peace upon the maintenance of the status quo that has driven Germany into militarism. Germany had as good a right to an empire as any other great power, but could only acquire an empire through war. Love of peace has been too much associated with a static conception of interna

tional relations. In economic disputes, we all know that whatever is vigorous in the wage-earning classes is opposed to 'industrial peace,' because the existing distribution of wealth is felt to be unfair. Those who enjoy a privileged position endeavor to bolster up their claims by appealing to the desire for peace, and decrying those who promote strife between the classes. It never occurs to them that, by opposing changes without considering whether or not they are just, the capitalists share the responsibility for the classwar. And in exactly the same way, England shares the responsibility for Germany's war. If actual war is ever to cease, there will have to be political methods of achieving the results which now can be achieved only by successful fighting, and nations will have to admit voluntarily adverse claims which appear just in the judgment of neutrals.

It is only by some such admission, embodying itself in a parliament of the nations with full power to alter the distribution of territory, that militarism can be permanently overcome. It may be that the present war will bring, in the western nations, a change of mood and outlook sufficient to make such an institution possible. It may be that more wars and more destruction will be necessary before the majority of civilized men rebel against the brutality and futile destruction of modern war. But unless our standards of civilization and our powers of constructive thought are to be permanently lowered, I cannot doubt that, sooner or later, reason will conquer the blind impulses which now lead nations into war. And if a majority of the great powers had a firm determination that peace should be preserved, there would be no difficulty in devising diplomatic machinery for the settlement of disputes, and educational systems which would implant in the minds of the in the minds of the young an invincible

and ineradicable horror of the futile slaughter which the defenseless children are now taught to admire.

But besides the conscious and deliberate forces leading to war, there are the inarticulate feelings of common men, which, in most civilized countries, are always ready to burst into warfever at the bidding of statesmen. If peace is to be secured, the readiness to catch war-fever must be somehow diminished. Whoever wishes to succeed in this must first understand what warfever is and why it arises.

The men who have an important influence in the world, whether for good or evil, are dominated as a rule by a threefold desire: they desire, first, an activity which calls fully into play the faculties in which they feel that they excel; secondly, the sense of successfully overcoming resistance; thirdly, the respect of others on account of their success. The same desires, usually in a less marked degree, exist in men who have no exceptional talents. But such men cannot achieve anything very difficult by their individual efforts; to them, as units, it is impossible to acquire the sense of greatness or the triumph of strong resistance overcome. Their separate lives are unadventurous and dull. In the morning they go to the office or the plough; in the evening they return, tired and silent, to the sober monotony of wife and children. Believing that security is the supreme good, they have insured against sickness and death, and have found an employment where they have little fear of dismissal and no hope of any great rise. But security, once achieved, brings a nemesis of ennui. Adventure, imagination, risk, also have their claims; but how can these claims be satisfied by the ordinary wage-earner? Even if it were possible to satisfy them, the claims of wife and children have priority and must not be neglected.

To this victim of order and good organization, the realization comes, in some moment of sudden crisis, that he belongs to a nation, that his nation may take risks, may engage in difficult enterprises, enjoy the hot passion of doubtful combat, stimulate adventure and imagination by military expeditions to Mount Sinai and the Garden of Eden. What his nation does, in some sense he does; what his nation suffers, he suffers. The long years of private caution are avenged by a wild plunge into public madness. All the horrid duties of thrift and order and care, which he has learned to fulfill in private, are thought not to apply to public affairs: it is patriotic and noble to be reckless for the nation, though it would be wicked to be reckless for one's self. The old primitive passions, which civilization has denied, surge up, all the stronger for repression. In a moment, imagination and instinct travel back through the centuries, and the wild man of the woods emerges from the mental prison in which he has been confined. This is the deeper part of the psychology of the war-fever.

But besides the irrational and instinctive element in the war-fever, there is always also, if only as a liberator of primitive impulse, a certain amount of quasi-rational calculation and what is euphemistically called 'thought.' The war-fever very seldom seizes a nation unless it believes that it will be victorious. Undoubtedly, under the influence of excitement, men overestimate their chances of success; but there is some proportion between what is hoped and what a rational man would expect. Holland, though quite as humane as England, had no impulse to go to war on behalf of Belgium, because the likelihood of disaster was so obviously overwhelming. The London populace, if they had known how the war was going to develop, would not have

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