Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene. Ellis Havelock
for art, for organised labour—and in primitive days dancing was the chief military school, a perpetual exercise in mimic warfare during times of peace, and in times of war the most powerful stimulus to military prowess by the excitement it aroused. Not only was war a formative and developmental social force of the first importance among early men, but it was comparatively free from the disadvantages which warfare later on developed; the hardness of their life and the obtuseness of their sensibility reduced to a minimum the bad results of wounds and shocks, while their warfare, being free from the awful devices due to the devilry of modern man, was comparatively innocuous; even if very destructive, its destruction was necessarily limited by the fact that those accumulated treasures of the past which largely make civilisation had not come into existence. We may admire the beautiful humanity, the finely developed social organisation, and the skill in the arts attained by such people as the Eskimo tribes, which know nothing of war, but we must also recognise that warfare among primitive peoples has often been a progressive and developmental force of the first importance, creating virtues apt for use in quite other than military spheres.3
The case is altered when we turn from savagery to civilisation. The new and more complex social order while, on the one hand, it presents substitutes for war in so far as war is a source of virtues, on the other hand, renders war a much more dangerous performance both to the individual and to the community, becoming indeed, progressively more dangerous to both, until it reaches such a climax of world-wide injury as we witness to-day. The claim made in primitive societies that warfare is necessary to the maintenance of virility and courage, a claim so fully admitted that only the youth furnished with trophies of heads or scalps can hope to become an accepted lover, is out of date in civilisation. For under civilised conditions there are hundreds of avocations which furnish exactly the same conditions as warfare for the cultivation of all the manly virtues of enterprise and courage and endurance, physical or moral. Not only are these new avocations equally potent for the cultivation of virility, but far more useful for the social ends of civilisation. For these ends warfare is altogether less adapted than it is for the social ends of savagery. It is much less congenial to the tastes and aptitudes of the individual, while at the same time it is incomparably more injurious to Society. In savagery little is risked by war, for the precious heirlooms of humanity have not yet been created, and war can destroy nothing which cannot easily be remade by the people who first made it. But civilisation possesses—and in that possession, indeed, civilisation largely consists—the precious traditions of past ages that can never live again, embodied in part in exquisite productions of varied beauty which are a continual joy and inspiration to mankind, and in part in slowly evolved habits and laws of social amenity, and reasonable freedom, and mutual independence, which under civilised conditions war, whether between nations or between classes, tends to destroy, and in so destroying to inflict a permanent loss in the material heirlooms of Mankind and a serious injury to the spiritual traditions of civilisation.
It is possible to go further and to declare that warfare is in contradiction with the whole of the influences which build up and organise civilisation. A tribe is a small but very closely knit unity, so closely knit that the individual is entirely subordinated to the whole and has little independence of action or even of thought. The tendency of civilisation is to create webs of social organisation which grow ever larger, but at the same time looser, so that the individual gains a continually growing freedom and independence. The tribe becomes merged in the nation, and beyond even this great unit, bonds of international relationship are progressively formed. War, which at first favoured this movement, becomes an ever greater impediment to its ultimate progress. This is recognised at the threshold of civilisation, and the large community, or nation, abolishes warfare between the units of which it is composed by the device of establishing law courts to dispense impartial justice. As soon as civilised society realised that it was necessary to forbid two persons to settle their disputes by individual fighting, or by initiating blood-feuds, or by arming friends and followers, setting up courts of justice for the peaceable settlement of disputes, the death-blow of all war was struck. For all the arguments that proved strong enough to condemn war between two individuals are infinitely stronger to condemn war between the populations of two-thirds of the earth. But, while it was a comparatively easy task for a State to abolish war and impose peace within its own boundaries—and nearly all over Europe the process was begun and for the most part ended centuries ago—it is a vastly more difficult task to abolish war and impose peace between powerful States. Yet at the point at which we stand to-day civilisation can make no further progress until this is done. Solitary thinkers, like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and even great practical statesmen like Sully and Penn, have from time to time realised this fact during the past four centuries, and attempted to convert it into actuality. But it cannot be done until the great democracies are won over to a conviction of its inevitable necessity. We need an international organisation of law courts which shall dispense justice as between nation and nation in the same way as the existing law courts of all civilised countries now dispense justice as between man and man; and we further need, behind this international organisation of justice, an international organisation of police strong enough to carry out the decisions of these courts, not to exercise tyranny but to ensure to every nation, even the smallest, that measure of reasonable freedom and security to go about its own business which every civilised nation now, in some small degree at all events, already ensures to the humblest of its individual citizens. The task may take centuries to complete, but there is no more urgent task before mankind to-day.4
These considerations are very elementary, and a year or two ago they might have seemed to many—though not to all of us—merely academic, chiefly suitable to put before schoolchildren. But now they have ceased to be merely academic; they have indeed acquired a vital actuality almost agonisingly intense. For one realises to-day that the considerations here set forth, widely accepted as they are, yet are not generally accepted by the rulers and leaders of the greatest and foremost nations of the world. Thus Germany, in its present Prussianised state, through the mouths as well as through the actions of those rulers and leaders, denies most of the conclusions here set forth. In Germany it is a commonplace to declare that war is the law of Nature, that the "struggle for existence" means the arbitration of warfare, that it is by war that all evolution proceeds, that not only in savagery but in the highest civilisation the same rule holds good, that human war is the source of all virtues, the divinely inspired method of regenerating and purifying mankind, and every war may properly be regarded as a holy war. These beliefs have been implicit in the Prussian spirit ever since the Goths and Vandals issued from the forests of the Vistula in the dawn of European history. But they have now become a sort of religious dogma, preached from pulpits, taught in Universities, acted out by statesmen. From this Prussian point of view, whether right or wrong, civilisation, as it has hitherto been understood in the world, is of little consequence compared to German militaristic Kultur. Therefore the German quite logically regards the Russians as barbarians, and the French as decadents, and the English as contemptibly negligible, although the Russians, however yet dominated by a military bureaucracy (moulded by Teutonic influences, as some maliciously point out), are the most humane people of Europe, and the French the natural leaders of civilisation as commonly understood, and the English, however much they may rely on amateurish methods of organisation by emergency, have scattered the seeds of progress over a large part of the earth's surface. It is equally logical that the Germans should feel peculiar admiration and sympathy for the Turks, and find in Turkey, a State founded on military ideals, their own ally in the present war. That war, from our present point of view, is a war of States which use military methods for special ends (often indeed ends that have been thoroughly evil) against a State which still cherishes the primitive ideal of warfare as an end in itself. And while such a State must enjoy immense advantages in the struggle, it is difficult, when we survey the whole course of human development, to believe that there can be any doubt about the final issue.
For one who writes as an Englishman, it may be necessary to point out clearly that that final issue by no means involves the destruction, or even the subjugation, of Germany. It is indeed an almost pathetic fact that Germany, which idealises warfare, stands to gain more than any country by an assured rule of international peace which would save her from warfare. Placed in a position which renders militaristic organisation indispensable, the Germans are more highly endowed than almost any people with the
On the advantages of war in primitive society, see W. MacDougal's
It is doubtless a task beset by difficulties, some of which are set forth, in no hostile spirit, by Lord Cromer, "Thinking Internationally,"