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Leila's Books
THE MENACE OF PEACE
THE MENACE OF PEACE
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CHAPTER III.
AND what is the war about? There are answers, enough and to spare, that deal with phases of the conflict. It is a renewal, the historians tell us, of the ever-recurring collision of rival racial movements: there is an incidental truth in the answer, but nothing more. There are voices declaring the source of the struggle to be in the mutual jealousies of German and Anglo-Saxon, each seeking to prevent the predominance of the other: and this, too, is true in part. The Radicals expose and denounce the financial causes of the conflict: and they are nearer the truth than the others. For it is true that Governments, the decisions of rulers and ministers and parliaments, are in the hands of one or another of great banking groups. In their hands is practically all of the world's industrial activity, and the making of peace or war. The back-doors between the money-marts of London and Paris and Berlin, between those of Berlin and Rome and Vienna, are always open: the messengers of the profit-makers go in and out the reeking portals. Probably two hundred men control the war's resources; and they will have a mortgage on the world when the war is done. Let us admit the whole ghastly truth: the war that now engages the nations has its setting and sustenance in a financial avidity and rottenness that are beyond the common mind's measure.
Even so, the economic interpretation of the war is but superficially true. If man were merely a mechanism, the explanation might be sufficient. But man is more than a mechanism; and the action of the mechanism itself is merely an expression of man's spiritual quality, of the degree of his self-realization. Economic modes and social forms, and the industrial and national conflicts they engender, are but objectifications of man's inner mind and manner.
This is especially true of the capitalist system of production. Capitalism is not a thing in itself: it is but the manifestation of a thing: it is a revelation of both the social and the average individual thought or desire. Capitalism is a state of mind: when brotherhood informs the social and the average mind, then brotherhood will organize the world's production and distribution, and the capital therein engaged will be social and sacramental.
We must look beneath our economic modes and strifes for the meaning of the war—for even so much of the meaning as man may read and apply. The war may indeed have spiritual sources beyond our present ken. Of the cosmic tides that beat upon the world we know nearly nothing. Pragmatically speaking, this convulsion of the nations may be but an incident of some struggle that involves the stars and the spaces—an eddy in the course of a strife too vast for our caged and planetary comprehension. But, historically speaking, we may find this war—perhaps all wars—to be but the conflict between two rival principles of collective life and conduct. History is the disclosure of this conflict—the record, tortuous and treacherous, of the slow and hard struggle between the autocratic and the democratic principles for the direction of the human climb.
Or, to put it otherwise, our history is deciding whether the will that proceeds from mutual love, from an affection that is collective and fraternal, or the will of sheer mechanic might, shall be the power that finally and commonly prevails. Shall the will to love, or shall the will to power, be the chosen law of human relations—of all our collective and individual procedure? Shall the peoples be governed by a power imposed upon them by a master-might or a master-class, justifying itself by the strength of its right hand? Or shall they cooperate with a power that springs from a Divine Presence within, co-ordinating them in a common growth, in equal opportunity, in social goodness and spiritual gladness?
CHAPTER III.
AND what is the war about? There are answers, enough and to spare, that deal with phases of the conflict. It is a renewal, the historians tell us, of the ever-recurring collision of rival racial movements: there is an incidental truth in the answer, but nothing more. There are voices declaring the source of the struggle to be in the mutual jealousies of German and Anglo-Saxon, each seeking to prevent the predominance of the other: and this, too, is true in part. The Radicals expose and denounce the financial causes of the conflict: and they are nearer the truth than the others. For it is true that Governments, the decisions of rulers and ministers and parliaments, are in the hands of one or another of great banking groups. In their hands is practically all of the world's industrial activity, and the making of peace or war. The back-doors between the money-marts of London and Paris and Berlin, between those of Berlin and Rome and Vienna, are always open: the messengers of the profit-makers go in and out the reeking portals. Probably two hundred men control the war's resources; and they will have a mortgage on the world when the war is done. Let us admit the whole ghastly truth: the war that now engages the nations has its setting and sustenance in a financial avidity and rottenness that are beyond the common mind's measure.
Even so, the economic interpretation of the war is but superficially true. If man were merely a mechanism, the explanation might be sufficient. But man is more than a mechanism; and the action of the mechanism itself is merely an expression of man's spiritual quality, of the degree of his self-realization. Economic modes and social forms, and the industrial and national conflicts they engender, are but objectifications of man's inner mind and manner.
This is especially true of the capitalist system of production. Capitalism is not a thing in itself: it is but the manifestation of a thing: it is a revelation of both the social and the average individual thought or desire. Capitalism is a state of mind: when brotherhood informs the social and the average mind, then brotherhood will organize the world's production and distribution, and the capital therein engaged will be social and sacramental.
We must look beneath our economic modes and strifes for the meaning of the war—for even so much of the meaning as man may read and apply. The war may indeed have spiritual sources beyond our present ken. Of the cosmic tides that beat upon the world we know nearly nothing. Pragmatically speaking, this convulsion of the nations may be but an incident of some struggle that involves the stars and the spaces—an eddy in the course of a strife too vast for our caged and planetary comprehension. But, historically speaking, we may find this war—perhaps all wars—to be but the conflict between two rival principles of collective life and conduct. History is the disclosure of this conflict—the record, tortuous and treacherous, of the slow and hard struggle between the autocratic and the democratic principles for the direction of the human climb.
Or, to put it otherwise, our history is deciding whether the will that proceeds from mutual love, from an affection that is collective and fraternal, or the will of sheer mechanic might, shall be the power that finally and commonly prevails. Shall the will to love, or shall the will to power, be the chosen law of human relations—of all our collective and individual procedure? Shall the peoples be governed by a power imposed upon them by a master-might or a master-class, justifying itself by the strength of its right hand? Or shall they cooperate with a power that springs from a Divine Presence within, co-ordinating them in a common growth, in equal opportunity, in social goodness and spiritual gladness?
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