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Updated: May 19, 2025
"Good faith" has a score of connotations, and we believe apparently that good politics can dispense with all of them and that "Patriotism" has naught to do with any. Of course, to shoot straight is so much easier than to think straight, and I suppose at bottom the bellicist believes that the latter is a hopeless object since "man is not a thinking animal."
If, however, you said: "Having disarmed you and established the equilibrium, I shall now upset it in my favour by taking your weapon and using it against you unless you hand me your purse and subscribe to my creed. I do this because force alone can determine issues, and because it is a law of life that the strong should eat up the weak." You would then be a Bellicist.
For that is the difference between the two conceptions: the Bellicist says: "Force alone can settle these matters; it is the final appeal; therefore fight it out. Let the best man win. When you have preponderant strength, impose your view; force the other man to your will; not because it is right, but because you are able to do so."
And whether the European society as a whole is to drift towards the Turkish ideal or towards the English ideal will depend upon whether it is animated mainly by the Pacifist or mainly by the Bellicist doctrine; if the former, it will stagger blindly like the Turk along the path to barbarism; if the latter, it will take a better road.
To have an opinion of worth on that question we must get away from certain confusions and misrepresentations. It is a very common habit for the Bellicist to quote the list of wars which have taken place since the Crimean War as proof of the error of Bright and Cobden. But what are the facts?
But the law would not justify me, if having disarmed my opponent, having neutralised his force by my own, and re-established the social equilibrium, I immediately proceeded to upset it, by asking him for his purse on pain of murder. I should then be settling the matter by force I should then have ceased to be a Pacifist, and have become a Bellicist.
"Peace" in the Balkans under the Turkish System The inadequacy of our terms The repulsion of the Turkish invasion The Christian effort to bring the reign of force and conquest to an end The difference between action designed to settle relationship on force and counter action designed to prevent such settlement The force of the policeman and the force of the brigand The failure of conquest as exemplified by the Turk Will the Balkan peoples prove Pacifist or Bellicist; adopt the Turkish or the Christian System?
Churchill goes further and says that a nation should be so strong as to make victory over its rivals certain, he knows that if Germany were to adopt his own doctrine its inevitable outcome would be war. The issue is plain: We get a better understanding of certain political facts in Europe, or we have war. And the Bellicist at present is resolutely opposed to such political education.
And, of course, the Bellicist on the other side of the frontier says exactly the same thing, and I am still waiting to have explained to me how, therefore, if this matter depends upon understanding, we can ever solve it by neglecting understanding, which the Militarist urges us to do.
But the Bellicist says that discussions of this sort, these attempts to find out the truth, are but the encouragement of pernicious theories: there is, according to him, but one way better rapiers, more and better racks, more and better inquisitions. Mr. Bonar Law, in one of the very wisest phrases ever pronounced by a statesman, has declared that "war is the failure of human wisdom."
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