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Updated: April 30, 2025
When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask them to go. The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less emphatic in their condemnation of war.
But with their customary scrupulousness, their dread of pharisaism, they admit that Switzerland is still far from being a true democracy. "To-day democracy is purely formal; in our own time the principle of true democracy is, in a sense, revolutionary." They tell us some of their aspirations. They desire the democratic control of foreign policy. They want pacifism on a democratic basis.
These were the regions where indifference to and ignorance of foreign affairs had been most conspicuous, but they were also the regions where the President's personal influence was strongest; finally they were the districts where extreme pacifism was most deeply embedded.
I do not know of any other country where a poet would have chosen, as Po-Chui did in one of the poems translated by Mr. Waley, called by him The Old Man with the Broken Arm, to make a hero of a recruit who maimed himself to escape military service. Their pacifism is rooted in their contemplative outlook, and in the fact that they do not desire to change whatever they see.
What has been deemed, however, in Christianity the most unrealizable ideal is that which may be called pacifism to resist not evil, to turn the other cheek, to agree with your adversary while you are in the way with him. "I come not," said Jesus, in one of those paradoxical statements hitherto so difficult to understand, "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."
The true sources of Jefferson's pacifism must be sought in his rationalistic philosophy, which accorded the widest scope to the principle of self-direction and self determination, whether on the part of the individual or of groups of individuals.
In order to efface his last scruples he hid them under close reasoning, and with the aid of his colleagues he laboriously proved by a + b that war was the duty of consistent pacifism. His League had every advantage in dwelling on the criminal acts of the enemy; but did not dwell on those in its own camp.
He has pointed out with force the terrible dangers on the first of these two paths, the ruinous strain and ultimate destruction which a journey down it will inflict on every nation. But, holding a brief for International Pacifism, he was not, in that book, at all events, concerned to point out the dangers which beset Peace.
As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But, as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the greater became their irritation, when success was labelled "pacifism" and "priggery."
To insult her with his talk of pacifism, and then, heedless of her intensity, to propose to her! She could not forgive him for that. She was glad her words had stung him! Minutes passed. The fire would not answer to any attention, but sulkily lived out its little hour. The evening seemed interminable.
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