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Updated: April 30, 2025
The improvement of ideas the foundation of all improvement Shooting straight and thinking straight; the one as important as the other Pacifism and the Millennium How we got rid of wars of religion A few ideas have changed the face of the world The simple ideas the most important The "theories" which have led to war The work of the reformer to destroy old and false theories The intellectual interdependence of nations Europe at unity in this matter New ideas cannot be confined to one people No fear of ourselves or any nation being ahead of the rest.
Seward's ironic peacefulness in the midst of the storm gained in luster because all about him raged a tempest of ferocity, mitigated, at least so far as the distracted President could see, only by self-interest or pacifism. As Lincoln came into office, he could see and hear many signs of a rising fierceness of sectional hatred.
But the daily shining-up of metal buttons which need never have been made of metal at all, which tarnish in the damp and indeed lose their lustre in an hour in any weather, which, moreover, look much prettier dull than bright this is enough to convert the most bloodthirsty recruit into obdurate pacifism.
He learned to be passionately unjust and false, for he wanted to persuade himself that he could accept the fact of war, and participate in it, without renouncing his pacifism of yesterday, his humanitarianism of the day before, and his constant optimism. It was not plain sailing, but there is nothing that the brain cannot attain to.
In the autumn of 1917 I had a visit from a subject of a neutral state, who is a pronounced upholder of general disarmament and world pacifism. We began, of course, to discuss the theme of free competition in armaments, of militarism, which in England prevails on the sea and in Germany on land, and my visitor entered upon the various possibilities likely to occur when the war was at an end. He had no faith in the destruction of England, nor had I; but he thought it possible that France and Italy might collapse. The French and Italians could not possibly bear any heavier burdens than already were laid on them; in Paris and Rome, he thought, revolution was not far distant, and a fresh phase of the war would then ensue. England and America would continue to fight on alone, for ten, perhaps even twenty, years. England was not to be considered just a little island, but comprised Australia, India, Canada, and the sea. "L'Angleterre est imbattable," he repeated, and America likewise. On the other hand, the German army was also invincible. The secession of France and Italy would greatly hinder the cruel blockade, for the resources of those two countries once they were conquered by the Central Powers were very vast, and in that case he could not see any end to the war. Finally, the world would collapse from the general state of exhaustion. My visitor cited the fable in which two goats met on a narrow bridge; neither would give way to the other, and they fought until they both fell into the water and were drowned. The victory of one group as in previous wars, he continued, where the conqueror gleaned a rich harvest of gains and the vanquished had to bear all the losses, was out of the question in this present war. Tout le monde perdra, et
She is the daughter of socialism, syndicalism, pacifism, internationalism everything that is most apart from my traditions. But she brings to me beauty, innocence, the feminine solution of all intellectual concepts. She, the woman, is the soul of conflicting England. She is torn both ways. But as she has to breed men, some day, she is instinctively on our side. She is invaluable to me.
That is the whole case of Pacifism: we shall not improve except at the price of using our reason in these matters; of understanding them better. Surely it is a truism that that is the price of all progress; saner conceptions man's recognition of his mistakes, whether those mistakes take the form of cannibalism, slavery, torture, superstition, tyranny, false laws, or what you will.
Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war would become too horrible for patriots to endure.
"When we survey the world around, the wondrous things which there abound" especially the developments of these last years there must come to some of us a doubt whether this civilisation of ours is to have a future. Mr. Lowes Dickenson, in an able book, "The Choice Before Us," has outlined the alternate paths which the world may tread after the war "National Militarism" or "International Pacifism."
For a century that principle had been the pole-star of American foreign policy; no other people had such a wrench to make from their moorings before they could enter the war, and no other people can understand what it cost the Americans to cut themselves adrift from their haven of democratic pacifism in order to fight for the freedom of another world.
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