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Updated: May 31, 2025
Such pacifism and the dream of universal peace are no new ideas in the world. Like the philosophy of war pacifism has a long history. There have been pacifists everywhere and presumably at all times, since pacifism is quite as much a temperament as it is an idea or a philosophy.
At the other extreme was the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists. Part of Lincoln's abiding quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling. Their peculiar form of introspection had injected into politics the idea of personal sin. Their personal responsibility for slavery they being part of a country that tolerated it was their basal inspiration.
The "civilized" nations of the world, with their blockades, their poison gases, their bombs, submarines, and negro armies, will probably destroy each other within the next hundred years, leaving the stage to those whose pacifism has kept them alive, though poor and powerless.
Jimmie Higgins couldn't understand that here in Archangel were Americans taking their orders from British and French officers, who wasted no breath on pacifism and sentiment, who had no fool ideas about wars for democracy. Was one obscure little runt of a Socialist machinist to be allowed to block their world-plans?
The logical ground for this has been laid for us by many writers; Drawbridge , one of the most recent, finds no support in Christianity for the doctrines of pacifism. All nations, when they fight, fight for God, for liberty and the right, with the implied belief that their own country has a mission in the world, supported by divine authority. All governments have in them a strain of theocracy.
After long years opposing the political temper of the extremists, he was not the man now to change front. To one who believed himself marked out for a tragic end, the cowardice at the heart of the pacifism of his time was revolting. It was fortunate for his own peace of mind that he could here count on the Secretary of State.
His powerfully gentle personality has an undoubted effect on the revolutionaries, and while neither element wants to embrace pacifism, both want AE's revolution to go forward with theirs. His gaiety at the little Sunday evenings which he holds quite regularly, goes far, I am told, towards easing the strain on the taut nerves of the Sinn Fein intellectuals who attend them.
War is not going to be ended by complete international disarmament, any more than complete unpreparedness kept the United States out of the struggle. A reasonable armament for every nation, and the union of all nations against any one or two that threaten wantonly to break the peace is the most promising plan intelligent pacifism has yet suggested.
The best foundation for all necessary military activities of a free people appears to be a by-product, so to speak, of peaceful life sustained at a high point of efficiency and enthusiasm. Military training disconnected from its immediate use and application in war must appear to some and indeed to many as a misfit in modern civilized life. This is not an argument for pacifism, however.
Shall we continue, in one moment, to assume that war is the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly it begins to disturb us, as unimportant.
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