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These British shipowners are a pampered class with great political and social influence, and no doubt as soon as the accumulating strain of the struggle tells to the extent of any serious restriction of their advantage and prospects, we shall see them shifting to the side of the at present negligible group of British pacifists.
I should put it more harshly. I hate more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our mainspring. Odd, isn't it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it's the truth. We're full of hate towards everything that doesn't square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves.
Men who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen, whose very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German.
It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong militarists.
As yet it is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny associations, such as Ethical and Secularist and, partly, Socialist Societies; and I venture to say, from a large experience of these bodies, that, apart from the professed peace societies, they have been more assiduous than any religious associations in England, in proportion to their work, in demanding the substitution of arbitration for war, and that the overwhelming majority, almost the entirety, of their members are pacifists.
Well, that is the method that mankind has pursued during the whole of its history; it has never shown the least disposition not to take this advice and not to try this method to the full. And written history, to say nothing of unwritten history, is there to tell us how well it has succeeded. Unhappily, one has to ask whether some of these military Pacifists really want it to succeed?
The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, was scarcely an unmixed joy to the majority of them. Those who were in earnest and they mostly were in grim and deadly earnest had hoped to find him a man nearer their own class. Fenn and Bright had their own reasons for standing apart, and the extreme pacifists took note of the fact that he had been a soldier.
At the present time, through agitation and conference, a world sentiment against war is increasing, and pacifists in every land constitute an expanding group of like-minded men and women who are determined that wars shall cease in the future. These are all examples of unorganized associations or incomplete groups.
If we did not die, this war would not be the last; it would be only the preface to the next. To paraphrase the words of Mr. Wells, "We had been prepared to take life in a certain way and life had taken us, as it takes every generation, in an entirely different way. We had been prepared to be altruistic pacifists, and ..."
He spoke no word of his intentions, convinced that he ran a considerable risk at the hands of the Pacifists, but too sensible of his honour to assist anyone to put that spoke in his wheel which he could not help longing for. At six o'clock he locked Blink into his study, and arming himself with three leaders, set forth on his perilous adventure.
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