denly--as the art and social development, the
industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of
England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered--that everything
must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game.
And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory
organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more
than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist
must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous
abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.

The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very
numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want
war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the
war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash
which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is
with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them
as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love
for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the
deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler
constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.

You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that
war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is
destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or
understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and
perplexity--such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the
cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude
and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest
writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets,
for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is
hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and
happier living.

The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and
rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did
not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a
sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt
and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains
forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over
civilization. This easy belief of t