tal becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will
always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do
possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it
becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war
will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but
those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.

We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the
ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there
will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as
something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own
nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see
it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely
nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess,
who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even
to their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the old
original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the
belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the
malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood
and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding
ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to
disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared
to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not
exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us,
that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There
is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by
the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that
other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed
utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.

So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it must
always continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness by
making us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means of
protecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him a
negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative,
defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and they
have not, something they would like to s