aight; apparently we need not learn to think straight. And yet if
Europe could do the second it could dispense with the first. "Good
faith" has a score of connotations, and we believe apparently that good
politics can dispense with all of them and that "Patriotism" has naught
to do with any.

Of course, to shoot straight is so much easier than to think straight,
and I suppose at bottom the bellicist believes that the latter is a
hopeless object since "man is not a thinking animal." He deems,
apparently, we must just leave it at that. Of course, if he does leave
it at that--if we persist in believing that it is no good discussing
these matters, trying to find out the truth about them, writing books
and building churches--our civilization is going to drift just precisely
as those other civilizations which have been guided by the same dreadful
fatalism have drifted--towards the Turkish goal. "Kismet. Man is a fool
to babble of these things; what he may do is of no avail; all things
will happen as they were pre-ordained." And the English Turk--the man
who prefers to fight things out instead of thinking things out--takes
the same line.

If he adopts the Turkish philosophy he must be content with the Turkish
result. But the Western world as a whole has refused to be content with
the Turkish result, and however tiresome it may be to know about
things, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to
realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to
accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment
at all, fatalistically to let things slide or--to find out bit by bit
where our errors have been and to correct those errors. This is a hard
road, but it is the road the Western world has chosen; and it is better
than the other.

And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium
to-morrow week. There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or
talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny
brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to
correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or
cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word
at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?

Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the "practical" man
who despises "theories" nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is
not an absolute dogma with all its thir