Gilbert Murray

“ We must either devote the whole of our national energies and resources, all our science, all our imagination, all our leisure, to preparation for a next war, not very distant, which must surpass in horror anything that the world has known and must leave European civilization poisoned if not dead: or we must by deliberate effort build up some permanent structure of international understanding which will make such a war impossible. To do the first we need only drift with the tide; to achieve the second we must rise up and conquer circumstances. ”

“ They are real forces and full of power, which no wise statesman will overlook or forget to reckon with. The building of a League of Nations is not an affair of emotion; it is a work of reason, of patience, of skill in international law and statesmanship; but those who have faith in the work will be helped forward by these hopes and longings. And even those who have no faith left in any of the often-baffled, often-discredited, schemes of human brotherhood will yet hesitate to reject the attempt at a League. ”

“ Things have been done no doubt in this War which no man living who knows of them can forgive. But a generation soon passes. The burning lava quickly cools, and the grass and flowers grow over it. I wish one could be as confident of a recovery of wisdom and uprightness in the public affairs of Europe as we can be of a reaction towards peace and goodwill. For in the building up of a League of Nations, as in all great constructive work, neither correct principles nor good intentions suffice to ensure success. ”

“ The principle that will solve the problem of war is not Democracy, but Internationalism. Or if that word seems to imply a lack of proper devotion to one's own country, let us say it is not Democracy nor yet Internationalism, but Brotherhood. We need the growth of brotherhood within each nation, and brotherhood between the nations also. It may seem folly at the present time, when half the world is wild with hatred of the other half, to speak of brotherhood at all. ”

“ The fact is unchanged that, under the present conditions of state organization and national sovereignty, the life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard oh No artisan, no peasant, no remote wood-cutter or shepherd in the whole of Europe, however law-abiding and God-fearing, can be sure henceforth that he will not suddenly by due process of law be haled away to a punishment more cruel than that normally reserved for the worst criminals. If not killed, he may be wounded, blinded, maimed for life, his business ruined, his family reduced to want and his home broken up. ”

“ It is right that Italy should be free and united; yet how could that have been achieved except by war? How could America have become independent? How could the Balkan peoples have escaped from the yoke of the Turk? ”

“ One can hardly imagine that after the War the state of things which led to it will be tolerated in any decent society. The Armament rings are great commercial companies which will be ruined if the nations enjoy long and secure peace, will make considerable fortunes if there is frequent fear of war, and colossal fortunes if there is actual war. In other words, here we have groups of people, and powerful groups, who are subject to an enormous and perpetual temptation to compass the utter misery of their fellow-creatures, and who have every facility for doing so in secret. ”

“ Their rule would be no safeguard against war or anything else.
The fundamental error of the Bolshevik or sans-culotte theorist lies, I believe, in his conscious or unconscious acceptance of class selfishness as the natural and unavoidable basis of human government. If every ruling class is, as a matter of course, to rule in its own interests, then by all means let the largest class rule; but the hypothesis itself is one that destroys all hope for the future of mankind. To accept it is a sin against the whole spirit of Democracy. ”

“ The essential doctrine of Democracy is that each man, as a free human soul, lives of his free will in the service of the whole people. This ideal is no doubt hard to attain, but it is not hard to aim at. It is the only ideal permanently possible for any society that has emerged from the rule of mere custom or the divine right of kings. In certain ancient Greek cities a man, before casting a vote, swore in the presence of the gods that he was voting to the best of his judgement for the good of the whole city. ”

“ We children of men are, in spite of present appearances, something better and gentler than the tiger and the snake. And the War itself, which opened such an abyss of human cruelty, has revealed also heights hitherto undreamed of, not, merely of physical courage but of devotion and loyalty and self-sacrifice. ”

“ It is not enough to trust to the presence of wise statesmen; they can be so easily thwarted by fools. It is not enough to make them directly subject to democratic control; nor to remove the sinister interests which make for war and the aggravating causes which make disputes more difficult than they need be. All these things are good, but they are not enough. War does not always arise from mere wickedness or folly. It sometimes arises from mere growth and movement. Humanity will not stand still. One people grows while another declines. ”

“ But that is in part because the societies that I speak of, the Socialist bodies, the Trades Unions, the workmen's Liberal and Radical Associations, have, in all the democratic nations alike, an idealist atmosphere. They tend to be led by the best minds of their class, who agree in most matters with the best minds of other classes. No doubt the workers' hatred of war is intensified by the plain facts of their own class interest, and this makes the general sentiment for peace stronger in the working class than among the wealthy. ”

“ The Bolshevik theorist has observed that it is not only kings and priests and soldiers who oppress the community; all through society each class is hard upon the class below it. The capitalist oppresses the small trader, the bourgeois oppresses the workman, the skilled artisan oppresses the unskilled and unorganized. Therefore, he argues, the only way to avoid oppression is to put power in the hands of the lowest class of all. ”

“ Whatever view a man may take of the origins of the War, it remains clear that millions of poor men in divers regions of the world have been dragged suddenly, and without any previous action of their own, into a quarrel which they neither made, nor desired, nor understood; and in the course of that quarrel have been subjected again and again to the very extremity of possible human suffering, while those at -whose will they fight for the most part contemplate the battles from a distance or else sit at home in glory. ”

“ But it has surely burned deep into the hearts of all sane human beings the sense of what war means—the horror, the misery, the incalculable loss. We may, I think, feel sure that during the next ten or twenty years at least, when the Council will be forming its habits and fixing its character, the members will meet in a quite different spirit from that of an ordinary Diplomatic Conference of the old sort. Then their minds were full of their various national ambitions and antagonisms; in future such desires will surely be dwarfed by one main concern to avoid by common counsels the common ruin. ”

“ To avoid secret treaties is quite practicable, at any rate in times of peace; and Great Britain had as a matter of fact during the present century resolutely avoided them. None the less we were drawn into war. To avoid secret negotiations is a totally different thing, and, to my mind, an impossible one. It would imply that no two statesmen are ever to discuss an important international question together, except in the presence of reporters. ”

“ And in return we shall both form a habit of friendly consultation with other Powers instead of hostile intrigue, and shall be saved from the deadly dilemma of either provoking war by making preparations or inviting attack by going unprepared. A number of nations which act together can be strong enough to check an aggressor though no one of them alone is so strong as to threaten its neighbours.
America is already committed to the League. America, the richest and strongest and most peaceful Power in the world, stands as the nucleus. ”

“ True, if you take the real leaders of the working class throughout Europe they have a remarkably clean record in this matter. That is because the working classes, like most other large groups, are led not by their average men but by their idealists. No one can attend many Socialist conferences or Trade Union Congresses, or Workers' Educational gatherings, or other meetings of the elite of the working class in Great Britain without feeling the strong idealism of the atmosphere. And I believe it is much the same in most other civilized nations. ”

“ The whole notion that because war and war-making, as things now stand, not only cause practical injury to the common people, but constitute an intolerable outrage on human freedom, therefore a mere democratizing of international machinery would ensure peace, is, in my judgement, a false inference. ”

“ This does not mean that the individual statesmen responsible for a war are villains. Of course the true war-makers are. The men who plot deliberate wars for national or personal ambition stand ever more deeply damned as we consider the full nature of their action. But the wrong done to humanity may be almost as great when the statesmen concerned are, in ordinary parlance, free from all blame. ”

“ A philosophic Socialist, especially if his experience is drawn from Russia or the Central Empires, will drive this point further home.
If we analyse roughly the obvious tendencies that make for War, he will point out, not of course that they are confined to one class in the population, but that, in part at least, they do consist in 'sinister interests', and that such interests naturally flourish more among the rich than the poor. Of course it does not in the least follow, because a man has a sinister interest, that he is necessarily guided by it. ”

“ Our Socialist critic will not let them off lightly. Statesmen have no friends. If he is reasonable we may get him to admit that among those statesmen whom he has known personally there was as great ability and as much strength and loftiness of character as he could have expected to find in any other walk of life. 'But', he will argue, 'statesmen deal habitually with such large issues, and have to preserve their calm of mind amid such vast ebbs and flows of human suffering, that their judgement in such matters becomes, and ought to become, to a certain extent inhuman. ”

“ When the need for change occurs within the limits of one sovereign state the machinery for dealing with it exists, and the difficulty is far less. Most of the British colonies gained their powers of responsible government without serious friction: England had learnt her lesson in America and Canada. The gradual growth of self-government in India will be an infinitely difficult but probably a peaceful process. The great classical instance in recent times is the separation, without war, of Norway and Sweden, an achievement which filled Europe with admiration. ”

“ Again, though commerce and finance have on the whole always suffered heavily through war, it is notorious that a great many persons and companies have made vast fortunes, both in this and in previous wars; and it is not likely that none of them expected to do so beforehand. Some, no doubt, were completely taken by surprise by their own profits; and no one would for a moment suggest that because a firm made money out of some war therefore its directors desired the war. But evidently there do exist a number of moneyed interests to which a outbreak of war means success and prosperity. ”

“ One naturally expands in a particular direction and finds that thereby it is crossing the path of another. The strong and civilized peoples tend to spread over the world. The uncivilized and incompetent peoples both tempt others to war by their weakness and provoke them by their turbulence. Races hitherto subject to others make progress and demand their freedom. All these modes of growth produce situations which cannot be solved without great international changes, and there is at present no machinery for accomplishing such changes except the monstrous machinery of war. ”

“ The hope is that the League will be so strong and general that to stand out of it will be a marked action. The Power that stands out will thereby be confessing that it means still, in spite of all that the world has suffered, to cleave to war and make its fortune by war. Let us hope there may be no such Power. But if there is, its existence will not wreck the whole League ”

“ Everything must be done to prevent the great issues which divide men's minds from taking the form of brute struggles of greed or pride between armed nations. Let us hope that the disputes which come before the Council of Conciliation will not. even at the worst, be merely tugs-of-war between nations, with no principle involved but competing desires. ”

“ No split of opinion or even of interest, neither political nor social nor religious, is fatally dangerous as long as it is not a split between sovereign states, because it is only such states, and not parties or churches or social groups, that hold the keys of the arsenals. ”