John Mavrogordato

“ I have called this the latest stage in the extension of the sphere of morality because it is the one which actually prevails and limits our national conduct. For the paradox of legal murder and massacre in the modern world is resolved as soon as we realise that war is a conflict between two or more isolated moral systems, each of which only regards violence as a crime to be suppressed within the limits of its own validity. ”

“ It is this totality of obligations, the whole systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated analysis I call the moral sphere.
Curiously enough Lord Haldane was hounded from the Government on the paradoxical ground that he knew too much about the enemy against whom we are fighting. It is certainly true that he has a better understanding than any other statesman of the Prussian perversion of aristocracy and of the true function of science in the State. But it is too much to hope that philosophers should remain Ministers of a State in which journalists are become dictators. ”

“ It would certainly be hard to find a man of what we have called enlightened opinions who would not profess, whatever his private feelings, that it is as great a crime to kill a Hottentot or a Jew as to kill an Englishman. With certain lingering exceptions then we already regard the foreigner as a member of our own moral system. The moral sphere has already extended or is at least in course of extension to its ultimate limits: and war is a survival from the penultimate stage of morality. War, to put it mildly, is a moral anachronism. War between European nations is civil war. ”

“ It is impossible to maintain that any nation or class or individual will be any better in any respect for the Great War, with the single exception of that parasitic class who, as a class, and therefore perhaps not consciously, are chiefly responsible for its inception. We must have Peace first and congresses afterwards. The survivors of civilisation cannot discuss a lasting settlement while they are still under fire. ”

“ The distribution and exchange of commodities are necessary to the existence of the State; so necessary that it might be supposed that their regulation would be one of the primary functions of government. Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. ”

“ They have not yet realised that nowadays all markets are practically open markets, and that no tariff can effectively exclude goods for which there is any demand, for the simple reason that an effective demand cheerfully pays an increased price. All nations in fact stand to share fairly the commercial advantage of each other's colonial markets: and it might even be shown by a little simple book-keeping that the particular balance any nation gains from trading with a colony of its own must be debited with the expense of governing that colony. ”

“ But even if it were as possible by violence as it might conceivably be desirable to extirpate or even to limit the propagation of a particular form of mental culture, the achievement would certainly not be worth the cost to the unhappy survivors and their posterity. It would indeed be a crime against humanity to eliminate the better part of the younger generation, the flower of human brains, in the monstrous pedantry of attempting to correct an intellectual error. ”

“ The man who puts a quarrel with his neighbour into the hands of a legal representative is a stage higher in social civilisation than the man who fights it out at sight. Diplomats are the legal representatives of nations—only there is no supernational court before which they can state their case.
Of course, it is perfectly true that the ultimate sanction of diplomacy is always force, that international negotiations may always be resolved into a series of polite threats, and that the envoy of the small and weak nation rarely has any influence. ”

“ Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for war—remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains. ”

“ The belligerent nations are frantically engaged in destroying two thousand years of education and all the accumulated capital of humanity. Only the enemies of civilisation, the sellers of arms and the sowers of hatred, are growing rich on its ruins. It is impossible to deny that the longer the war continues the greater will be the subsequent sufferings, spiritual and material, of every nation engaged. ”

“ But Imperialism has only been scotched by the unconscious wisdom of English political development. It still unhappily survives not only in the intermittent demand for the acquisition of fresh colonial territory, but also, in its crudest form, without even the shadow of an excuse commercial or altruistic, in the continued subjection of Ireland to English rule. We must not be surprised if the imperialistic elements of the State receive after the war a new lease of life from the mutual encouragement of commerce and militarism. ”

“ It is an illuminating coincidence that the classes in every nation which most enthusiastically demand the violent prosecution of the war seem to be proportionately anxious to annul the hardly-won privileges of democracy. ”

“ At a moment when tens of thousands of men are giving up their whole incomes as well as their savings, in order to fight for their country, it is impossible to imagine any spectacle more unedifying for the wage-earning class than that of these malcontent capitalist legislators angrily fighting for their extra war-profits. ”

“ For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character; that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts; makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. ”

“ At present the only body of doctrine with any conception of the nature of government for the collective benefit of humanity is International Socialism. It is the International Socialists who must lead the attack on War, if only because the only instigators of war themselves form an international body in so far as the only occasions for war are contrived by the Imperialists and Capitalists who are to be found in every nation. To Socialism belongs the duty of educating Europe against Imperialism, as it has begun to educate the nation against Capitalism ”

“ We may note in passing that a common objection, raised by writers like Emile Faguet, to the effect that democracy puts a premium on incompetence by choosing its officials almost fortuitously from the mob, is the exact opposite of the truth. It is our present regime that leaves the selection of our rulers to the chances of birth or wealth or forensic success. Real democracy will stimulate the selection of the best, just as trade union standardisation of wages encourages the employment of the better workmen. ”

“ The urgent necessity is a little first aid, a little cessation of the killing. I don't know how many young men in different parts of the world have been deliberately and scientifically murdered during the writing of this protest. England alone, who has been criticised for her delay in exposing her youth to the slaughter, is having about half a million of her best citizens stabbed or pierced or crushed or mutilated or poisoned or torn to pieces in one year [64] of modern warfare. And life is not the only instrument of vital progress that is being thrown away. ”

“ If again there were any evidence to show that war and war alone kept alive the spirit of true patriotism, it would be less easy to denounce its manifold wickedness. For true patriotism, although like all passionate emotion it involves a certain mental distortion, a slight disturbance of the rational orbit, is yet one of those happy diseases which relieve the colourlessness of strict normality. ”

“ Similarly, knowing as we do that England is no exception to the rule that no imperial nation can be wholly compact of righteousness, we might hesitate to accept The Times' version of British innocence, and we might hesitate to accept Lord Bryce's report on the German atrocities in Belgium, knowing as we do that it is based almost entirely on the hearsay evidence of refugees who would be anxious to distinguish themselves as witnesses from the general ruck of destitution ”

“ Other belligerent governments will raise the plea of checking the spread of a hostile and dangerous culture; a plausible because apparently philosophical justification of war as the only means of extirpating a heresy that might pervert the whole future of European civilisation. Unfortunately such a moral effect, such a "conversion by shock," could only be accomplished by a very sudden, complete and shattering victory; and it is now beginning to be recognised that spectacular triumphs are not to be expected in modern warfare. ”

“ The street fight is clearly recognised as not only futile but immoral; it not only settles no questions of principle but it constitutes a breach of the moral relation between two members of one community; it is become merely a rather sordid exhibition of irrelevant physical facts. The average citizen of England or Germany would never think of encouraging a fight between two sides of a street: why does he not recognise with equal directness the futility and immorality of a fight between two [Pg 120] sides of a continent? ”

“ But this will only be true if we do not measure national wealth by the average wealth of every citizen; if we speak in this case of national wealth quite apart from any question of its equitable distribution, and are careful to distinguish it from national welfare; a wealthy nation in this case would have to mean a nation blessed with a class of wealthy capitalists, or supporting a large parasitic colony of the persons described as financiers; and such a nation would have as a corollary to be blessed with a class of workers disproportionately large and disproportionately poor. ”

“ Imperialism is a form of political corruption in which a nation is consoled for its own slavery by the pride of enslaving its neighbours. The attainment of permanent peace connotes the abandonment of Imperialism. ”

“ For some years, to say the least, it has been generally received that the sphere of morality is co-extensive with mankind. In spite of certain lingering exceptions, it is to-day a commonplace of thought that every human being on the earth is our colleague in civilisation; is a member that is of the human race, which finding itself on this earth has got somehow to make the best of it ”

“ National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity; [22] and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism. But trade in itself is a necessary aliment of the State, and its abuses ought not to be beyond remedy. ”

“ Unhappily our democracy is not indifferent to Imperialism, for it is misled to believe that mere expansion is somehow grand and good; the only geography it learns at school is miscalled "patriotic" because it is designed to encourage this belief. ”

“ Watered by 'war's red rain,' one Bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'—almost a form of worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words. ”

“ The police have an army of inspectors for watching and superintending the work of the markets. The rules drawn up for their regulation would more than fill an old-fashioned three-volume novel, and each one provides for penalties severer and stricter than the other. Yet the profitable game of rigging the market and everything connected with it is in full swing, and no one is more fooled than the police, unless it be the public. ”

“ But if war is ultimately unprofitable for the nation as a whole, it might be argued that Trade itself must ultimately be involved in the national loss. The answer is that even if the Trader's interests were identical with those of the nation and were ultimately bound to suffer with the nation as a whole, he would undoubtedly ignore the possibility of a loss so much remoter than his immediate and obvious profits ”

“ Our semi-scientific militarists forget that the "survival of the fittest" [13] is in nature essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading a wider net than the voluntary [Pg 31] system, may be described as an institution for exposing the best citizens of a state to abnormal risks of annihilation. ”

“ Imperialism is bad because it is based on conquest, implies a "subject race," and sooner or later will have to be maintained by war. It breeds a conquering and commercial spirit, which is never satisfied unless it is carrying some one else's burden (at a high freight) . The imperialist plutocracy will then find itself so much occupied with other people's affairs that it will be neglecting domestic politics altogether: and this neglect will be the more disastrous in so far as poverty and servitude will have increased at the same rate as luxury. ”

“ Germany, it is true, has reason to be proud of her theatres, but that is a matter of State enterprise, rather than an indication of national culture. The German State has been efficient enough to perceive that good theatres are a fundamental necessity of national education, and that good theatres, owing to the excessive rents they have to pay, can never be kept going without a State subsidy. But these admirable theatres can hardly be called the vehicles of a high native culture. ”

“ The very concentration of authority which is essential in war is, in peace, fatally destructive not of freedom alone, but also of that maximum individual development which is the very end and purpose for which society exists."—Sidney Webb, Towards Social Democracy?, 1916. ”

“ Actually it seems that the reverse is the case, if one may judge by the fact that war is invariably accompanied by an overwhelming outbreak of every spurious form of patriotism that was ever invented by the devil to make an honest man ashamed of his country. True patriotism is a calm and lovely orientation of the spirit towards the vital beauty of England. ”

“ It may be said of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs and vileness and scum. ”

“ The dialectical exercises of the German Chancellor and Mr. Asquith are so futile that they remind us only of two naughty children who [Pg 91] drag out their squabble with stubborn outcries of "He began it." The first consideration is to stop fighting. Such academic discussions are necessarily endless, for the simple reason that every nation has its faults, to which criminal motives can always be attached: every nation has its fools, whom its enemies can describe as typical representatives. The question of responsibility for the Great War must be left to the historians of the future. ”