i6o THE POPE LAB SCIENCE MONTHLY 



As a single typical illustration let us consider the illuminating 

 articles by Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson entitled "The "War and the Way 

 Out/' published in recent numbers of the Atlantic Monthly. 



Mr. Dickinson traces the causes of war to the artificial rivalries be- 

 tween those abstract and unreal beings called states, rivalries which are 

 wholly unshared by the real men, women and children who compose the 

 state. The actual citizens of the state desire to live in peace and quiet, 

 to till their land, sell their produce, and buy their necessities, and are 

 but little interested in the question whether the shores of the Baltic 

 shall belong to Russia or Germany or whether Constantinople shall be 

 controlled by one nation or another. Nor indeed do these political rela- 

 tions make any material difference to the people themselves ; they make a 

 difference only to that idol, the abstract state, and then only in time of 

 war. The remedy, therefore, is to be found, first, in the cessation of these 

 international rivalries, second, in the international control of armaments, 

 and third, in the elective allegiance of disputed territor} r , such for 

 instance, as Poland, Alsace and Lorraine. The cause of war being thus 

 removed, the peace-loving, law-abiding and land-tilling citizens will live 

 in happiness and prosperity. 



This program is most captivating and no one can doubt that if inter- 

 national rivalries could be prevented in this way, the immediate cause 

 of many wars would be removed. But the greater number of the wars 

 of history have not been between rival states but have been wars of con- 

 quest and civil wars and the real causes of them all lie deeper than in any 

 political relations, deeper than the love of conquest, deeper than in any 

 economic or commercial complications. All these alike are the occasions 

 and not the causes of war. 



Mr. Dickinson regards the state as an abstraction, in a way unreal, 

 and not having necessarily as its interests the interests of the real people 

 who compose the state. This is true but Mr. Dickinson's constructive 

 program rests, if not upon an abstraction such as the political state, nev- 

 ertheless upon a myth, namely the myth of the peace-loving, law-abiding 

 and land-tilling citizen, who, if opportunity offers, will till his land and 

 buy and sell his goods in peace and prosperity. This quiet, peace-lov- 

 ing and land-tilling citizen, if not quite a myth, is at any rate not typical 

 of the modern citizen. The typical man of to-day has not, to be sure, 

 any conscious desire for war nor any wish to violate the laws of the 

 state, but he is an exceedingly complex product of biological evolution, 

 of modern civilization and of social forces, and in his own brain may 

 perhaps be found the real powder-magazine responsible for war. The 

 man of to-day is a high-tension being, with a highly organized brain, 

 possessing an immense amount of potential energy in a state of rather 

 unstable equilibrium, the product of an evolution which has discovered 

 the survival value of certain peculiar mental qualities. Beneath this 



