NOTES 329 



needs, how great must be the needs of research in this country, 

 where the public are not yet awake to the fact that it deserves a 

 worthy support. 



Types : Men of Principle 



It is difficult to decide who is the more foolish, the aggressive 

 militarist or the abject pacifist. The one concludes that might 

 is right, and that any one who is strong enough to do so may 

 seize anything he pleases from the rest of the world ; and the 

 other concludes that the best way to ensure peace is to take all 

 punishments lying down. Thus the existence of the one type 

 encourages the existence of the other type. The militarist 

 could not exist but for the pacifist, nor the pacifist but for the 

 militarist, and the two types have been jointly responsible for 

 the disaster of the present war. 



Men think of the aggressive militarist as being a loud-voiced, 

 brutal, military personage ; but, as a matter of fact, we have 

 never known a British military man (at least) who is of this 

 persuasion. The true-bred type is probably physically rather 

 a feeble personage in high hereditary position — and we all 

 remember what his father thought of the young Frederick the 

 Great before the latter became the hero of militarists. Indeed, 

 the aggressive militarist is apparently a neurotic person who 

 attempts to cover his weaknesses by a profession of strength, 

 and who, when he finds himself in high place, will too easily 

 discover numerous enough sycophants to support him. But the 

 successful parvenu often adopts the same attitude. Thus the 

 Germans were so elated by their unexpected victory forty-three 

 years ago over a people who had long previously established 

 their superiority in arts and war that, like other parvenus, they 

 came to think they were entitled to whatever they wanted. 



On the other hand, the abject pacifist is often a person of the 

 same neurotic type, who, however, has not been born in the 

 same " high " place. His feeble and supersensitive soul shrinks 

 at the thought of any pain, and his equally feeble intelligence 

 prevents him from distinguishing between the sorrows which 

 can be prevented and those which cannot. It is a mere chance 

 whether he becomes a pacifist or a antivivisector, or even 

 shudders at the mere suggestion that a doctor should inoculate 

 him with a vaccine. As with the aggressive militarist, however, 

 there is another type of pacifist — the robust parvenu, who by 



