MILITARISM AND PARTY-POLITICS 395 



On both sides the error lies in inadequate reasoning. We 

 persistently refuse to look on matters in the true scientific 

 spirit, which seeks only for the truth. The mass of men and of 

 their governments still live in the obsession of dogmas, the 

 scorn of knowledge, the worship of images, and the hatred of 

 God which the prophets of old denounced. So too, as of old, 

 aye in the self-same lands where during untold aeons our 

 naked ancestors ran fighting and shrieking under the dripping 

 forests, there we, the children of the Light which our great men 

 gave us, still run shrieking and fighting and blowing each other 

 into fragments by means of the science which they created. 

 We have witnessed the greatest crime ever perpetrated upon 

 humanity. It is due in the first place to the wickedness or 

 incompetence of those by whom the mass of men allow them- 

 selves to be ruled — the prince who pretends to possess the 

 mandate of God, or the politicians who pretend to possess the 

 mandate of the people ; and secondly to the fact that, however 

 far civilisation has progressed, the mass of men still remain 

 intellectually in but little better condition than they were in 

 when they smote each other with sticks and hammered each 

 other to death with stones. 



