312 THE ISSUES OF LIFE 



conviction that he looks forward to the control of the birth- 

 rate and to the regularisation of industrialism as likely to 

 bring wars to an end, we should add as a more positive pacific 

 factor an increase of inter-relations which will promote 

 tolerance for, and intelligent appreciation of those who are 

 very different from ourselves. 



But the immediate point is that the militarists' appeal to 

 history is not any more convincing than their appeal to 

 biology. The facts are against them in both fields. 



The third appeal of the militarists is to ethics, and may 

 be illustrated by Moltke's famous letter of 1880 — ^' Eternal 

 peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war 

 is a part of God's world-order. In war are developed the 

 noblest virtues of mankind; courage and sacrifice, fidelity 

 and the willingness to sacrifice life itself. Without war 

 the world would be swallowed up in materialism." There 

 are two half-truths here. The first is that war does evoke 

 noble virtues; the missing half is that there are other en- 

 deavours outside of war that may evoke these virtues not less 

 well, and much less wastefully. Moreover, no one can forget 

 that war evokes other qualities than virtues. The second 

 half-truth is that struggle and sifting seem to be needed 

 for the welfare of humanity; the missing half is that war 

 is only one of the many forms of struggle. As Havelock 

 Ellis tersely puts it, " Conflict is a genus with many species, 

 of which war is only one " — and one of violence, from which 

 at every level it is the effort of civilisation to deliver us. 

 Struggle we can never do without, but of war the world 

 has had more than enough. 



Let us state the case more generally. Endeavour and 

 sifting are surely conditions of progress, but war between 

 races is only one mode and it seems very doubtful that it 



