August 10, igiO 
LAND & WATHK 
33 
Human Nature and the War 
By Principal L. P. Jacks 
IN the two years during which the war has been in 
progress a number of men, women and children 
roughly equal to the total population of London 
has been killed. Perhaps live times as many have 
been wounded, making with the killed a total not far 
short of the population of Great Britain. What it has cost 
in material wealth to accomplish this result would be hard 
to say ; probably fifteen thousand million sterling is well 
within the mark. 
For what end has this been done — to repeat the ques- 
tion of Little Peterkin ? It has been done in order to 
settle a type of quarrel which, had it broken out between 
six reasonable men with some sense of humour, instead 
of between six Great " Powers," with no " power " of 
understanding each other, would have been settled in 
a quarter of an hour. 
Looking at the matter in this way most people would 
agree that we are in the presence of something essentially 
irrational. Reason is said to be the prerogative of man. 
The war — not the word, not the idea, but the Ihing in its 
concrete horror — is a strange comment on the prerogative. 
A Detached View 
Suppose we were to cut the war out as a single chapter 
in the history of man's doings on this planet and set our- 
selves to deduce from this chapter a theory as to the 
nature of the beings who did these things. Or suppose 
we M'ere suddenly endowed with a power of vision to see 
the war, not through the medium of statistics or news- 
paper reports but as a living fact in all the length and 
breadth and detail of its dreadful truth — and then, 
with that vision fresh before us, set ourselves to write out 
a testimonial to the character of man, to be delivered to 
the angels or to the inhabitants of some other planet on 
which the human race had applied for a situation. Should 
we not come to the conclusion that man is thoroughly 
and hopelessly insane ? Should we not warn the angels 
against having anything to do with a race of lunatics so 
dangerous ? 
And is not the war a test case of character for 
human nature ? When in the history of the world 
have nations ever made so great an effort — of body or 
mind ? When has man given so extensive and so clear 
a display of the stuff of which his nature is composed ? 
Moreover the war is not a thing of momentary origin. 
It marks a point of arrival to which ages of development 
have brought us. It is a summary up to date of a long 
course of human history. It is what we have come to 
after going our own way through the centuries. 
We have come to this — that about three hundred 
million human beings on this side and two hundred 
million on that are now engaged in trying to inflict upon 
each other the greatest possible amount of death, mutila- 
tion and material loss, and have so far succeeded as to 
kill or wound forty millions and to destroy fifteen 
thousand million pounds' worth of wealth at the very least. 
As a test case of what man is, and what he is capable of, 
we shall look in vain for any single episode or revealing 
action that will tell a more eloquent tale about man — ■ 
that is if we are to judge him by what he does rather than 
by what he says, as surely we ought to do. We could not 
hesitate as to the conclusion to be drawn from such pre- 
misses. To conclude that human nature is brutal, or 
wicked, or selfish or cruel would not be enough. Human 
nature, we should have to say, is plainly mad. Insanity 
and not reason is the prerogative of man. 
A friend of mine who has reflected deeply on the war, 
and written about it more wisely than any other English- 
man, remarked the other day, " During the early months 
of the war I often had the feeling that I was in hell al- 
ready — in fact that we were all in hell together without 
knowing it. But that feeling has passed away. I now 
believe that I am in Bedlam — which perhaps is only a 
particular province of hell." That feeling is wide-spread 
though vague and undefined. Even our soldiers at the 
front, keen as they are to do their duty,' often speak in 
their letters of the " mad business " on which they 
are engaged. I have had many letters from the front 
in that strain, letters from men who have since given the 
last proof of their devotion. And only to-day I notice 
in the newspaper that a German prisoner used the same 
expression to one of his captors — " when will this mad 
business stop ? " The sense of its " madness " is in the 
air. 
Mr. Philip Gibbs, in one of his brilliant letters from the 
battlefield, says of a group of prisoners whom he cjues- 
tioned, " they talk as men under an evil spell, put upon 
them by unknown powers beyond their reach." Does 
not this reference to an " evil spell " echo something 
of which we are all more or less vividly conscious ? Is 
it not a mockery to say that " patriotism " in the various 
nations requires for its expression nuitual slaughter 
and destruction on just this appalling scale ? That a 
man should love his country and be willing to die for 
it is, indeed, no mark of insanity. It is a mark of highest 
reason. But the worst forms of insanity are precisely 
those which attack reason in its highest forms. What 
if patriotism itself has succumbed to the " evil spell " 
and produced a madness worse than any ever seen under 
the sun ? 
For this, and for other reasons too, there are 
some pessimists who have, gone tlie length of suggesting 
that man is a being lower than any of the brute beasts. 
In answer to the plea that war is a " biological necessity," 
a phase of the struggle for existence, they remind us very 
properly that not even the fiercest of the carnivora 
make organised war on their own kind — as a working 
man put it to me not long ago, " the animals have to;) 
much sense." Red as their teeth and claws may be, 
the blood on them is not that of their fellows in the same 
species. Their killing is not a " mad business," for their 
prey is their food. Between this and the havoc of our 
modern battlefields there is no parallel. In intelligence 
as well as in morality the human performance is iilfinitely 
" lower " than the brutes ! 
From these conclusions there would seem to be no 
escape — if we accept the view that hum.an nature is 
really responsible for what is going on. Bui, I hasten to 
say, human nature is not responsible joy it — nnd vent\!re 
to think that until this is realised the profoundcst political 
lesson of the war will be missed. Human nature h;is 
been dragged into this business against its will, its intelli- 
gence, its instincts. A " spell " has been put upon it, 
A Libel on Man 
To charge the horrors of the present time to the brute 
passions of man's nature, to his want of right-mindedness, 
or of self control is to commit a libel on man and to let 
the real sinner go free. In human nature there is nothing 
whatever which could lead, under any conceivable 
circumstances, to such orgies of bloodshed and mutila- 
tion as the slopes of Verdun and many other places have 
recentlj' witnessed. Human nature is from first to last 
in revolt against the whole proceeding. It is not human 
nature which does these things, but State nature — a very 
different thing. To love one's native land and be willing 
to die for it is one thing, perhaps the noblest in man : to 
love a soulless machine called " the State " is another, 
and I for one have never met a human being in Englantl 
or anywhere else who was capable of so unnatural a 
passion. 
Modern States are not human. They are stupid 
monsters without conscience, without soul, without 
feeling. As to intelligence they lack even that modest 
amount of it which would enable them to understand one 
another. Not understanding one another, and unable 
to do so, their mutual relations are like those of a number 
of icebergs floating on the same sea,, which .may at any 
moment be flung into collision by the drift of invisible 
currents. It is the paradox of the world's history that 
the great States formed by the combined intelligence of 
their members have so little intelligence in their relations 
with one another. The human nature which is in each 
member of the state, and stands on the whole for right- 
