The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade

LONDON: MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI First Published 1917

There may be some exaggeration in this book. I firmly believe that England and her Allies entered this War with the noblest intentions. If I have done less than justice to these, it is because my chief purpose in this essay has been to express my equally firm belief that all these fine emotions have been and are being exploited by the basest forms of Imperialism and Capitalism. J. M. January 1st, 1917.

The existence of war in the modern world is primarily a question for the moral philosopher. It may be of interest to the anthropologist to consider war as a gallant survival with an impressive ritual and a code of honour curiously detached from the social environment, like the Hindu suttee; or with a procedure euphemistically disguised, like some chthonic liturgy of ancient Athens. But it is a problem too broad for the anthropologist when we consider that we have reached a stage of civilisation which regards murder as the most detestable of crimes and deprives the murderer of all civil rights and often even of the natural right to live: while in the same community the organised massacre of our colleagues in civilisation is not only tolerated but assumed to be necessary by the principal expositors of law and religion, is the scientific occupation of the most honoured profession in the State, and constitutes the real sanction of all international intercourse.
The existence of war stimulates the astonished watcher in the tower of ivory to examine the development, if any, of human morality; and to formulate some law of the process whereby political man has been differentiated from the savage.
Morality being a relation between two or more contracting parties, he will notice that the history of mankind is marked by a consistent tendency to extend this relation, to include in the system of relationships more numerous and more distant objects, so that the moral agent is surrounded by a continually widening sphere of obligations.