“But, sir, it’s nothing more than the absence of war. It’s a negative. In itself it’s—vacuum. You can’t live in a vacuum.”
“But I mean an active peace.”
“That would be something more than peace. War is an activity. Peace is not. If you take war out of the world, you must have some other activity.”
“But doesn’t the organization of the World Peace in itself constitute an activity?”
“That would be a diminishing activity, sir. Like a man getting himself morphia and taking it and going to sleep. A World Peace would release energy, and as the energy was released, if the end were merely peace, there would be less need for it. Until things exploded.”
Great portions of Oswald’s Valediction broke away and vanished for ever into the limbo of unspoken discourses.
“But would you have war go on, Peter?”
“Not in its present form. But struggle and unification, which is the end sought in all struggles, must go on in some form, sir,” said Peter, “while life goes on. We have to get the World State and put an end to war. I agree. But the real question is what are you going to do with our Peace? What struggle is to take the place of war? What is mankind going to do? Most wars have come about hitherto because somebody was bored. Do you remember how bored we all were in 1914? And the rotten way we were all going on then? A World State or a League of Nations with nothing to do but to keep the peace will bore men intolerably.... That’s what I like about the Germans.”
“What you like about the Germans!” Oswald cried in horror.
“They did get a move on, sir,” said Peter.