November 26.—Kraepelin, one of the wisest and most far-sighted physicians of to-day where the interpretation of insanity is concerned, believes that Civilisation is just now favouring Degeneration. He attributes an especially evil influence on mental health to our modern tendency to limit freedom: the piling-up of burdens of all sorts, within and without, on the exercise of the will.
This well accords with what I have noted concerning the necessity in any age of creating New Freedoms and New Restraints. New Restraints by all means, they are necessary and vital. But just as necessary, just as vital, are the compensatory New Freedoms.
We cannot count too precious in any age those who sweep away outworn traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring. But, after all, they are a part of life, an absolutely necessary part of it. For life is a breaking-down as well as a building-up. Destruction as well as construction goes to the Metabolism of Society.
November 27.—It seems to me a weakness of the Peace Propaganda of our time—though a weakness which represents an inevitable reaction from an ancient superstition—that it tends to be under the dominance of Namby Pamby. The people who crowd Peace Congresses to demonstrate against war seem largely people who have little perception of the eternal function of Pain in the world and no insight into the right uses of Death.
Apart from the intolerable burden of armaments it imposes, and the flagrant disregard of Justice it involves, the crushing objection to War, from the standpoint of Humanity and Society, is not that it distributes Pain and inflicts Death, but that it distributes and inflicts them on an absurdly wholesale scale and on the wrong people. So that it is awry to all the ends of reasonable civilisation. Occasionally, no doubt, it may kill off the people who ought to be killed, but that is only by accident, for by its very organisation it is more likely to kill the people who ought not to be killed. Occasionally and incidentally, also, it may promote Heroism, but its heroes merely exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes. In the recent Balkan wars we see that the combatant States all diligently and ferociously maimed each other, very little to their own advantage and very much to the aggrandisement of the one State within their borders which never fired a gun and never lost a man. If Peace Societies possessed a little intelligence they would surely issue a faithful history of this war for free distribution among all the modern States of the world. That is what War is.
Explorers in Southern Nigeria, I see, have just reported the discovery of remote Sacred Places consecrated to native worship. Here were found the Lake of Life and the Pool of Death. Here, also, from time to time human sacrifices are offered. This ritual the worthy explorers self-complacently describe as "blood-thirsty."
But how about us? The men of Southern Nigeria, seriously, deliberately, with a more or less unconscious insight into the secrets of Nature, offer up human sacrifices on their altars, and when some ignorant European intrudes and calls them "blood-thirsty" we all meekly acquiesce. In Europe we kill and maim people by the hundred thousand, not seriously and deliberately for any sacred ends that make Life more precious to us or the Mystery of Nature more intelligible, but out of sheer stupidity. We spend the half, and sometimes more than the half, of our national incomes in sharpening to the finest point our implements of bloodshed, not to the accompaniment of any Bacchic Evoe, but incongruously mumbling the Sermon on the Mount. We put our population into factories which squeeze the blood out of their anaemic and diseased bodies, and we permit the most extravagant variations in the infantile death-rate which the slightest social readjustment would smooth out. We do all this consciously, in full statistical knowledge to a decimal fraction.
Therein is our blood-thirstiness, beside which that of the Southern Nigerian savage is negligible, if not estimable, and this European blood-thirstiness it is which threatens to lead to an extravagant reaction to the opposite extreme, as it has already led to an ignoble reaction in our ideals.
For there can be no ideal conception of Life and no true conception of Nature if we seek to shut out Death and Pain. It is the feeble shrinking from Death and the flabby horror of Pain that mark the final stage of decay in any civilisation. Our ancestors, too, offered up human sacrifices on their altars, and none can say how much of their virility and how much of the promise of the future they held in their grasp were bound up with the fact. Different days bring different duties. And we cannot desire to restore the centuries that are gone. But neither can we afford to dispense with the radical verities of Life and Nature which they recognised. If we do we are felling the tree up which we somehow hope to climb to the clouds.
It is essential to the human dignity of a truly civilised society that it should hold in its hands not only the Key of Birth but the Key of Death.