That which lies nearest my heart has been to help, with cheering words, to strengthen the faith of my fellow-workers. If these words have succeeded also, here and there, in scattering doubts, so much the better. Little-faith is faint-hearted. Without confidence in a cause, there is no action. Ignorance may be enlightened, superstition wiped out; intolerance may become tolerant, and hate be changed into love; ideas may be quickened, intelligence widened, and men's hearts may be ennobled; but from pessimism which can see nothing but gloomy visions nothing is to be expected. This offspring of materialism is one of the most powerful opponents which the cause of international law and justice has to encounter. It is only self-deception to conceal the fact that it still reigns in our Christian community.
These gloomy-sighted people refer us to history, which on every page tells of crime and blood, sorrow and tears. We answer by pointing to the development of civilization, and show how all things slowly grow and ripen, whether in human life or in the world of nature.
Human perfection does not provide for an individual being a law-abiding member of a human community, and exclude a community from being a law-abiding member of an alliance of States. The abolition of war therefore in no way pre-supposes universal righteousness, but only a certain degree of moral cultivation.
But that this perfection is not attained to cannot be any rational objection against striving after the perfect. Discontent with imperfection ought much rather to goad us on to work for what is better.
Now, war is not something imperfect only: it is a summing up of all human depravity—a condition which we might expect all enlightened men and women would turn against with combined energies. That this does not take place is an evidence that the enlightenment is not so great among so-called cultivated people.
The dazzling external show of war conceals from many its inner reality. This applies not only to the horrors of the battle-field and their ghastly accompaniments. Fancy's wildest pictures of the infernal abyss are nothing to the descriptions eye-witnesses give of this veritable hell. Tolstoï's pen and Veretschagin's pencil give us an idea of it.[40] From this misery spring untold sufferings for thousands upon thousands of innocent victims; and, besides, it remains to be a flowing source of fresh calamities.
The Armed Peace is a similar calamity, which threatens European civilization with complete overthrow. We have got so far in the general race in the science of armaments that the yearly outlay in Europe for military purposes, including the interest of national debts, is reckoned as about twelve milliards of kroner,[41] 650 millions sterling, which of course must imply a corresponding limitation of productive labour.
In time of peace the European armies are reckoned at four millions of men. In time of war this can grow to nineteen millions; and in a few years when, as intended, the new conscription law comes into full effect, to something like thirty millions.[42]
War, the personification of all human depravity, desolates the progressive work of culture, and the armed peace which ruins the nations prepares new wars and augments the misery. Ignorance, war, and poverty follow one another in an unvarying circle.