Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of practicability—it appealed to men’s minds; and it has gone on appealing to them ever since.

Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy with which man—the crude struggling biped—stood up against the larger and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance toward civilisation—just as previously, the salting of the earth (the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle.

And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means of establishing God’s elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us in our churches—for our approving acceptance—a proposition made by the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation, has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the earth.

It is not without significance that the Christian Church all down the ages has allowed that sort of teaching to enter the minds of the common people. It is not without significance that the common people five years ago rose superior to their Bible-teaching, and regarded its reproduction in the world of to-day as a moral outrage.

And yet if the world’s affairs, and its racial problems are to be solved by physical force, it was a perfectly consistent thing to do; and the inconsistency lies in our moral revolt against it.

The truth is, of course, that we are in a period of transition. We are indignant with people who regard successful force as a justification for wrong; but we are almost equally indignant with those who will not regard it as a remedy for wrong. And we are slow to see that while the school of justification by force remains rampant in the world, there may be some chemic value for the spiritual development of the human race in the school which denies the efficacy of remedy by force. Yet is it not possible that as the past belongs to the one, so the future may belong to the other?

When we started upon this war we declared that it was a war to end war; and it was quite a popular thing to say that if it did not result in the ending of war, then the cause of the Allies would stand defeated. But that was only another way of saying that we should suffer defeat if in the near future the whole world were not converted to the point of view of the conscientious objector. But that would have been a very unpopular way of putting it, so it was not said.

Surely this sort of contradiction in which war lands us is only another proof that we are in an age of transition. Transition makes consistency difficult.

But the inconsistency, which conditions of war bring into prominent reality, lies embedded in our social system (which is itself a compromise between two incompatible principles)—the Will to Love and the Will to Power; and there will always be that inconsistency till the world has definitely decided whether Love or Power is to form the basis of our moral order. It has not decided it yet. In our own country (leaving out all question of foreign relations) we have not decided it yet.

It is the condition of impurity resulting from that indecision—and permeating more or less the whole of our social organisation—which I ask you now to consider.