The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down together after browsing on the consciousness of their happy agreements. We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. I knew a young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply obeyed commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since he left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life.
If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from bloodshed, if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the fight of employer and employed, the fight of different interests in the legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a different matter. But if you are going to try to solve the problems of capital and labor, of competing business interests, of differing nations, it is a tougher job than standing up on the battlefield.
We are told that when the North Sea fishermen found that they were bringing flabby codfish home to market, they devised the scheme of introducing one catfish into every large tank of codfish. The consequent struggle hardened the flesh of the fish and they came firm to market. The conclusion usually drawn from all such stories is that men need fighting to keep them in moral condition. But what I maintain is that if we want to train our moral muscles we are devising a much harder job for them if we try to agree with our catfish than to fight him.
Civilization calls upon us to “Agree with thine adversary.” It means a supreme effort on our part, and the future of the world depends upon whether we can make this effort, whether we are equal to the cry of civilization to the individual man, to the individual nation. It is a supreme effort because it is not, as sometimes thought, a matter of feeling. To feel kindly, to desire peace—no, we must summon every force of our natures, trained minds and disciplined characters, to find the methods of agreement. We may be angry and fight, we may feel kindly and want peace—it is all about the same. The world will be regenerated by the people who rise above both these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people can agree.
What has this young twentieth century gone out to fight? Autocracy? The doctrine of the right of might? Yes, and wherever found, in Germany or among ourselves. And wherever found these rest on the consciousness of separateness. It is the conviction of separateness which has to be conquered before civilization can proceed. Community must be the foundation stone of the New State.
The history of modern times from the point of view of political science is the history of the growth of democracy; from the point of view of social psychology it is the history of the growth of the social consciousness. These two are one. But the mere consciousness of the social bond is not enough. Frenssen said of Jörn Uhl, “He became conscious of his soul, but it was empty and he had now to furnish it.” We have become conscious of a social soul, we have now to give it content. It is a long way from the maxim, “Religion is an affair between man and his Maker,” to the cry of Mazzini, “Italy is itself a religion,” but we surely to-day have come to see in the social bond and the Creative Will, a compelling power, a depth and force, as great as that of any religion we have ever known. We are ready for a new revelation of God. It is not coming through any single man, but through the men and men who are banding together with one purpose, in one consecrated service, for a great fulfilment. Many of us have felt bewildered in a confused and chaotic world. We need to focus both our aspirations and our energy; we need to make these effective and at the same time to multiply them by their continuous use. This book is a plea for the more abundant life: for the fulness of life and the growing life. It is a plea against everything static, against the idea that there need be any passive material within the social bond. It is a plea for a splendid progress dependent upon every splendid one of us. We need a new faith in humanity, not a sentimental faith or a theological tenet or a philosophical conception, but an active faith in that creative power of men which shall shape government and industry, which shall give form equally to our daily life with our neighbor and to a world league.