‘The Russian blockade would be a “death cordon,” condemning women and children to starvation, a policy which, as humane people, those present could not consider.’
[68] While attempting in this chapter to reveal the essential difference of the two methods open to us, it is hardly necessary to say that in the complexities and cross-currents of human society practical policy can rarely be guided by a single absolute principle. Reference has been made to the putting of the pooled force of the nations behind a principle or law as the alternative of each attempting to use his own for enforcing his own view. The writer does not suppose for an instant that it is possible immediately to draw up a complete Federal Code of Law for Europe, to create a well-defined European constitution and then raise a European army to defend it, or body of police to enforce it. He is probably the last person in the world likely to believe the political ideas of the European capable of such an agile adaptation.
[69] Delivered at Portland, Maine, on March 28th, 1918; reported in New York Times, March 29th.
[70] Bertrand Russell: Principles of Social Reconstruction.
Mr. Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, says:—
‘We see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each other—prompting to ever-advancing developments of altruism while it necessarily leads to any new product of advance being attacked. It shows, moreover ... that a gregarious species rapidly developing a complex society can be saved from inextricable confusion only by the appearance of reason and the application of it to life. (p. 46.)
... ‘The conscious direction of man’s destiny is plainly indicated by Nature as the only mechanism by which the social life of so complex an animal can be guaranteed against disaster and brought to yield its full possibilities, (p. 162.)
... ‘Such a directing intelligence or group of intelligences would take into account before all things the biological character of man.... It would discover when natural inclinations in man must be indulged, and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him must be controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them insignificant.’ (p. 162-3.)
[71] The opening sentence of a five volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris, edited by H. W. V. Temperley, and published under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, is as follows:—
‘The war was a conflict between the principles of freedom and of autocracy, between the principles of moral influence and of material force, of government by consent and of government by compulsion.’