There is no question of denying that both war and slavery may have been useful, and indeed indispensable, during a certain phase of human evolution. Primitive man, like the lower animals, had all his energies monopolised by the attaining of nutriment. When spiritual needs began to demand their rights, it was necessary that the masses should work to excess in order that a small minority might pass lives of learned leisure. The marvellous civilisations of antiquity could not have existed without slavery. But the time has now arrived when a new organisation has rendered slavery superfluous. In a modern national society a community voluntarily renounces part of its earnings (and will have to renounce an increasingly large part of its earnings) for social purposes. Machines produce about ten times as much as unaided human labour. Were they intelligently used, the social problem would be greatly simplified. A sophism of the political economists assures us that national wellbeing increases proportionally with the increase in the consumption of commodities. The principle is unsound. Its outcome is that it inoculates people with artificial needs. But it is this artificially excited greed which, in the last resort, continues to bolster up slavery in the shape of exploitation and war. Property created war, and property maintains war. For the weak only, is property a source of virtue, since the weak will not make efforts without the stimulus afforded by the desire for possession. Throughout history, war has been for property. Nicolai does not believe that there has ever been a war for a purely ideal object, and without any thought of material domination. People may perhaps fight for the pure ideal of country, in the endeavour to express to the full the genius of their own nation. But the guns will not really help the ideal forward. Such material arguments as guns and bayonets will seem valuable only when the abstract idea has become intertwined with the lusts for power and property. Thus, war, property, and slavery, are close associates. Goethe wrote:
Krieg, Handel und Piraterie
Dreieinig sind sie, nicht zu trennen.[52]
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Nicolai then proceeds to criticise the pseudo-scientific notions from which our modern intellectuals deduce justifications for war. Above all he disposes of fallacious Darwinism and of the misuse of the idea of the struggle for existence. These notions, imperfectly understood and speciously interpreted, are by many regarded as furnishing a sanction for war. Or, it is held, war is a method of selection, and is therefore a natural right. To such conceptions Nicolai opposes genuine science, the fundamental law of the increase in living beings,[53] and the law that there is a natural limit to growth.[54] It is obvious that the existence of these limitations imposes struggle upon individual beings and upon species, seeing that the world contains only a restricted quantity of energy, that is to say of nutriment. But Nicolai shows that war is the most paltry, the stupidest, one may even say the most ruinous, among all forms of struggle. Modern science, which enables us to estimate the amount of solar energy reaching our planet, shows us that the entire animal world does not as yet make use of more than one twenty thousandth part of the available supply. It is obvious that in these conditions war, that is to say the murder of another accompanied by the theft of that other's share of energy, is an inexcusable crime. It is, says Nicolai, as if loaves were lying about by the thousand, and we were nevertheless to kill a beggar in order to steal his crust. Mankind has an almost boundless field to exploit, and man's proper struggle is the struggle with nature. All other forms of struggle bring impoverishment and ruin, by distracting our attention from our main purposes. The creative method is based upon the harnessing of new and ever new sources of energy. The starting point was the prehistoric discovery of fire, when man for the first time was able to effect the explosive liberation of the solar energy stored up by plants. The discovery marked a new turn in human affairs, and was the dawn of man's supremacy over nature. During the last hundred years this new principle has been developed to such an enormous extent that human evolution has been entirely transformed. Nearly all the chief problems may be said to have been solved, and what remains requisite is the practical application. Thermo-electricity renders possible the direct and purposive utilisation of solar energy. Modern chemical researches point to the possibility of artificially manufacturing foodstuffs, and so on. Were man to apply all his combative energy to the utilisation of the forces of nature, not merely could he live at ease, but there would be room in the world for milliards of additional human beings. When compared with this splendid struggle, how puny seems the great war! What has that war to do with the real struggle for existence? It is a product of degeneration. War is justifiable. Not war between human beings. But creative war for man's mastery over natural forces, the young war of which hardly a millionth part has yet been waged. In this war we can foresee victories such as no human being has ever yet won.
Nicolai, contrasting this creative struggle with the destructive struggle, symbolises them in the persons of two German men of science. One of these is Professor Haber, who has turned his knowledge to account for the manufacture of asphyxiating bombs, and who will doubtless not be forgotten. The other is Emil Fischer, the brilliant chemist who has achieved the synthetic production of sugar, and who will perhaps achieve the synthesis of albumen. Fischer is the founder, or at any rate the forerunner, of the new era of humanity. Future generations will gratefully refer to him as one of the supreme conquerors in the victorious struggle for the sources of life. He is in very truth a practitioner of the "divine art" of which Archimedes spoke.
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Nicolai's arguments, showing that war is antagonistic to human progress, are confronted with an indisputable fact, a fact which has to be explained—the actual existence of war, and its monstrous expansion. Never has war been more powerful, more brutal, more widespread. Never has war been more glorified. In an interesting chapter (Chapter Fourteen), which introduces a number of debatable points, Nicolai shows that in earlier days apologists for war were exceptional. Even among the epic poets of war, those whose song was of heroism, the direct references to war convey fear and disapproval. Delight in war (Kriegslust), love of war for its own sake, is peculiar to modern literature. We have to come down to the writings of Moltke, Steinmetz, Lasson, Bernhardi, and Roosevelt, to find apotheoses of war, pæans of war whose jubilation is quasi-religious. Nor was it until the outbreak of the present struggle that such huge armies as those of to-day were witnessed. The Greek armies in classical antiquity did not exceed 20,000. Those of imperial Rome, ranged from 100,000 to 200,000. In the eighteenth century, armies of 150,000 were known; while Napoleon had an army of 750,000. In 1870, there were armies of two and a half millions. But in the present war there are ten million fighting men in each camp (Chapter Five and Chapter Six). The increase is colossal, and quite recent. Even if we take into account the possibility of a struggle in the near future between Europeans and Mongols, a proportional increase could not continue beyond a generation or two, for the whole population of the globe would not suffice to furnish such armies.
But Nicolai is not appalled by the titanic dimensions of the monster he is fighting. Indeed, this very fact gives him confidence in the ultimate victory of his cause. For biology has revealed to him the mysterious law of giganthanasia. One of the most important principles of paleontology teaches that all animals (with the exception of insects, which, for this very reason, are, with the brachiopods, the oldest families on the globe), all species, tend throughout the centuries to grow larger and larger until, of a sudden, when they seem greatest and strongest, their forms disappear from the geological record. In nature it is always the large forms that die. That which is large must die for the reason that, in conformity with the imperious law of growth, the day comes when it exceeds the limits of its primordial possibilities. Thus is it, writes Nicolai, with war. Along the boundless field-grey battle lines, thrills the warning of the coming Twilight of the Gods. Everything beautiful and characteristic in the war of ancient days has vanished. Gone is the gay camp life, gone are the motley uniforms, gone is single combat—gone, in a word, are the show features. The battlefield, now, has become little more than an accessory. In former days the scene of battle used to be selected with care, for then the rival armies manœuvred for position. To-day the soldiers settle down haphazard and dig themselves in. The essential work is carried on elsewhere, by the provision of finance, munitions, food supply, railways, etc. In place of the one man of genius as general, we have now the impersonal machinery of the general staff. The old lively, joyous war is dead.—It may be that even yet war has not attained its zenith. In the present war there are still neutrals, and perhaps Freiligrath was right in holding that there must first be some battle in which the whole world will share. But if so, that will be the very last. The final war will be the greatest and the most terrible of all, just as the last of the great saurians was the most gigantic. Our technique has swelled war to its extremest limits, and will then slay war.[55]
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At bottom, behind its fearsome exterior, the war monster lacks confidence, and feels that its life is threatened. Never before have warmongers appealed, as they appeal to-day, to such a compost of arguments, mystico-scientifico-politico-murderous, to justify the existence of war. No one would dream of such arguments were it not that the days of war are numbered, were it not that the most enthusiastic disciples of war are shaken in their faith. But Nicolai is ruthless in attack, and part of his book is a pitiless satire upon all the sophisms wherewith in our folly we attempt to justify war—the executioner's axe poised over our heads. These sophisms are: the sophism that war is a biological means for ensuring the survival of the fittest; the sophism of defensive war; the sophism of the humanisation of war; the sophism of the alleged solidarity created by war, the so-called party truce; the sophism of the fatherland—for the fatherland, in practical application, becomes the narrowly conceived and artificially constructed political state; the sophism of race; and so on.