The pacifist "mollycoddle," as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him in his San Francisco Exposition speech, finds expression in these words of Bertrand Russell in the August number of the Atlantic Monthly:
All these three motives for armaments—cowardice, love of dominion, and lust for blood—are no longer ineradicable in civilized human nature. All are diminishing under the influence of modern social organization. All might be reduced to a degree which would make them almost innocuous, if early education and current moral standards were directed to that end. Passive resistance, if it were adopted deliberately by the will of a whole nation, with the same measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is good in national life than armies and navies can ever achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter of brutality involved in modern war.
But it is hardly to be expected, Mr. Russell reluctantly concludes, that progress will come in this way, because "the imaginative effort required is too great." He adds:
It is much more likely that it will come, like the reign of law within the state, by the establishment of a central government of the world, able and willing to secure obedience by force, because the great majority of men will recognize that obedience is better than the present international anarchy.
A central government of this kind would command assent not as a partisan, but as the representative of the interests of the whole. Very soon resistance to it would be seen to be hopeless and wars would cease. Force directed by a neutral authority is not open to the same abuse or likely to cause the same long-drawn conflicts as force exercised by quarreling nations, each of which is the judge in its own cause. Although I firmly believe that the adoption of passive instead of active resistance would be good if a nation could be convinced of its goodness, yet it is rather to the ultimate creation of a strong central authority that I should look for the ending of war. But war will end only after a great labor has been performed in altering men's moral ideals, directing them to the good of all mankind, and not only of the separate nations into which men happen to have been born.
“Good Natured Germany”
The leading article in the June issue of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte (Munich) is by Dr. George Grupp, one of Germany's most able scholars, and is entitled, "Never Can Germany be Overcome if She be United." Dr. Grupp finds evidences for this assertion all through history, and quotes some of the earliest commentators and historians to this effect:
As early as 1487 Felix Fabri, a Dominican of Ulm wrote: "Si Germani essent ubique concordes, totum orbem domarent." (If the Germans were united they would conquer the whole world.)
The sentence is an echo of the fiery address which one Aeneas Silvius, later to become pope, delivered to the German princes after the fall of Constantinople, and from which Felix Fabri himself gives a quotation....