And the same conflict is in each man’s soul. Behind the man of today, who reasons, is his savage ancestor who merely felt; behind the gentleman in evening dress who goes to the boxing match is his ancestor who turned his thumb down over the arena; behind the jurist who arbitrates at The Hague, is his ancestor who commanded a pirate ship in the neighboring sea; behind the German who, less than a generation ago, was leading civilization, is the barbarian who attacked Rome, and who now has come out to attack Belgium.
Now absolute power is old fashioned, alliances are old fashioned, even violence and revenge are old fashioned, and among civilized nations they are “not done,” except through the madness or the imbecility of crowds. Nobody really wants to do either of them, except the rulers and soldiers who see a chance of gain.
Of the hosts of men sacrificing, fighting, suffering, dying, not one in twenty wants to do it, or even knows why he is doing it, or what is to be gained by doing it, and not one in fifty thousand was consulted about doing it. Mr. Lowes Dickinson after expressing himself in the London Nation somewhat to the foregoing effect, adds:
We are sane people. But our acts are mad. Why? Because we are all in the hands of some score of individuals called Governments.... These men have willed this thing for us over our heads. No nation has had the choice of saying no. The Russian peasants march because the Czar and the priest tell them to. That of course. But equally the German socialists march; equally the French socialists. These men know what war means.... They hate it. But they march. Business men, knowing too, hating too, watch them march. Workingmen watch them march, and wait for starvation. All are powerless. The die has been cast for them. The crowned gamblers cast it, and the cast was death.
But “some score of individuals” is too many. The New York Nation puts that better:
Whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back again into a position enabling three Emperors—one of them senile, another subject to melancholia, and the third often showing signs of disturbed mental balance—to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.
The German tradition of 1870, so strongly in favor of getting in the first blow, made it impossible for a spreading of the war to be seriously threatened without Germany striking that blow, and so turning any possibility of a general war into the reality.
In fights between individuals, the wrong has usually been laid to the one who struck first. There is equal reason for so laying it between nations.
When to the tradition in favor of the first blow is added the military habit diffused through the nation to a degree absolutely strange to modern times; when over a nation thus accustomed to arms, there is a ruling class whose only ambition and only hope is in War, and when at the head of this class is a ruler with a megalomaniac ambition and conceit, the wonder is not that such a nation has gone to war with virtually all its neighbors, but that it has so long been at peace with them.