Chapter 6

ATTITUDE OF MEN OF THE PRESENT DAY TO WAR.

People do not Try to Remove the Contradiction between Life and
Conscience by a Change of Life, but their Cultivated Leaders Exert
Every Effort to Obscure the Demands of Conscience, and justify
their Life; in this Way they Degrade Society below Paganism to a
State of Primeval Barbarism--Undefined Attitude of Modern Leaders
of Thought to War, to Universal Militarism, and to Compulsory
Service in Army--One Section Regards War as an Accidental
Political Phenomenon, to be Avoided by External Measures only--
Peace Congress--The Article in the REVUE DES REVUES--Proposition
of Maxime du Camp--Value of Boards of Arbitration and Suppression
of Armies--Attitude of Governments to Men of this Opinion and What
they Do--Another Section Regards War as Cruel, but Inevitable--
Maupassant--Rod--A Third Section Regard War as Necessary, and not
without its Advantages--Doucet-Claretie-Zola-Vogüé.

The antagonism between life and the conscience may be removed in
two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience. And
there would seem there can be no doubt as to these alternatives.

A man may cease to do what he regards as wrong, but he cannot
cease to consider wrong what is wrong. Just in the same way all
humanity may cease to do what it regards as wrong, but far from
being able to change, it cannot even retard for a time the
continual growth of a clearer recognition of what is wrong and
therefore ought not to be. And therefore it would seem inevitable
for Christian men to abandon the pagan forms of society which they
condemn, and to reconstruct their social existence on the
Christian principles they profess.

So it would be were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a
force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes
the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the
words of the Gospel, "They have loved darkness better than light
because their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in
men not trying to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves
that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are
used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.

Slavery was opposed to all the moral principles advocated by Plato
and Aristotle, yet neither of them saw that, because to renounce
slavery would have meant the break up of the life they were
living. We see the same thing in our modern world.

The division of men into two castes, as well as the use of force
in government and war, are opposed to every moral principle
professed by our modern society. Yet the cultivated and advanced
men of the day seem not to see it.

The majority, if not all, of the cultivated