Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Militant Pacifism (International Journal of Ethics, 1917-10-01).pdf/7

76 and even to strengthen the fighting instinct, with all these martial virtues which it inspires, but to direct it to radically new ends. The militant pacificist, in other words, expressly challenges the assumption that pugnacity can find moral expression only in the war of human being against human being. He believes that men should go on fighting but that they should attack no longer human lives but human ignorance, human injustice, and the great nature-evils. In this conviction, the pacificist is evidently in line with the psychological teaching that an instinct may be modified and still cherished by being supplied with a new object. And in his effort to divert pugnacity from the ends of war, he is seeking to preserve for human use not merely lives—for which, as physical values, he claims no special exemption—but the great spiritual values, human love, human virtue, human toil.

And the whole gruesome record of war attests the urgency of the pacificist’s claim that pugnacity must be redirected toward inanimate instead of human objects. For the great lesson which history imprints on the mind of the candid reader is the tragic certainty that all wars gain their ultimate ends, whether great or petty, by the violation of personality, by the destruction of homes, by the paralysis of art and industry and letters. The irony of the terrible situation is precisely this: that even wars entered on from high motives must rouse greed, cupidity, and blind hatred; that even in defensive warfare a people can defend its rights only by inflicting new wrongs; and that chivalrous no less than self-seeking war entails relentless destruction. This truth, that there is inherent inconsistency at the heart of every just war, and the sad fact that a war, unless it is on both sides the outgrowth of popular fear, must be, on one side at least, a war of aggrandizement, illumine with blinding light the truth that no individual or nation can be trusted to define its own rights and then to fight for them, to act, in a word, at once as advocate, judge, and inflicter of punishment in its own cause. In this crisis of conflicting needs—on the one hand the crying need of all nations for men of