Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Militant Pacifism (International Journal of Ethics, 1917-10-01).pdf/8

Rh courage and self-sacrifice who will fight for the ends of justice and humanity, on the other hand, the dire need of nations desolated, blighted and impoverished, to be rid of war—the militant pacificist, in season and out of season, preaches his fighting gospel of a war against obdurate nature-evils, against floods and fires, famine and disease; and, even more insistently, he urges the necessity of organized and tireless war against human error and human selfishness in individual hearts and in social customs and institutions. Such a war, it is true, is fought with intangible weapons but it is, none the less, literal fighting and it involves all the vigor, the passion, the unyielding determination of the warrior. In truth, these warriors have need to put on “the whole armor of God” for they wrestle “not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places.” This spiritual warfare demands also, in a manner as yet only dimly apprehended, a systematic organization of effort and a rigid training of combatants. For only by disciplined obedience to their leaders, by the harmonious exercise of their powers and by the outpouring of their common toil, their time, their talents, their fortunes, their lives, if need be, can men successfully attack opposing nature-forces and entrenched human evil and victoriously fight for better customs, better laws, better men—in a word, for a regenerated and redeemed society.

There remains the insistent practical question: how, precisely, may we redirect pugnacity? How may we teach ourselves to make war no longer against the lives and homes of our fellow men but against their errors and ours, and against our common enemy, hostile Nature? It is, of course, beside the restricted purpose of this paper to answer this question in sociological terms—to explain, for example, the constitution of international courts and international police, to set forth the methods of the general strike as applied to international relations, or to debate William James’s great conception of a “conscription of the whole youthful population” as part of “the army enlisted against