Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/13

Rh society which establishes, encourages, or condones as "necessary" such defilements of human nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings, vengeful and unreformative punishment—having its heart so hardened as to tolerate these—is not likely in its institutions and government departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution of the social problem.

The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not think worth while—because its heart was not in them. It has had the heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely controlled, on the lines of love.

In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive, jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong,