Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/160

156 of early conflicts between primitive social groups. These conflicts were incessant in all parts of the world wherever there were virile and progressive races and the cause of the conflicts was the natural desire of the stronger to exploit the weaker, it being always easier and more attractive to gain sustenance by robbery than by labor. Furthermore these incessant conflicts were in a high degree beneficial to social development, resulting in the extermination of the unfit and the survival of the strong and the brave. Within the primitive groups there was some degree of cooperation, sympathy, mutual helpfulness, regard for life and property, together with some observance of "law" and "order" and "right" and "wrong," this primitive organization resulting perhaps from the rules and regulations imposed by a victorious group upon a conquered group. Between the groups there was fear, suspicion, hatred, with no respect for life or property. Might was right. Within the group certain actions were stigmatized as wrong and were punished, such for instance as murder and theft. But between members of hostile groups these acts were praiseworthy.

The modern constitutional state is the historical development of the primitive group. Within the groups, now called nations, the upper classes, nobles, lords, officers, plutocrats, still to a greater or less extent exploit the lower classes, as the victors did the vanquished, and between the groups there is still the old rivalry, suspicion and distrust, while the taking of life and property is still praiseworthy and is not called murder and theft, but war.

But meanwhile within the political state there have grown up two new communities—one moral and the other industrial and commercial, and gradually, while the old bounds of the political state have persisted, the moral and industrial states have expanded till they have burst the bounds of the political state and become international and world wide. A cosmopolitan conscience has replaced the old group conscience and moral obligations extend to all mankind. In time of war between the nations, however, under the transport of patriotism, the old group consciousness revives, with its deep-seated instinct of pugnacity, and with it is revived the old group conscience and the ancient hatred and suspicion, and the ancient desire to exterminate the rival group. Hence the reversion in time of war to primitive standards of conduct.

But under the completely transformed conditions of society in modern times, the original raison d'être of war has ceased to be. Victory is no longer to the physically stronger and mentally braver. The vanquished are no longer exterminated or enslaved. The victors lose perhaps as many of their fighters as the vanquished and the disabled are vastly more in number than the dead and both the dead and the disabled are the flower of the nation's youth. Meanwhile, the monstrous cost of a modern war, which impoverishes the nation and its posterity,