Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/164

160 As a single typical illustration let us consider the illuminating articles by Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson entitled "The War and the Way Out," published in recent numbers of the Atlantic Monthly.

Mr. Dickinson traces the causes of war to the artificial rivalries between those abstract and unreal beings called states, rivalries which are wholly unshared by the real men, women and children who compose the state. The actual citizens of the state desire to live in peace and quiet, to till their land, sell their produce, and buy their necessities, and are but little interested in the question whether the shores of the Baltic shall belong to Russia or Germany or whether Constantinople shall be controlled by one nation or another. Nor indeed do these political relations make any material difference to the people themselves; they make a difference only to that idol, the abstract state, and then only in time of war. The remedy, therefore, is to be found, first, in the cessation of these international rivalries, second, in the international control of armaments, and third, in the elective allegiance of disputed territory, such for instance, as Poland, Alsace and Lorraine. The cause of war being thus removed, the peace-loving, law-abiding and land-tilling citizens will live in happiness and prosperity.

This program is most captivating and no one can doubt that if international rivalries could be prevented in this way, the immediate cause of many wars would be removed. But the greater number of the wars of history have not been between rival states but have been wars of conquest and civil wars and the real causes of them all lie deeper than in any political relations, deeper than the love of conquest, deeper than in any economic or commercial complications. All these alike are the occasions and not the causes of war.

Mr. Dickinson regards the state as an abstraction, in a way unreal, and not having necessarily as its interests the interests of the real people who compose the state. This is true but Mr. Dickinson's constructive program rests, if not upon an abstraction such as the political state, nevertheless upon a myth, namely the myth of the peace-loving, law-abiding and land-tilling citizen, who, if opportunity offers, will till his land and buy and sell his goods in peace and prosperity. This quiet, peace-loving and land-tilling citizen, if not quite a myth, is at any rate not typical of the modern citizen. The typical man of to-day has not, to be sure, any conscious desire for war nor any wish to violate the laws of the state, but he is an exceedingly complex product of biological evolution, of modern civilization and of social forces, and in his own brain may perhaps be found the real powder-magazine responsible for war. The man of to-day is a high-tension being, with a highly organized brain, possessing an immense amount of potential energy in a state of rather unstable equilibrium, the product of an evolution which has discovered the survival value of certain peculiar mental qualities. Beneath this