Page:Scott Nearing - The Germs of War (1916).djvu/9

 is no good Indian but a dead Indian" speaks the true war-spirit. Your enemies are bad because they are your enemies.

You probably know people from all of the nations at war, Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Austrians and Italians. They have their good qualities and their bad ones. In every army now in the trenches there are men who are good fathers, good neighbors, good workmen, good citizens. In every army there are roughs and hoodlums. No people in the world has any monopoly in goodness or in badness.

Human nature is as capable of peace as it is capable of war. Witness the peace that has reigned for a century between Canada and the United States! There is not a fort on the boundary-line; not a warship in the lakes and the two peoples are at peace, and there is not even a hint of a desire for war.

Subject human nature to one line of treatment, and you develop bitterness, fear, hatred, war. Give it the opposite line of treatment, and you develop good feeling, friendship and peace.

Human nature cannot be blamed for war. One part of it is used in making war just as one part of corn is used in making whiskey.