Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/583

 THE P8YCE0L00Y OF WAR 577

tiinentsy if preparedness only hastens war and more of it^ what is the psychological remedy ?

1. I have emphasized the fact that from the beginning sympathy, tender emotions, humanitarian feelings, kindness, benevolence, love, truth and justice which is not all vengeance, have been accumulating a force in opposition to the other instincts. Selfish intellect could never establish insane asylums, hospitals, red cross societies, homes for the aged, care for cripples and defectives, and abolish barbarous systems of punishing criminals. It is this altruistic fund of feeling, augmented by every intellectual effort of man, on which we shall build our forts to storm the forts of militarism. It is slow, but the outlook is not dis- couraging. I admit that the militarists are correct when they say that physical force has always spoken louder than moral force; but I do not admit that it must or will always be true. Why can we not see that it is just that kind of thinking that has kept physical force dominant?

2. How shall this be brought about? The surest avenue that psy- chology knows is through the education of the people. Several years ago we undertook to educate the people in the dangerous effects of alco- hol. The liquor interests were all unconcerned. But now, look at the result. Whenever we speak against war we are called idealists and dreamers. I am not deluded by any idealism. I have presented the cold facts that the war impulses are too strong for intelligence. There is no mathematical axiom truer than this: So long as the majority of the people or of those in authority think we must have war and prepare for it we shall have it. Shall you or shall you not help to keep it going?

But let us not be absurd and attempt to teach peace and militarism in our schools at the same time. The boy that wears a uniform and at the same time receives formal instruction in peace and good will to all mankind will always have enough war impulses surging in him to laugh at such contradictions.

3. Again, we shall move on with our already large and highly per- fected organizations for peace even if military writers continue to say these efforts have amoimted to nothing. Militarism must be over- thrown from without; the masses of the common people must do it; and it must come first from democratic countries. The psychologist does not look for it soon, nor as the result of any convention of those dominated by the war spirit.

Let all the nations abandon their system of trying to rob each other by tariffs. Let the government take all our munition plants and manu- facture munitions only for our own use. There is not one man in a thousand who, if he speaks from his heart and not from some council acts, will not say that the only proper neutrality at all times would be to sell munitions to none of the warring nations. Let us cease to as-

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