foresees the development of glandular psychology. We know that by suitable injections a person’s emotional mood can be changed, and Russell suggests that a simple operation like compulsory vaccination will convert the reddest Bolshevic to the temperament of the mildest curate. The glands of docility will be under government control.
The suggestion appears to me to be over-simple, and to belong to the mechanistic type of prophecy. Its supreme simplicity is in this connection its supreme defect. The only defence against democracy is a complicated mode of government. If methods of government are foolproof then any one can practice it; and a sudden coup d’état, or an invasion of half-a-dozen uninoculated savages, would be an irrevocable disaster.
It is, I think, mainly through the development of scientifically conducted propaganda that the world may one day see the abandonment of force. No wholesale change of heart will be involved. It will simply be that a more efficient weapon will have been discovered, a weapon that is preventive as well as corrective in its use.
The military mind is, it is generally agreed, conservative to the verge of sheer stupidity, but even the military mind is becoming infected with the new ideas. Under the influence of Captain Liddel Hart, the military representative of the prophetic school with which we are concerned, it will surely come to recognize “the moral objective of war.”2 Even this author is conservative, in regarding tanks and aeroplanes as being the principal weapons of the future. With regard to the immediate future he may be right. But the implication of his general thesis is that all these weapons will ultimately give place to subtler ones of psychological design. Hardly less effective than the ‘death ray’ in bending the enemy’s will is the rumour that one has been invented. And rumours can be invented daily in His Majesty’s Office of Propaganda. And why stop at the control of fear? Why not apply psychology throughout the whole of