CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
nydus/The Great IllusionPublic
Page 363 of 611
Table of Contents

THE HUMAN NATURE AND MORALS OF THE CASE

merchants are robbed and killed; we will lend you police and help you to maintain order; you will pay the police their just wage, and that is all;" and had honestly kept to this office, their exercise of force would have aided human co-operation, not checked it. Again, it would have been a struggle, not against man, but against the use of force; the "predominant Power" would have been living, not on other men, but by more efficient organization of man's fight with nature.

That is why, in the first section of this book, I have laid emphasis on the truth that the justification of past wars has no bearing on the problem which confronts us: the precise degree of fighting which was necessary a hundred and fifty years ago is a somewhat academic problem. The degree of fighting which is necessary to-day is the problem which confronts us, and a great many factors have been introduced into it since England won India and lost part of North America. The face of the world has changed, and the factors of conflict have changed radically: to ignore that is to ignore facts and to be guided by the worst form of theorizing and sentimentalism—the theorizing that will not recognize the facts. England does not need to maintain order in Germany, nor Germany in France; and the struggle between those nations is no part of man's struggle with nature—has no justification in the real law of human struggle; it is an anachronism; it finds its justification in a sham philosophy that will not bear the test of facts, and, responding to no real need and achieving no real purpose, is bound with

363