Of all the winged words which Tolstoy wrote during the war between Russia and Japan, perhaps none are more significant than these: "The great strife of our time is not that now taking place between the Japanese and the Russians, nor that which may blaze up between the white and the yellow races, nor that strife which is carried on by mines, bombs, and bullets, but that spiritual strife which, without ceasing, has gone on and is going on between the enlightened consciousness of mankind now awaiting for manifestation and that darkness and that burden which surrounds and oppresses mankind."In the curious period of accommodation in which we live, it is possible for old habits and new compunctions to be equally powerful, and it is almost a matter of pride with us that we neither break with the old nor yield to the new. We call this attitude tolerance, whereas it is often mere confusion of mind. Such mental confusion is strikingly illustrated by our tendency to substitute a ( 210) statement of the historic evolution of an ideal of conduct in place of the ideal itself. This almost always occurs when the ideal no longer accords with our faithful experience of life and when its implications are not justified by our latest information. In this way we spare ourselves the necessity of pressing forward to newer ideals of conduct.
We quote the convictions and achievements of the past as an excuse for ourselves when we lack the energy either to throw off old moral codes which have become burdens or to attain a morality proportionate to our present sphere of activity.
At the present moment the war spirit attempts to justify its noisy demonstrations by quoting its great achievements in the past and by drawing attention to the courageous life which it has evoked and fostered. It is, however, perhaps significant that the adherents of war are more and more justifying it by its past record and reminding us of its ancient origin. They tell us that it is interwoven with every fibre of human growth and is at the root of all that is noble and courageous in human life, that struggle is the basis of all progress, that it is now extended from i individuals and tribes to nations and races.
We may admire much that is admirable in this past life of courageous warfare. while at the ( 211) same time we accord it no right to dominate the present, which has traveled out of its reach into a land of new desires.
We may admit that the experiences of war have equipped the men of the present with pluck and energy, but to insist upon the self same expression for that pluck and energy would be as stupid a mistake as if we would relegate the full- grown citizen, responding to many claims and demands upon his powers, to the school-yard fights of his boyhood, or to the college contests of his cruder youth. The little lad who stoutly defends himself on the schoolground may be worthy of much admiration, but if we find him, a dozen years later, the bullying leader of a street-gang who bases his prestige on the fact that "no one can whip him," our admiration cools amazingly, and we say that the carrying over of those puerile instincts into manhood shows arrested development which is mainly responsible for filling our prisons.
This confusion between the contemporaneous stage of development and the historic role of certain qualities, is intensified by our custom of referring to social evolution as if it were a force and not a process.
We assume that social ends may be obtained without the application of social energies, although we know in our hearts that the best results of civilization have come about ( 212) only through human will and effort. To point to the achievement of the past as a guarantee for continuing what has since become shocking to us is stupid business; it is to forget that progress itself depends upon adaptation, upon a nice balance between continuity and change. Let us by all means acknowledge and preserve that which has been good in warfare and in the spirit of warfare; let us gather it together and incorporate it in our national fibre. Let us, however, not be guilty for a moment of shutting our eyes to that which for many centuries must have been disquieting to the moral sense, but which is gradually becoming impossible, not only because of our increasing sensibilities, but because great constructive plans and humanized interests have captured our hopes and we are finding that war is an implement too clumsy and barbaric to subserve our purpose. We have come to realize that the great task of pushing forward social justice could be enormously accelerated if primitive methods as well as primitive weapons were once for all abolished.
The past may have been involved in war and suffering in order to bring forth a new and beneficent courage, an invincible ardor for conserving and healing human life, for understanding and elaborating it. To obtain this courage ( 213) is to distinguish between a social order founded upon law enforced by authority and that other social order which includes liberty of individual action and complexity of group development. The latter social order would not suppress the least germ of promise, of growth and variety, but would nurture all into a full and varied life. It is not an easy undertaking to obtain it and it cannot be carried forward without conscious and well-defined effort. The task that is really before us is first to see to it, that the old virtues bequeathed by war are not retained after they have become a social deterrent and that social progress is not checked by a certain contempt for human nature which is but the inherited result of conquest. Second, we must act upon the assumption that spontaneous and fraternal action as virile and widespread as war itself is the only method by which substitutes for the war virtues may be discovered.
