The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, by Edward Carpenter

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife

Author: Edward Carpenter

Release Date: November 16, 2003 [EBook #10097]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEALING NATIONS ***

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders

THE HEALING OF NATIONS AND THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF THEIR STRIFE

By Edward Carpenter

1915

"The Tree of Life … whose leaves are for the Healing of the Nations"

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTORY

II. WAR-MADNESS

III. THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR

IV. THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY

V. THE CASE FOR GERMANY

VI. THE HEALING OF NATIONS

VII. PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

VIII. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND RECRUITING

IX. CONSCRIPTION

X. HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?

XI. COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS

XII. COLONIES AND SEAPORTS

XIII. WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE

XIV. THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE

XV. THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS

XVI. NEVER AGAIN!

XVII. THE TREE OF LIFE

APPENDIX—

A New and Better Peace

The Change from the Old Germany to the New

Classes in Germany for and against the War

Political Ignorance

Purpose of the War: Max Harden

England's Perfidy: Professors Haeckel and Eucken

Manifesto of Professor Eucken

Nietzsche on Disarmament

The Effect of Disarmament

The Principle of Nationality: Winston Churchill

Conscription

Neutralization of the Sea: H.G. Wells

The War and Democracy: Arnold Bennett

The Future Settlement: G. Lowes Dickinson

Brutality of Warfare: H.M. Tomlinson

Patriotism: Romain Rolland

No Patriotism in Business!

Manifesto, Independent Labour Party

Responsibility of the whole Capitalist Class

Text of Karl Liebknecht's Protest in Reichstag

The Russian Danger

Letter on Russia by P. Kropotkin

On the Future of Europe, by the same

Servia: R.W. Seton-Watson

The Battlefield: Walt Whitman

Chinese Christians on the War: Dr. A. Salter

Essential Friendliness of Peoples

Reconciliation in Death

Christmas at the Front, 1914

Letter from the Trenches by Baron Marschall von Bieberstein

I

INTRODUCTORY

The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the present war and now collected together for publication, do not—as will be evident to the reader—pretend to any sort of completeness in their embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression involves contradictions as well as repetitions.

The truth is that affairs of this kind—like all the great issues of human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind without logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than Politics—unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that one can really say for certain is—that nobody understands them.

When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"—just as if these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming disposition—whereas it is perfectly well known that they really represent most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which the merest accidents (as whether two members of a Cabinet have quarrelled, or an Ambassador's dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long and fatal train of consequences—it becomes obvious that all so-called "explanations" (though it may be right that they should be attempted) fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1]

Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately with the present situation, I have preferred to take here and there just an aspect of it for consideration, with a view especially to the differences between Germany and England. I have thought that instead of spending time over recriminations one might be on safer ground by trying to get at the root-causes of this war (and other wars), thus making one's conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude of details and accidents, most of which must for ever remain unknown to us.

There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars—Religious wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition and Profit—though in any particular case the four species may be more or less mingled. The religious and the race motives often go together; but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is not so very dominant. Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are, however, still common enough. Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the mass-peoples themselves. The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife. Why, then, do wars occur? It is because the urge to war comes, not from the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it. In every nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found,