§ 32

Men, human beings, brothers, as they ought to be, earning their livelihood in making engines of Destruction. “Ypres,” “Louvain,” and “Rheims,” came into my mind, with the devastation of hundreds of square miles of fair agriculture in France and Belgium, and for what? That a materialistic nation, clever and unprincipled, and lost to all moral restraint, audacious and mendacious, might govern the world under the sovereignty of the mad egoist, William II. But Britain had to fight. Her honour would have been stained for ever, had she broken faith with Belgium in her extreme agony. Whether it is desirable to make implements of destruction in the abstract, is a question; during the war they had to be made and with all possible speed, and British factories played an honourable part in saving Britain, as her soldiers did who shed their blood for their country. Is it indeed, Utopia, that place where men may come to regard war as a folly, and where, being taught a better and higher Ideal than quarrelling, is a reality? I like to think the time will come when our greatest minds are concentrated on contributing to all that Peace designs, and our skilled labour and craftsmen are employed on things permanent. They will be things that last into the ages to come, that ennobled the men who designed and made them, and bring a pride for them in the making, and an honour gained in the estimation of them in the future. The abolition of War might depress the purse of Industrialism, but it would endow the country with riches that money cannot purchase. Enormous, scarcely calculable, sums of money now spent on “preparations” to kill our neighbours, would be converted to create things enduring and elevating. Perhaps it may never be, but why not dream of it and work for it as a possibility? There is an Ideal somewhere. Why not reach after it? There is so much that needs doing for Education, for Beauty, provision of healthy work for every one, and healthier lives for every one.

We ought to have no time for war. The late struggle for Freedom has supplied Europe and Britain with the rest. Somehow or other, a change must come. If we are to prosper, aye, to exist, pre-war conditions cannot be renewed. We have to make a new start, to obtain a greater simplicity of life. If you like, more primitive. Many good old customs and systems may well be revived. We were in such a hurry to coin money. We forgot that what we were leaving behind was better than what we were recklessly trying to meet. We thought that money was the “Summum bonum” of existence, to buy transient pleasure, to gratify our lower instincts, to feed ourselves with luxuries, to be victims to Vanity Fair, and slaves to it; to eclipse the sun the giver of physical needs, the symbol of Eternal God, the Giver of Light; hence, Life, has been as great a folly as War. It is, indeed, a kind of war to do so, a war against Nature and her manifold gifts through the Spirit of God, which were visible in the Sun. To live under gloom, being poisonous to the body, is likewise poisonous to the Soul, which, in time, it must injure, if not destroy, for it paralyses Hope; it paralyses everyone of our finer sensibilities and aspirations. It blinds us to Beauty, it hardens the heart, destroys graceful sympathy, engenders selfishness, and, in time, it annihilates Love, because absence of Light is enervating to manhood.

And that is what a few have been doing to the many under promise that they shall be enriched. Enriched with what? Money paid for bad work? And when the money is there, how have they been taught to use it? Palliatives in plenty have been offered them. More excitements for leisure hours, which devitalise, have been sown broadcast; and why? because, pandering to human weakness, it paid to keep the people quiet. We have reaped that which has been sown. The people have become restive, they want more wages, not for the purpose of uplifting their finer sensibilities, but to gamble with first one then another amusement. Instead of providing, for leisure hours of our workmen, stimulus to educate themselves to be provident, to be industrious, we have led them by promises to the silly idea that they are the right class to govern the country!