man -who has handed over his reason and his conscience into the keeping of another. But a man who has given up reason and conscience is a man who has given up the most typically human characteristics of human beings. The government of an army is a special and extreme case of that most soul-destroying of all forms of government, a tyranny or, as we now prefer to call it, a dictatorship. War, then, exacts a gigantic price for the military virtues. Vice and crime are the conditions of their very existence. Can it be right to cultivate virtue by means of wickedness? Those who believe that there exists, apart from self-interest and social convention, a real and absolute goodness, will· answer at once that it cannot be right. No man is justified in doing an evil thing that good, as he believes, may come of it. This view of what ought to be is confirmed by our investigations into what is. For we find that the military virtues can and do exist in individuals devoted not to war, but to the furtherance of peace. The causes of religion and humanitarianism have had their noble soldiers-soldiers whose courage, e,ndurance and selfcontrol were not set off by any personal vice, any crimeagainstsociety. Warisonlyone,andthattheworst, of schools in which men can leam the military virtues. VII "You have made a good case against war," says the objector, "but you have failed to show what is the practical alternative to war. Indeed, you can't do so, because there is no practical alternative, Pacifism doesn't work," The answer to this is a flat contradiction. Pacifism does work. True, there is no pacifist technique for arresting shells in mid-trajectory or even for persuading the airmen circling above a city to refrain from dropping their bombs. Pacifism is in the main preventive. ll Bib 1oteca Gino Bianco
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==