The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife eBook
Edward Carpenter
They are vital matters which lie at the root of national
well-being. They are things which in their adoption
or in their denial search right through the tissue
of public life. To live straightforwardly by your
own labour is to be at peace with the world. To
live on the labour of others is not only to render
your life false at home, but it is to encroach on
those around you, to invite resistance and hostility;
and when such a principle of life is favoured by a
whole people, that people will not only be in a state
of internal strife, but will assuredly raise up external
enemies on its borders who will seek its destruction.
The working masses and the peasants, whose lives are
in the great whole honest—who support themselves
(and a good many others besides) by their own labour—have
no quarrel; and they are the folk who to-day —notwithstanding
lies and slanders galore, and much of race-prejudice
and ignorance—stretch hands of amity and
peace to each other wellnigh all over the world.
It is of the modern moneyed classes that we may say
that their life-principle (that of taking advantage
of others and living on their labour) is essentially
false[21]; and these are the classes which are distinctively
the cause of enmities in the modern world, and which,
as I have explained above, are able to make use of
the military class in order to carry out their designs.
It can only be with the ending of the commercial and
military classes, as classes, that peace can come
to the world. China, founded on the anti-commercial
principles of Confucius, disbanded her armies a thousand
years ago, and only quite lately—under
the frantic menace of Western civilization—felt
compelled to reorganize them. She was a thousand
years before her time. It can only be with the
emergence of a new structure of society, based on the
principle of solidarity and mutual aid among the individuals
of a nation, and so extending to solidarity and mutual
aid among nations, that peace can come to the Western
world. It is the best hope of the present war
that, like some frightful illness, it marks the working
out of deep-seated evils and their expulsion from
the social organism; and that with its ending the
old false civilization, built on private gain, will
perish, crushed by its own destructive forces; and
in its place the new, the real culture, will arise,
founded on the essential unity of mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Reprinted by permission from the English Review
for January, 1915.
[19] Lord Bryce in the Daily Chronicle, October,
1914.
[20] In a letter to the Times, September 18,
1914.
[21] There is no reason in itself why Commercialism
should be false. Commerce and interchange of
goods is of course a perfectly natural and healthy
function of social life. Indeed, it is a function
which should have a most beneficent influence in binding
nations together. It is when that function is
perverted to private gain that it becomes false.
But of course without this perversion there would
be no distinctively commercial class with interests
opposed to those of the community.
