this uncertainty is due to the mixing in of private interests with public professions, but much more is it, I think, the result of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient grasp of the implications of the propositions under discussion.  The ordinary political Socialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose every sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal peace, the merger of national partitions in loyalty to the World State.  But he does not recognize that the way to reach that goal is not necessarily by minimizing and specializing war and war responsibility at the present time.  There he falls short of his own constructive conceptions and lapses into the secessionist methods of the earlier Radicals.  We have here another case strictly parallel to several we have already considered.  War is a collective concern; to turn one’s back upon it, to refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit.

In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces.  In many ways military organization is the most peaceful of activities.  When the contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, under-selling and intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more honourable emulations.  Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do.  They are fed and drilled and trained for better services.  Here a man is at least supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking.  And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military affairs!  Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades.  The house appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago.  A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858.  Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen.  But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike.  No one has a use now for such superannuated things.

3.18.  War and competition.

What is the meaning of war in life?

War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with the whole fabric of human life.  That violence and killing which between animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized in war.  It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also a co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and development within the war-making group.