International Conciliation Volume 98-121 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 Excerpt: ...of mankind is due? It is due partly, no doubt, if not to strife, to competition. But chiefly to thought, which, as we have seen, is more often hindered than helped by war. It is the races that know how to think, rather than the far more numerous races that excel in fighting rather than in thinking, that have led the world. Thought, in the form of invention and inquiry, has given us those improvements in the arts of life and in the knowledge of nature by which material progress and comfort have been obtained. Thought has produced literature, philosophy, art, and (when intensified by emotion) religion--all the things that make life worth living. Now, the thought of any people is most active when it is brought into contact with the thought of another, because each is apt to lose its variety and freedom of play when it has worked too long upon familiar lines and flowed too long in the channels it has deepened. Hence, isolation retards progress, while intercourse quickens it. The great creative epochs have been those in which one people of natural vigor received an intellectual impulse from the ideas of another, as happened when Greek culture began to penetrate Italy, and, thirteen centuries later, when the literature of the ancients began to work on the nations of the mediaeval world. Such contact, with the process of learning which follows from it, may happen in or through war, but it happens far oftener in peace; and it is in peace that men have the time and the taste to profit fully by it. A study of history will, show that we may, with an easy conscience, dismiss the theory of Treitschke--that war is a healthgiving tonic which Providence must be expected constantly to offer to the human race for its own good. Apart altogether from the hopes we entertain for...