"When you think of it, Margaret, man's chief end is not to glorify God as the Catechism says; his chief end is to eliminate pain ... human pain. You have heard of vivisection? Performing operations on animals, often without chloroform. What's it all for? Not cruelty, as Bernard Shaw suggests; it's all done with the kindly purpose of finding out new ways to abolish human pain. Rabbits and guinea-pigs are dosed with all sorts of microbes so that scientists might discover how to protect human beings from the pain of disease. The doctors sometimes do manage to discover a new way to abolish a certain pain, and the pathetic thing is that while they torture animals to find a way to abolish pain a thousand scientists are busily engaged inventing weapons that will bring more pain into the world. It is an alarming thought that our doctors and nurses spend their lives trying to keep the unfit alive, while our armament makers spend their lives planning means to send the fit to their death. Lots of people have said that this war shows the failure of Christianity; what it really shows is the failure of Medicine. Medicine's primary aim is to keep people alive as long as possible; War's primary aim is to kill as many people as possible. War is really a battle between two branches of science, between shells and senna. The shell scientist won ... and the medicine man buckled on a Sam Browne belt and went out to help his rival's victims. If the doctors of the world had realised that war was a defeat of their principles they would have gone on strike, and would no doubt have stopped the war by doing so. Every doctor should be a pacifist, but as a matter of fact very few doctors are pacifists." "What is a pacifist?" asked Margaret. "A pacifist is a man who loves peace so much that people look up almanacs to see whether his name was Schmidt a generation back, Margaret. He is usually a nervous man with the physical courage of a hen, but he has more moral courage than three army corps. He is usually a Conscientious Objector, and it takes the moral courage of a god to be that." "They are just a lot of cowards!" cried Margaret with indignation.