If he adopts the Turkish philosophy he must be content with the Turkish
result. But the Western world as a whole has refused to be content with
the Turkish result, and however tiresome it may be to know about
things, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to
realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to
accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment
at all, fatalistically to let things slide or--to find out bit by bit
where our errors have been and to correct those errors. This is a hard
road, but it is the road the Western world has chosen; and it is better
than the other.
And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium
to-morrow week. There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or
talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny
brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to
correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or
cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word
at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?
Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the "practical" man
who despises "theories" nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is
not an absolute dogma with all its thirty-nine articles water-tight.
"You are a Pacifist, then suppose...," and then follows generally some
very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed
its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or
some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the
unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the
millenium--an argument which would equally well have told against the
union of Scotland and England or would equally justify the political
parties in a South American republic in continuing to settle their
differences by militarist methods instead of the Pacifist methods of
England.
Human nature may be unchanging: it is no reason why we should fight a
futile war with Germany over nothing at all; the yellow peril may
threaten; that is a very good reason why we should compose our
differences in Europe. Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious
questions, bigotry and fanaticism always will exist--it did not prevent
our getting rid of the wars of religion, still less is it a reason for
re-starting them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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