(_a_) First, there is the pacifism I shall call ‘vulgar’, meaning thereby the pacifism which does nothing but denounce ‘the man who kills’, and sneer at the prejudices of patriotism. When I see certain teachers, even if they are Montaigne, Voltaire, and Anatole France, whose whole case against war consists in saying that highwaymen are no more criminal than leaders of armies, and in laughing at people who kill each other because one party is dressed in yellow and the other in blue, I feel inclined to desert a cause whose champions over-simplify things to this extent, and I begin to feel some sympathy for the impulses of profound humanity which created the nations and which are thereby so grossly insulted.[166] (_b_) _Mystic pacifism_, by which I mean the pacifism which is solely animated by a blind hatred of war and refuses to inquire whether a war is just or not, whether those fighting are the attackers or the defenders, whether they wanted war or only submit to it. This pacifism is essentially the pacifism of the people (and that of all the so-called pacifist newspapers) and was strikingly embodied in 1914 by a French writer who, having to judge between two fighting nations one of which had attacked the other contrary to all its pledges while the other was only defending itself, could do nothing but intone ‘I have a horror of war’ and condemned them both equally. It is impossible to exaggerate the consequences of this behaviour, which showed mankind that mystic pacifism, just like mystic militarism, may entirely obliterate the feeling of justice in those who are smitten with it. I think I see another motive in the French writers who in 1914 adopted the attitude of M. Romain Rolland--the fear that they would fall into national partiality if they admitted that their nation was in the right. It may be asserted that these writers would have warmly taken up the cause of France, if France had not been their own country. Whereas Barrès said, ‘I always maintain my country is right even if it is in the wrong,’ these strange friends of justice are not unwilling to say: ‘I always maintain my country is in the wrong, even if it is right.’ There again we see that the frenzy of impartiality, like any other frenzy, leads to injustice.