In making a plea for some experiment in international coöperation, I remember, with humiliation, that we have fought because it is the easy way. Fighting solves no problems. The problems which brought on this war will all be there to be settled when the war ends. But we have war as the line of least resistance. We have war when the mind gives up its job of agreeing as too difficult.[145] It is often stated that conflict is a necessity of the human soul, and that if conflict should ever disappear from among us, individuals would deteriorate and society collapse. But the effort of agreeing is so much more strenuous than the comparatively easy stunt of fighting that we can harden our spiritual muscles much more effectively on the former than the latter. Suppose I disagree with you in a discussion and we make no effort to join our ideas, but “fight it out.” I hammer away with my idea, I try to find all the weakest parts of yours, I refuse to see anything good in what you think. That is not nearly so difficult as trying to recognize all the possible subtle interweavings of thought, how one part of your thought, or even one aspect of one part, may unite with one part or one aspect of one part of mine etc. Likewise with coöperation and competition in business: coöperation is going to prove so much more difficult than competition that there is not the slightest danger of any one getting soft under it. The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down together after browsing on the consciousness of their happy agreements. We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. I knew a young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply obeyed commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since he left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life. If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from bloodshed, if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the fight of employer and employed, the fight of different interests in the legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a different matter. But if you are going to try to _solve_ the problems of capital and labor, of competing business interests, of differing nations, it is a tougher job than standing up on the battlefield.