>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E00159  <<<

TITLE: THE HEALING OF NATIONS
AUTHOR: EDWARD CARPENTER
EBOOK: E00159 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

THE HEALING OF NATIONS AND THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF THEIR STRIFE 
 
By Edward Carpenter 
 
1915 
 
"_The Tree of Life ... whose leaves are for the Healing of the Nations_" 
 
CONTENTS 
 
    I.  INTRODUCTORY 
 
   II.  WAR-MADNESS 
 
  III.  THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR 
 
   IV.  THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY 
 
    V.  THE CASE FOR GERMANY 
 
   VI.  THE HEALING OF NATIONS 
 
  VII.  PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM 
 
 VIII.  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND RECRUITING 
 
   IX.  CONSCRIPTION 
 
    X.  HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED? 
 
   XI.  COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS 
 
  XII.  COLONIES AND SEAPORTS 
 
 XIII.  WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE 
 
  XIV.  THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE 
 
   XV.  THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS 
 
  XVI.  NEVER AGAIN! 
 
 XVII.  THE TREE OF LIFE 
 
 APPENDIX-- 
 
        A New and Better Peace 
 
        The Change from the Old Germany to the New 
 
        Classes in Germany for and against the War 
 
        Political Ignorance 
 
        Purpose of the War: Max Harden 
 
        England's Perfidy: Professors Haeckel and Eucken 
 
        Manifesto of Professor Eucken 
 
        Nietzsche on Disarmament 
 
        The Effect of Disarmament 
 
        The Principle of Nationality: Winston Churchill 
 
        Conscription 
 
        Neutralization of the Sea: H.G. Wells 
 
        The War and Democracy: Arnold Bennett 
 
        The Future Settlement: G. Lowes Dickinson 
 
        Brutality of Warfare: H.M. Tomlinson 
 
        Patriotism: Romain Rolland 
 
        No Patriotism in Business! 
 
        Manifesto, Independent Labour Party 
 
        Responsibility of the whole Capitalist Class 
 
        Text of Karl Liebknecht's Protest in Reichstag 
 
        The Russian Danger 
 
        Letter on Russia by P. Kropotkin 
 
        On the Future of Europe, by the same 
 
        Servia: R.W. Seton-Watson 
 
        The Battlefield: Walt Whitman 
 
        Chinese Christians on the War: Dr. A. Salter 
 
        Essential Friendliness of Peoples 
 
        Reconciliation in Death 
 
        Christmas at the Front, 1914 
 
        Letter from the Trenches by Baron Marschall von Bieberstein 
 
I 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the 
present war and now collected together for publication, do not--as will 
be evident to the reader--pretend to any sort of completeness in their 
embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are 
scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are 
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression 
involves contradictions as well as repetitions. 
 
The truth is that affairs of this kind--like all the _great_ issues of 
human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their 
best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are 
too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such 
things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind 
_without_ logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for 
that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic 
differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than 
Politics--unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that 
one can really say for certain is--that nobody understands them. 
 
When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict 
and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite 
genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and 
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to 
explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but 
unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix 
the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"--just as if 
these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for 
the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming 
disposition--whereas it is perfectly well known that they really 
represent most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which the 
merest accidents (as whether two members of a Cabinet have quarrelled, 
or an Ambassador's dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long 
and fatal train of consequences--it becomes obvious that all so-called 
"explanations" (though it may be right that they should be attempted) 
fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1] 
 
Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately with the 
present situation, I have preferred to take here and there just an 
aspect of it for consideration, with a view especially to the 
differences between Germany and England. I have thought that instead of 
spending time over recriminations one might be on safer ground by 
trying to get at the root-causes of this war (and other wars), thus 
making one's conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude of 
details and accidents, most of which must for ever remain unknown to us. 
 
There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars--Religious 
wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition 
and Profit--though in any particular case the four species may be more 
or less mingled. The religious and the race motives often go together; 
but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is 
not so very dominant. Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are, 
however, still common enough. Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have 
occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely 
happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the 
mass-peoples themselves. The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more 
modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife. 
Why, then, do wars occur? It is because the urge to war comes, not from 
the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it. In every 
nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found, beside the 
toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the 
Military, and the Commercial. It was so in far-back ancient India; it is 
so now. Each of these classes endeavours in its turn--as one might 
expect--to become the ruling class and to run the government of the 
nation. The governments of the nations thus become class-governments. 
And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own, 
alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it 
going. 
 
In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the 
mere existence of Class, in itself. In a sense that is a perfectly 
natural thing. There _are_ different divisions of human activity, and it 
is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to 
a certain activity--literary or religious or mercantile or military or 
what not--should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as 
the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite 
organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy _provided 
the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation_. 
But if the class does _not_ subordinate itself to the general welfare, 
if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the 
nation for its own uses--if it becomes parasitical, in fact--then it and 
the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body 
becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body's needs, 
become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system. 
 
It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the 
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the 
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been 

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 290225 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>