Excerpt from America and the European War

Well, of course, there is the same confusion here as once made religious faith in Europe not a matter of truth and feeling in its eternal verities, but a matter of opposing cavalry and artillery and the cleverness of one general at deceiving and outwitting the other in a trade where all is fair. In the wars of religion the spiritual conflict was replaced by a very material one, a conflict dragged down from the higher plan whereon it might have purified men to a plane whereon it certainly debased them. For hundreds of years, men were sure that they had to fight out their religious ideas by war and it was necessary to protect and promote their religious ideas by that means. The Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were as certain that Catholic power had to be destroyed by arms as Englishmen of the twentieth century that Prussianism must be destroyed by the same means. And, indeed, so long as both based their position upon military force, so long as both believed that their only security was in dominating the other by that force, collision was, of course, inevitable. This conflict, the determination of each group to impose its military domination on the other, was also certainly inherent in human nature. Yet the day came when one group ceased to attach any very great value to the military domination of another, because it became to be realized that the religious and moral value of such domination was nil, and that the military conflict was irrelevant to religious or moral realities; that the religious possessions of all were rendered more secure by ceasing to fight for them. If we are sufficiently wise, a like transformation will take place in the do main of ideals of nationality. You had men, of course, desiring the military glory, and nothing more, of their particular religious group, not concerned in fact with religious truth or dogma at all, but with the simple desire to have their side win as against the other side. And you have a corresponding defense of war as between nations. You have millions animated by a determination to achieve victory and to give their lives for it, for the simple end of victory. In the Nietzschean and other will-to-power philosophies, you will find plenty of this glorification of victory for itself, irrespective of any moral or material aim whatsoever.

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