Excerpt from Proposals for the Avoidance of War: With a Prefatory Note

The feeling that the present war is a disastrous failure of civilization, and that at its close all should be done, that human wisdom and foresight can devise, to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe, is, we believe, general, if not universal, among all the nations concerned. But to concentrate this feeling upon definite and practicable measures is not an easy task. It is clear that the reforms to be introduced must be drastic if they are to be effective. For, as John Stuart Mill has said: Small remedies for great evils do not produce small effects. They produce no effects. On the other hand, there must be continuity for proposals involving too violent a breach with the established order are not likely to be seriously considered. What is attempted here is to put forward a scheme which, while it involves a real and radical advance upon the present organization of international relations yet does not break so violently with the course of historical development as to be fairly described as Utopian.

With the deep underlying causes of war we do not here concern ourselves. Those causes, mainly connected, in the modern world, with false ideas and wrong feelings about the moral and economic relations of States, of classes, and of individuals, can only be gradually dissipated by the spread of intelligence and knowledge and goodwill. And until they are dissipated there can be no com plete security for peace. Meantime, however, we think it possible, by such an arrangement as we suggest, to diminish very consider ably the risk of war, and so to give time for the development of that educational process upon which we mainly rely.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.