The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife

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Edward Carpenter. The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife

I. INTRODUCTORY

II. WAR-MADNESS

III. THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR2

IV. THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY;

V. THE CASE FOR GERMANY

VI. THE HEALING OF, NATIONS18

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

APPENDIX

CONSCRIPTION

SERVIA

Отрывок из книги

September, 1914.

How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium, and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in savage conflict—this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the finale of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars, we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest squabbles of children and schoolboys—utterly senseless and unreasoning. But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of blood and suffering are the outcome.

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If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany's action has only been that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that one may be excused for dwelling on it.

Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of professors and students, a large population of intelligent and well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three have—till thirty or forty years ago—paid little or no attention to political matters. The professors and students have had their noses buried in their departmental science and fach studies; the artisans have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the Socialist camp; and the peasants—as elsewhere over the world, absorbed in their laborious and ever-necessary labours—have accepted their fate and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads. Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.

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