It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, is there any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me.
It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so.
Hence the fanaticism of Marxists, Freudians, Eugenists, Spiritualists, Federal Unionists, Vegetarians, and all the rest.
But I have recieved no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly at limited objectives, such as abolition of the slave trade, of factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can acheive universal justice, or health, or peace.
I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one paticular war by wise policy, or to render one paticular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.
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