honest--who support themselves (and a good many others besides) by their
own labour--_have no quarrel_; and they are the folk who to-day
--notwithstanding lies and slanders galore, and much of race-prejudice
and ignorance--stretch hands of amity and peace to each other wellnigh
all over the world. It is of the modern moneyed classes that we may say
that their life-principle (that of taking advantage of others and living
on their labour) is essentially false[21]; and these are the classes
which are distinctively the cause of enmities in the modern world, and
which, as I have explained above, are able to make use of the military
class in order to carry out their designs. It can only be with the
ending of the commercial and military classes, as classes, that peace
can come to the world. China, founded on the anti-commercial principles
of Confucius, disbanded her armies a thousand years ago, and only quite
lately--under the frantic menace of Western civilization--felt compelled
to reorganize them. She was a thousand years before her time. It can
only be with the emergence of a new structure of society, based on the
principle of solidarity and mutual aid among the individuals of a
nation, and so extending to solidarity and mutual aid among nations,
that peace can come to the Western world. It is the best hope of the
present war that, like some frightful illness, it marks the working out
of deep-seated evils and their expulsion from the social organism; and
that with its ending the old false civilization, built on private gain,
will perish, crushed by its own destructive forces; and in its place the
new, the real culture, will arise, founded on the essential unity of
mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Reprinted by permission from the _English Review_ for January,
1915.