No grave difficulty, at least in the modern world, is involved in this
faith, until it suddenly comes into conflict with the urgent
requirements of social efficiency. When the social group is fused with
emotion and moves almost as an undivided unit toward some end, then the
claim of a right, on the ground of conscience, for the individual to
deviate from the group and to pursue another or an opposite course
appears serious if not positively insufferable. The abstract principle
of individual liberty all modern persons grant; the strain comes when
some one proposes to insist upon a concrete instance of it which
involves implications that may endanger the ends which the intensified
group is pursuing. A situation of this type confronts the Quakers
whenever their country engages in war, since as a people they feel that
they cannot fight or take any part in military operations.

They do not find it an easy thing to give a completely rational ground
for their opposition to war. Nor, as a matter of fact, is it any more
easy for the militarist to rationalize his method of solving world
difficulties. Both are evidently actuated by instinctive forces which
lie far beneath the level of pure reason.

The roots of the Quakers' opposition to war go deep down into the soil
of the past. They are the outgrowth and culmination of a long spiritual
movement. They carry along, in their ideas, emotions, habits and
attitudes, tendencies which have been unconsciously sucked in with their
mother's milk, and which, therefore, cannot be held up and analysed.
The mystics, the humanists, the anabaptists, the spiritual reformers,
are forerunners of the Quaker. They are a necessary part of his
pedigree,--and they were all profoundly opposed to war. This attitude
has become an integral part of the vital stock of truth by which the
Quaker lives his spiritual life, and to violate it is for him to stop