The Germs of War/Chapter 3
3. "Human Nature" and War.
Many people will answer at once that the germs of war are in human nature. "And you can't change human nature," they add despairingly.
Shortly after the outbreak of the present war in Europe, a man was talking over the situation, "At bottom," said he bitterly, "we are hyenas, nothing but hyenas." He might as well have said that the rose at bottom is nothing but dirt.
Whatever may have been true in the past, this war has shown as clearly as it has shown anything, that men and women of all nations are brave, selt-sacrificing, heroic. No great nation now at war can accuse any of its enemies of being either cowardly or weak. But, better than that, if the inside stories that come from the front mean anything, they mean that the men and women of the nations now at war did not want war, and now that they are at war, except in the heat of battle, they do not hate one another.
War is built out of the mud of human nature.
The passions of men are inflamed; they are told that their hearths and homes are in danger; they are persuaded that their existence and the existence of their country is at stake, and then they go to war, War is impossible until the nations have been roused to frenzy.
The soldiers in the trenches exchange cigarettes and shake hands. They talk back and forth, as man with man. If they were not at war they would work side by side in the same shops; eat side by side in the same restaurants, and sleep side by side in the same rooms.
Human nature has many sides. Some of them are good, and some are bad. War suppresses the good and brings the bad to the surface. War is hell, and it develops man's most hellish instincts. The phrase, "There is no good Indian but a dead Indian" speaks the true war-spirit. Your enemies are bad because they are your enemies.
You probably know people from all of the nations at war, Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Austrians and Italians. They have their good qualities and their bad ones. In every army now in the trenches there are men who are good fathers, good neighbors, good workmen, good citizens. In every army there are roughs and hoodlums. No people in the world has any monopoly in goodness or in badness.
Human nature is as capable of peace as it is capable of war. Witness the peace that has reigned for a century between Canada and the United States! There is not a fort on the boundary-line; not a warship in the lakes and the two peoples are at peace, and there is not even a hint of a desire for war.
Subject human nature to one line of treatment, and you develop bitterness, fear, hatred, war. Give it the opposite line of treatment, and you develop good feeling, friendship and peace.
Human nature cannot be blamed for war. One part of it is used in making war just as one part of corn is used in making whiskey.