Christmas, 1914.

People ask what new arrangements of diplomacy or revivals of Christianity—­what alliances, ententes, leagues of peace, Hague tribunals, regulation of armaments, weeks of prayer, or tons of Christmas puddings sent into the enemies’ camps—­will finally scotch this pestilence of war.  And there is no answer, because the answer is too close at hand for us to see it.

Nothing but the general abandonment of the system of living on the labour of others will avail. There is no other way.  This, whether as between individuals or as between nations, is—­and has been since the beginning of the world—­the root-cause of war.  Early and primitive wars were for this—­to raid crops and cattle, to carry off slaves on whose toil the conquerors could subsist; and the latest wars are the same.  To acquire rubber concessions, gold-mines, diamond-mines, where coloured labour may be exploited to its bitterest extreme; to secure colonies and outlying lands, where giant capitalist enterprises (with either white or coloured labour) may make huge dividends out of the raising of minerals and other industrial products; to crush any other Power which stands in the way of these greedy and inhuman ambitions—­such are the objects of wars to-day.  And we do not see the cause of the sore because it is so near to us, because it is in our blood.  The whole private life of the commercial and capitalist classes (who stand as the representatives of the nations to-day) is founded on the same principle.  As individuals our one object is to find some worker or group of workers whose labour value we can appropriate.  Look at the endless columns of stock and share quotations in the daily papers, and consider the armies of those who scan these lists over their breakfast-tables with the one view of finding some-where an industrial concern whose slave-driven toilers will yield the shareholder 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 per cent, on his capital.  Undisguised and shameless parasitism is the order, or disorder, of our days.  The rapacity of beasts of prey is in our social life but thinly veiled—­thinly veiled indeed by a wash of “Christian” sentiment and by a network of philanthropic institutions for the supposed benefit of the very victims whom we have robbed.

Is it any wonder that this principle of internecine warfare and rapacity which rules in our midst, this vulgar greed, which loads people’s bodies with jewels and furs and their tables with costly food, regardless of those from whom these comforts are snatched, should eventuate ultimately in rapacity and violence on the vast stage of the drama of nations, and in red letters of war and conflict written across the continents?  It is no good, with a pious snuffle, to say we are out to put down warfare and militarism, and all the time to encourage in our own lives, and in our Church and Empire Leagues and other institutions, the most sordid and selfish commercialism—­which itself is in essence a warfare, only a warfare of a far meaner and more cowardly kind than that which is signalized by the shock of troops or the rage of rifles and cannon.