And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium to-morrow week.  There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny brickbats thrown at them by ignorance.  You do not dismiss attempts to correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?

Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the “practical” man who despises “theories” nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is not an absolute dogma with all its thirty-nine articles water-tight.  “You are a Pacifist, then suppose...,” and then follows generally some very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the millenium—­an argument which would equally well have told against the union of Scotland and England or would equally justify the political parties in a South American republic in continuing to settle their differences by militarist methods instead of the Pacifist methods of England.

Human nature may be unchanging:  it is no reason why we should fight a futile war with Germany over nothing at all; the yellow peril may threaten; that is a very good reason why we should compose our differences in Europe.  Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious questions, bigotry and fanaticism always will exist—­it did not prevent our getting rid of the wars of religion, still less is it a reason for re-starting them.

The men who made that immense advance—­the achievement of religious toleration—­possible, were not completely right and had not a water-tight theory amongst them; they did not bring the millenium, but they achieved an immense step.  They were pioneers of religious freedom, yet were themselves tyrants and oppressors; those who abolished slavery did a good work, though much of the world was left in industrial servitude; it was a good thing to abolish judicial torture, though much of our penal system did yet remain barbaric; it was a real advance to recognise the errors upon which these things rested, although that recognition did not immediately achieve a complete, logical, symmetrical and perfect change, because mankind does not advance that way.  And so with war.  Pacifism does not even pretend to be a dogma:  it is an attempt to correct in men’s minds some of the errors and false theories out of which war grows.

The reply to this is generally that the inaptitude of men for clear thinking and the difficulties of the issues involved will render any decision save the sheer clash of physical force impossible; that the field of foreign politics is such a tangle that the popular mind will always fall back upon decision by force.