Page 33 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

international organisation would not have enforced itself on the
general mind of the race. But the European collision rendered the
indefinite continuance of the old chaotic regime impossible. The
necessity of avoiding any repetition of the catastrophe was for a
time universally acknowledged. A means of keeping international
peace and of creating an authority which shall have the power to
dispose of dangerous international questions and prevent what
from the new point of view of human unity we may call civil war
between the peoples of mankind, had somehow or other to be
found or created.
CWSA 25: 476

Conditions of International peace
Various ideas were put forward with more or less authority
as to the necessary conditions of international peace. The crud-
est of these was the foolish notion, created by a one-sided propa-
ganda, which imagined that the destruction of German militarism
was the one thing needful and in itself sufficient to secure the
future peace of the world. The military power, the political and
commercial ambitions of Germany and her acute sense of her con-
fined geographical position and her encirclement by an unfriendly
alliance were the immediate moral cause of this particular war;
but the real cause lay in the very nature of the international situ-
ation and the psychology of national life. The chief feature of this
psychology is the predominance and worship of national egoism
under the sacred name of patriotism. Every national ego, like ev-
ery organic life, desires a double self-fulfilment, intensive and ex-
tensive or expansive. The deepening and enriching of its culture,
political strength and economic well-being within its borders is
not felt to be sufficient if there is not, without, an extension or ex-
pansion of its culture, an increase of its political extent, dominion,
power or influence and a masterful widening of its commercial
exploitation of the world. This natural and instinctive desire is not

All India Magazine, October 2025 33