Page 34 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

an abnormal moral depravity but the very instinct of egoistic life;
and what life at present is not egoistic? But it can be satisfied only
to a very limited degree by peaceful and unaggressive means. And
where it feels itself hemmed in by obstacles that it thinks it can
overcome, opposed by barriers, encircled, dissatisfied with a share
of possession and domination it considers disproportionate to its
needs and its strength, or where new possibilities of expansion
open out to it in which only its strength can obtain for it its desir-
able portion, it is at once moved to the use of some kind of force
and can only be restrained by the amount of resistance it is likely
to meet. If it has a weak opposition of unorganised or ill-organised
peoples to overcome, it will not hesitate; if it has the opposition
of powerful rivals to fear, it will pause, seek for alliances or watch
for its moment. Germany had not the monopoly of this expansive
instinct and egoism; but its egoism was the best organised and
least satisfied, the youngest, crudest, hungriest, most self-con-
fident and presumptuous, most satisfied with the self-righteous
brutality of its desires. The breaking of German militarism might
ease for a moment the intensity of the many headed commercial
wrestle but it cannot, by the removal of a dangerous and restless
competitor, end it. So long as any kind of militarism survives, so
long as fields of political or commercial aggrandisement are there
and so long as national egoisms live and are held sacred and there
is no final check on their inherent instinct of expansion, war will
be always a possibility and almost a necessity of the life of the
human peoples.
CWSA 25: 477-78
League of Nations
Another idea put forward with great authorities behind it was
a league of free and democratic nations which would keep the
peace by pressure or by the use of force if need be. If less crude,
this solution is not for that any more satisfactory than the other.
It is an old idea, the idea Metternich put into practice after the

34 All India Magazine, October 2025