Page 34 - All India Magazine Oct-2025
P. 34

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
   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39