Page 38 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

ished; for each nation distrusts all the others too much, has too
many ambitions and hungers, needs to remain armed, if for noth-
ing else, to guard its markets and keep down its dominions, colo-
nies, subject peoples. Commercial ambitions and rivalries, political
pride, dreams, longings, jealousies are not going to disappear as
if by the touch of a magic wand merely because Europe has in
an insane clash of long-ripening ambitions, jealousies and hatreds
decimated its manhood and flung in three years the resources
of decades into the melting-pot of war. The awakening must go
much deeper, lay hold upon much purer roots of action before
the psychology of nations will be transmuted into that something
"wondrous, rich and strange" which will eliminate war and inter-
national collisions from our distressed and stumbling human life.
National egoism remaining, the means of strife remaining, its
causes, opportunities, excuses will never be wanting.
CWSA 25: 389-90

Illusory remedy
The limitation of armies and armaments is an illusory remedy.
Even if there could be found an effective international means of
control, it would cease to operate as soon as the clash of war ac-
tually came. The European conflict has shown that, in the course
of a war, a country can be turned into a huge factory of arms
and a nation convert its whole peaceful manhood into an army.
England which started with a small and even insignificant armed
force, was able in the course of a single year to raise millions of
men and in two to train and equip them and throw them effec-
tively into the balance. This object-lesson is sufficient to show that
the limitation of armies and armaments can only lighten the na-
tional burden in peace, leaving it by that very fact more resources
for the conflict, but cannot prevent or even minimise the disas-
trous intensity and extension of war. Nor will the construction of
a stronger international law with a more effective sanction behind

38 All India Magazine, October 2025