Page 40 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

psychological, economic and other causes of strife. Crime with
its penalties is always a kind of mutual violence, a kind of revolt
and civil strife and even in the best-policed and most law-abiding
communities crime is still rampant. Even the organisation of crime
is still possible although it cannot usually endure or fix its power
because it has the whole vehement sentiment and effective or-
ganisation of the community against it. But what is more to the
purpose, Law has not been able to prevent, although it has mini-
mised, the possibility of civil strife and violent or armed discord
within the organised nation.
CWSA 25: 391-92

Even if war were eliminated
Therefore, pending the actual evolution of an international
State so constituted as to be something other than a mere loose
conglomerate of nations or rather a palaver of the deputies of
national governments, the reign of peace and unity dreamed of
by the idealist could never be possible by these political or admin-
istrative means or, if possible, could never be secure. Even if war
were eliminated, still as in the nation crime between individuals
exists, or as other means such as disastrous general strikes are
used in the war of classes, so here too other means of strife would
be developed, much more disastrous perhaps than war. And even
they would be needed and inevitable in the economy of Nature,
not only to meet the psychological necessity of egoistic discord
and passion and ambition, but as an outlet and an arm for the
sense of injustice, of oppressed rights, of thwarted possibilities.
The law is always the same, that wherever egoism is the root of
action it must bear its own proper results and reactions and, how-
ever minimised and kept down they may be by an external ma-
chinery, their eventual outburst is sure and can be delayed but not
prevented for ever.
It is apparent at least that no loose formation without a pow-

40 All India Magazine, October 2025