Page 9 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

The Passing of War

Communication and war
One of the illusions incidental to this great hope is the ex-
pectation of the passing of war. This grand event in human prog-
ress is always being confidently expected and since we are now all
scientific minds and rational beings, we no longer expect it by a
divine intervention, but assign sound physical and economic rea-
sons for the faith that is in us. The first form taken by this new
gospel was the expectation and the prophecy that the extension
of commerce would be the extinction of war. Commercialism was
the natural enemy of militarism and would drive it from the face of
the earth. The growing and universal lust of gold and the habit of
comfort and the necessities of increased production and intricate
interchange would crush out the lust of power and dominion and
glory and battle. Gold-hunger or commodity-hunger would drive
out earth-hunger, the dharma of the Vaishya would set its foot on
the dharma of the Kshatriya and give it its painless quietus. The
ironic reply of the gods has not been long in coming. Actually this
very reign of commercialism, this increase of production and inter-
change, this desire for commodities and markets and this piling up
of a huge burden of unnecessary necessities has been the cause
of half the war s that have since afflicted the human race. And
now we see militarism and commercialism united in a loving clasp,
coalescing into a sacred biune duality of national life and patriotic
aspiration and causing and driving by their force the most irratio-
nal, the most monstrous and nearly cataclysmic, the hugest war
of modern and indeed of all historic times.
CWSA 25:607

Democracy and war
Another illusion was that the growth of democracy would
mean the growth of pacifism and the end of war. It was fondly

All India Magazine, October 2025 9