United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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vox 13 but your other world, the world you realize when you permit Job and the New Testament to sensitize you away from the habit of sucking soporifics out of Pollyanna and the worst parts of Browning. Let me be rashly concrete, assuming for a moment what not one half of one per cent of us does really assume, that modern warfare is a thoroughly wasteful and bad thing. You have on your hands then, for instance, the huge joke that in 1921, three years after the war to end war, the United States of America established her Citizens’ Military Training Camps which now proudly enroll, as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for War said last week, tens upon tens of thousands of the best young life of the American nation under twenty-four years of age. You know, or may know, if you choose to acquaint yourselves with the facts, that life on this planet today is amazingly interwoven and interdependent and that its underlying conditioning basis is commercial and military. This world today is not even in the careful hands of greedy but shrewd financiers, not even in the smooth and gentlemanly hands of far-seeing, self-seeking old-world diplomatists, certainly not even in the immaculate hands of the Church. The world today is simply a powder magazine for any lunatic’s match, the League of Nations being at best, no more than a sort of private police agency trying to forestall the lunatic. And if you think to fence yourself within a little place of peace, to cultivate your garden with Candide, you cannot even do that because at any moment, metaphorically or actually, a poison gas bomb may make ugly ravage among your flowers. The waste which is potential in all ignorance, stupidity, selfish acquisitiveness and anaemic or robust lusts may at any moment break into widespread expression and apall us all. I protest that this sounds merely rhetorical only to those who do not realize its truth. Henry W. Nevinson in the current issue of an English journal points my comment thus: “By Article 8 of the Versailles Treaty, Germany pledged her¬ self to disarm almost entirely, provided only that the other nations, her former enemies, disarmed in proportion. England has to some ex¬ tent reduced both her fleet and her army. For a time she reduced her air force, too. But no other nation has made the slightest attempt at reduction, much less disarmament. On the contrary, France, Italy and Poland are far more powerful in armaments than at the date of the Treaty. I have attended many Disarmament Conferences and seen they were all shams, because each nation was only anxious not to limit or reduce its own forces. More absurd still have been the Conferences to humanize war by laying down rules in the interests of mercy. It was as though two farmers who had been accustomed to burn each other’s ricks for years met together and agreed to use none but safety matches in future. I have known war for nearly forty years, and I have never known a war which was not eloquently supported by kings, rulers, and clergy, or in which men who refused to fight or spoke against the war were not persecuted with the utmost violence. Those who remember the “Pro-Boers” in the South African War or the “Con¬ scientious Objectors” in the Great War will understand. Nor do I

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12 VOX ‘You!’ said the Caterpillar contemptuously. ‘Who are you? Which brought them back again to the beginning of the con¬ versation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said very gravely, ‘I think you ought to tell me who you are first.’ ‘Why?’ said the Caterpillar. Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any very good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away. ‘Come back!’ the Caterpillar called after her. ‘I’ve something important to say.’ This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again. ‘Keep your temper,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘Is that all?’ said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could. ‘No,’ said the Caterpillar. Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hear¬ ing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking; but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, ‘So you think you’re changed, do you?’ ” As I look at you I ask the Caterpillar’s question, “So you think you’re changed, do you?” and I entertain the hope that the mere fact of continuing life on this earth should enable you always to answer the Caterpillar ' s question with an exultant and not a sad affirmative. In entertaining this hope I may be going dead against fundamental psy¬ chological laws. It rarely seems possible, for instance, to make “one kind of a dog into another kind of a dog.” Yet I venture the surmise as I face you tonight: that if you ponder the topics I listed in the beginning, as you ponder, you will change, and (here I give away the fact that I am not a complete skeptic; Anatole France tells us that final skepticism im¬ plies absolute silence) you will change for the better. In other words, in talking to you in the attempt to open up these topics for you to-night, I hope to do you good. As some of you know, the phrase “our prematurely afflicted cen¬ tury” comes from Thomas Hardy. It has its setting in one of the few really noble pronouncements in contemporary literature; Hardy’s “Apology” prefaced to “Late Lyrics and Earlier.” Look for a moment at this young century we once so gayly and blatantly called Canada ' s. After all, you are of the few. You, about to graduate, are of the super-privileged classes. Yours is the rather special responsibility of seeing what is to be seen, of doing what is to be done. You know what we assume to be the special responsibility of the good swimmer in the crowd watching a drowning man struggling in mid stream. It is simply the special degree of responsibility bred out of superior knowledge and capacity. After four years at College, unless you have been fools, first, in coming, and then in staying, you possess superior knowledge and capacity. Well, look at your young century. Look at your world of 1931. I don’t mean your pretty world of 1931 just now

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14 VOX believe that the account of horrors such as I could give or such as are revealed in Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front, will deter the peoples of the world from war. Those who would fight like the chance of self sacrifice; those who would not fight like to hear of horrors. Where, then, is hope of peace? It might possibly be found in the apalling scale of “the next war,” when whole populations will be exterminated by poison gas, and all kings, rulers, and clergy will be included in the universal holacaust. That will silence their at¬ tempts to hound the people on to international hatred. In my own case, I have found that the more I came to know the members of a foreign nation, the better I came to like them, and the less inclined I felt to cut their heads off with a sword or to shatter their limbs with shells, or to stop their breathing with gas.” This, then, is your world. Both potentially and actually it is a tragic world if waste, potential and actual, be a constituent of the tragic idea; a world full of evil designs, stupid activity, irresponsible powers. And leaving aside the thought of modern warfare with its peculiar potentialities for widespread waste and horror, your world at peace is really not good enough. There is injustice in the courts of justice, law¬ less precedure in and about the legislative halls, self seeking and aggrand¬ isement in the Church, highly organized lying under the name of na¬ tional diplomacy, ruthless exploitation under the name of commercial expansion, all known and condoned, all part of our “present system.” •This, then, is your world. Of course we do not usually think of it in these terms. We live or try to live in the peripheral areas round about this central tragic fact. We use misbegotten religious conceptions as opiates, our second and third rate art and literature as anodynes, work and the pursuit of time as a resource (“I’ve saved ten minutes,” said the Occidental. “What do you want it for?” asked the Oriental.”) and, generally, the pleasures of satisfying the darker passions or our gentler and subtler lusts, drunken¬ nesses of various sorts, as modes of escape. We circle about, hither and thither, occupied with what we call our interests. And all the while the central fact remains, though few there be that find it. So is our world perpetuated. I suppose my second topic is in my scheme in order to deflate the rhetoric and reduce the excitement. After all, it’s a pretty old world. The story of the world is a far longer story than Lord Chesterfield thought it was when in 1739 he wrote to his son, “in Europe the two principal eras or epochs by which we reckon are from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, which was 4000 years; and from the birth of Christ to this time, which is 1739 years.” I am not going to give you chronol¬ ogy, however. I shall not go back into geological time. I am merely go¬ ing to quote a few things to show that the story of the world is a very old, and indeed, a rather repetitious story, that our “prematurely afflicted century” is really but a pulse in the centuries’ flux. One need not go farther than Anno Domini to demonstrate that, leaving out of account War or Peace? Henry W. Nevinson, The Clarion, March, 1931, page 71.