United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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.

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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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vox 15 Lord Chesterfield’s four thousand years and whatever may, or s hould be added thereto. Out of scores of available quotations, three will suffice to suggest a deflation of that eloquence which begins “There never was a time in the history of the world. . .” (1) In 115 or thereabouts one Juvenal found himself face to face with a complicating factor in the life of man perennial since man first tried to make a garden of the world. Juvenal tackled the woman problem. I cannot give you all he says in the sixth Satire but it is easy to give you enough to suggest that any risks we run to-day from having women in the world have always been run. Apparently, women have always been at least half of what is the matter with the world. Says Juvenal: “Why need I tell of the purple wraps and the wrestling oils used by the women? Who has not seen one of them smiting a stump, piercing it through and through with a foil, lunging at it with a shield, and going through all the proper motions? . . . What mod¬ esty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength? . . . Yet these women are the women who find the thinnest of thin robes too hot for them: whose delicate flesh is chafed by the finest of silk tissue. . . What decency does Venus observe when she, is drunken? When she knows not one member from another, and eats giant oysters at midnight. . .drinks out of perfume bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances and every light shows double! There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.” Juvenal even faced the educated woman: “She lays down definitions, and discourses on morals, like a philosopher. . .The grammarians make way before her; the rhe¬ toricians give in; the whole crowd is silenced.’’ I do not quote these things to show what is the matter,with wo¬ man, but simply to show that our unsolved problem of the relations of the sexes, that fundamental warfare between the sexes which faces us everywhere beneath the surface of life today, is a very old affair. (2) My next author I shall not name. He lived in the eighteenth century and was something of an anomaly in that comfortable upper class century; he was a tragic figure. So tender was his spirit and so 1am- bently and brilliantly sane was the vision of his mind that we still de¬ fend ourselves and the vested interests of our comfortable insanities against him by calling him mad. A single quotation from him will also suggest the perennial story of the world. “But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed, therefore, confident that instead of reason we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices.” G. G. Ramsay’s translation.