Men were far too busy in the great fight against Nature
to fight against each other, far too absorbed in the task of inventing
methods of self-preservation to have much energy left for inventing
methods of self-destruction. It was once supposed that the Homeric
stories of war presented a picture of life near the beginning of the
world. The Homeric picture in fact corresponds to a stage in human
barbarism, certainly in its European manifestation, a stage also passed
through in Northern Europe, where, nearly fifteen hundred years ago,
the Greek traveller, Posidonius, found the Celtic chieftains in Britain
living much like the people in Homer. But we now know that Homer, so
far from bringing before us a primitive age, really represents the end
of a long stage of human development, marked by a slow and steady
growth in civilisation and a vast accumulation of luxury. War is a
luxury, in other words a manifestation of superfluous energy, not
possible in those early stages when all the energies of men are taken
up in the primary business of preserving and maintaining life. So it
was that war had a beginning in human history. Is it unreasonable to
suppose that it will also have an end?
There is another way, besides that of counting the world's war-years,
to determine the probability of the diminution and eventual
disappearance of war. We may consider the causes of war, and the extent
to which these causes are, or are not, ceasing to operate.
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