International Thought by John Galsworthy — Read

"The exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation of the world. "

To those who, until 1914, believed in civil behaviour between man and man, the war and its ensuing peace brought disenchantment. Preoccupied with the humaner pursuits, and generally unfamiliar with the real struggle for existence, they were caught napping. The rest of mankind have experienced no particular astonishment――the doing-down of man by man was part of daily life, and when it was done collectively they felt no spiritual change. It was dreadful but――in a word――natural. This may not be a popular view of human life in the mass, but it is true. Average life is a long fight; this man's success is that man's failure; co-operation and justice are only the palliatives of a basic, and ruthless, competition. The disenchantment of the few would not have mattered so much but for the fact that they were the nerves and voice of the community. Their histories, poems, novels, plays, pictures, treatises, sermons, were the expression of what we call civilisation. And disenchanted philosophers, though by so much the nearer to the truths of existence, are by that much, perhaps, the less useful to human nature. We need scant reminder of a truth always with us, we need rather perpetual assertion that the truth might with advantage be, and may possibly with effort become, not quite so unpleasant. Though we ought to look things in the face, a fine afflatus is the essence of ethical philosophy.