They are the failures of our social ad educational systems.We may regret their pitiful degradation, we may exonerate them from blame; none the less they are a pitiful crew.I have seen the hardship of the trenches, the gay and gallant wounded.I do a little understand what our soldiers, officers and men alike, have endured and done.And though I know I ought to allow for all that I have stated, I cannot regard these conscientious objectors with anything but contempt.Into my house there pours a dismal literature rehearsing the hardships of these men who set themselves up to be martyrs for liberty; So and So, brave hero, has been sworn at--positively sworn at by a corporal; a nasty rough man came into the cell of So and So and dropped several h's; So and So, refusing to undress and wash, has been undressed and washed, and soap was rubbed into his eyes--perhaps purposely;the food and accommodation are not of the best class; the doctors in attendance seem hasty; So and So was put into a damp bed and has got a nasty cold.Then I recall a jolly vanload of wounded men I saw out there....
But after all, we must be just.A church and state that permitted these people to be thrust into dreary employment in their early 'teens, without hope or pride, deserves such citizens as these.The marvel is that there are so few.There are a poor thousand or so of these hopeless, resentment-poisoned creatures in Great Britain.Against five willing millions.The Allied countries, I submit, have not got nearly all the conscientious objectors they deserve.
3
If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one passionate desire that the particular social system that has treated him so ill should collapse and give in, and its leaders and rulers be humiliated and destroyed, the intellectual direction of a mischievous pacifism comes from an entirely different class.
The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every other respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in common, that he has never been drawn into the whirl of collective life in any real and assimilative fashion.This is what is the matter with both of them.He is a little loose, shy, independent person.Except for eating and drinking--in moderation, he has never done anything real from the day he was born.He has frequently not even faced the common challenge of matrimony.
Still more frequently is he childless, or the daring parent of one particular child.He has never traded nor manufactured.He has drawn his dividends or his salary with an entire unconsciousness of any obligations to policemen or navy for these punctual payments.Probably he has never ventured even to reinvest his little legacy.He is acutely aware of possessing an exceptionally fine intelligence, but he is entirely unconscious of a fundamental unreality.Nothing has ever occurred to him to make him ask why the mass of men were either not possessed of his security or discontented with it.The impulses that took his school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures struck him as needless.As he grew up he turned with an equal distrust from passion or ambition.His friends went out after love, after adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this or that desire, and became men.But he noted merely that they became fleshly, that effort strained them, that they were sometimes angry or violent or heated.He could not but feel that theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought some finer exercise for his exceptional quality.He pursued art or philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him, and his own detachment.The vulgarity and crudity of the things nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press, the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, the baseness of common people in his own land.The world overseas had by comparison a certain glamour.Except that when you said "United States" to him he would draw the air sharply between his teeth and beg you not to...
Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.
