The Combative Instinct

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 72, 17 December 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Combative Instinct

"The peace movement for the time

being has been reduced to the hope that

the piling up of destructive armaments may deter any peace-breaker from making the terrible experiment of putting them to use. It is, I believe, certain that war will one day pass into desuetude through a renewal of the humanitarian spirit which will place if outside the code of tolerable human behaviour. But at a time when militarists sing file praises of war and pacifists declare it to be disgraceful not to fight for peace, it must be admitted that the prospect is overcast.

“On any purely rational principles, it would seem that the preservation of life was the supreme object of individuals and governments. If that were sincerely believed and acted upon, the business of government would be immensely simplified. There would be few crimes and no wars; armies would be ununcessary, and police a luxury. But there is apparently nothing about which mankind or its rulers are less convinced.

“Contempt for death is still the most heroic* and the-most dangerous of human qualities. Men kill without mercy when their blood is up; they risk their lives without a thought for a flag, or a ribbon, a lost cause, to rescue the drowning, to fetch a child from a burning house, or a comrade from a fiery pit, to scale a mountain, to break a record. Any theory which assumes man to be a rational, seif-regarding animal fails to reckon with that part of him which is mystical, romantic, chivalrous, cruel and savage.”—Mr. J. A. Spender.