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Mr. Milne and War [II]. To the Editor of Time and Tide
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- document
- Additional Information
Sir, – As Mr. Milne continues to involve himself, like a cat in fly-paper, in comparisons or analogies which he cannot control; as he is impervious to irony; and as he consistently misses the point, I shall content myself with re-stating briefly what I meant the main point to be.
I did not criticise Mr. Milne’s book from pure love of destruction, but from a belief that essays like his are harmful in so far as they distract people’s minds from more practical effort to minimise the chances of war. I pointed out that, instead of inveighing against War in general, we should do better to study the causes of the particular kind of war which we should be likely to have in contemporary circumstances. I believe the causes of modern wars to be largely, even preponderantly, economic; and I suggested that we ought to try to modify the world economy, beginning with our own, in order to do away, for instance, with the “struggle for markets.” The ultimate cause of War may indeed reside in human passions; but these passions operate through a long series of interests. I think that the passion for fighting and the motive of hatred are quite secondary among the causes of modern war. If Mr. Milne, like Lady Rhondda, is quite satisfied by Mr. Huxley’s intelligent but superficial reflexions on the conflicts of Central America, there is no more to be said.
Mr. Milne says, in rejoinder to Miss Mary Butts:
I am grateful to Mr. Edwards for correcting me; I could not remember how
