NORMAN ANGELL

Everywhere I go I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making.

Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which if persisted in, must make peace impossible.

The greatest service we can do the common man is to abolish him and make all men uncommon.

God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and cannot be destroyed, except by itself.

It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.

How can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activity and its infinitesimal proportion of military, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?

Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom -- spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure -- to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others.... It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

A nation, in order to be secure in its defense, has to be stronger than its potential enemy. Then what becomes of the defense of the other? Is he to have none?

Man’s greatest advances these last few generations have been made by the application of human intelligence to the management of matter. Now we are confronted by a more difficult problem, the application of intelligence to the management of human relations.

However much America may attempt to hold herself free in Europe she will very deeply feel the effects, both material and moral, of upheavals like that which is now shaking the old Continent; that even though there be no aggressive action against her, the militarization of Europe will force upon America also a militarist development; and that she can best avoid these dangers and secure her own safety and free development by taking the lead in a new world policy which is briefly this: To use her position to initiate and guide a grouping of all the civilized powers having as its object the protection of any one of its members that is the victim of aggression. The aid to be given for such an object should not be, in the case of the United States, military but economic, by means of the definite organization of non-intercourse against the recalcitrant power. America's position of geographical and historical remoteness from European quarrels places her in a particularly favorable position to direct this world organization, and the fact of undertaking it would give her in some sense the moral leadership of the western world, and make her the centre of the World State of the future.

The economic difficulty of the modern world is not shortage of materials but the organization of their exchange and distribution; distress arises, not from scarcity but from dislocation and maladjustment.

The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil.

As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses?

There are many who say in effect that public opinion has little to do with war, that it is explained by the influence of the vested interests who profit by it — armament makers or groups of capitalists. But even when we have admitted that those interests do exert great influence, it only pushes the question further back. Why are the mass of men, millions, powerless in this matter as against a tiny minority … who profit by the general disaster? There are undoubtedly some who say to the millions in effect: "We should like you to go to war because it would expand our profits." But why do the millions obey?

The convictions of the multitudes … are sincere convictions. They are, as we know, sometimes disastrously erroneous; but they are also disastrously honest.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men.

The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers.

The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition.

The day for progress by force has passed. From now on it will be progress by ideas or not at all.

I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.

The evil was not in either ideal; the evil was in the attempt to impose that ideal by force upon others.

The Council of the Union of Democratic Control re-affirms its unshaken conviction that a lasting settlement cannot be secured by a peace based upon the right of conquest and followed by commercial war, but only by a peace which gives just consideration to the claims of nationality, and which lays the foundation of a real European partnership.

What is needed is the development in men of that particular type of skill which will enable them to make social use of knowledge already in their possession; enable them to apply simple, sometimes self-evident, truths to the guidance of their common life.