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Slowly and dimly the Dumdrudges of the world–the peasants and artisans, the working people, the people who have most right to count–are beginning to recognise the absurdity of paying and dying for wars of which they know nothing, and in the quarrels of kings and ministers for whom they have neither reverence nor love. “What is the British Empire to me,” I heard a Whitechapel man say, “when I have to open the window before I get room to put on my trousers?” A section of the country was opposed to the Crimean War; a far larger section was opposed to the Boer War. Both were ridiculed, persecuted, and maltreated; but nearly everyone now admits that both were right. In the next unjust or unreasonable war the peace party will be stronger still. Something has thus been gained; but the greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July 1909. “Risk our lives and the subsistence of our little families to secure dividends for shareholders in mining concessions illegally inveigled from a semi-savage chieftain? Never! We will raise hell rather, and die in revolution upon our native streets.” So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more noble or of finer promise for mankind than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid. Ferrer had no direct part in that rising; his only part lay in sowing the seed of freedom by his writings. It was a pity he had no other part. He lost an opportunity such as comes in few men’s lives–and he was executed just the same.[18]

The event was small and brief, but it was one of the most significant in modern times. If the working classes refuse to fight, what will the kings, ministers, speculators, and contractors do? Will they go out to fight each other? Then, indeed, warfare would become a blessing undisguised, and we could freely join the poet in calling carnage God’s daughter. When I was a child I drew up a scheme for a vast British army recruited from our lunatic asylums. With lunatic soldiers, as I explained to my mother, the heavier our losses, the greater would be our gain. It seems to me still a promising idea. But an army recruited from kings, lords, Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, speculators, contractors, and officials–the people who are the primary originators of our wars–would have even greater advantages, and the losses in battle would be balanced by still greater compensations.

The Barcelona rising was, indeed, full of promise. It marked the gradual approach of a time when the working-people, who always supply most of the men to be killed in war, will refuse to fight for the ruling classes, as they would now refuse to fight for dynasties. If they refuse to fight in the ordinary Government wars, either war will cease, or it will rise to the higher stage of war between class and class. It will become either civil war–the most terrible and difficult, but the finest kind of war, because some principle of the highest value must be at stake before civil war can arise; or it will become a combined war of the classes in various countries between whom there is a feeling of sympathy and common interest. That would take the form of a civil war extended throughout Europe, and perhaps America and the highly-developed parts of Asia. The allied forces in the various countries would then strike where the need was greatest, the French or English army corps of working-men going to the assistance of Russian or German working-men against the forces of despotism or capital. But a social war on that scale, however desirable, is like the Spanish fleet in the Critic–it is not yet in sight. The growing perfection of modern arms gives too enormous an advantage to established forces. The movement is much more likely to take the Barcelona form of refusal to fight; and if the peoples of Europe could combine in that determination, the effect would be irresistible. This international movement is, in fact, very slowly, growing. The telegraph, the railway, cheap tickets, Cook’s tours, the power of reading, and even the peculiar language taught as French in our schools, combine to wear away the hostility of peoples. The “beastly foreigner” is almost extinct. The man who has been for a week in Germany, or for a trip to lovely Lucerne, feels a reflected glory in saying those foreigners are not so bad. There was a fine old song with a refrain, “He’s a good ‘un when you know him, but you’ve got to know him first.” Well, we are getting to know the foreigner whom we once called “beastly.”