"But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and issue
leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work clamouring to be
done?"
"That," I said, "is the Whig tradition."
When they pressed me further, I said: "I am really the questioner. I
am visiting _your_ country, and you have to tell _me_ things. It is
not right that I should do all the telling. Tell me all about Romain
Rolland."
And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and the
Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of the net
of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In several
conversations we began to work out in general terms the psychology of
those people who were against the war. But usually we could not get to
that; my interlocutors would insist upon telling me just what they would
like to do or just what they would like to see done to stop-the-war
pacifists and conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful
imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than
platitudinous uplifts.
But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the
question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really
three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and
the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and who have a mystical
belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance.
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