Then I recall a jolly vanload
of wounded men I saw out there....
But after all, we must be just. A church and state that permitted
these people to be thrust into dreary employment in their early 'teens,
without hope or pride, deserves such citizens as these. The marvel
is that there are so few. There are a poor thousand or so of these
hopeless, resentment-poisoned creatures in Great Britain. Against five
willing millions. The Allied countries, I submit, have not got nearly
all the conscientious objectors they deserve.
3
If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the
resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one passionate
desire that the particular social system that has treated him so ill
should collapse and give in, and its leaders and rulers be humiliated
and destroyed, the intellectual direction of a mischievous pacifism
comes from an entirely different class.
The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every other
respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in common, that he
has never been drawn into the whirl of collective life in any real and
assimilative fashion. This is what is the matter with both of them.
He is a little loose, shy, independent person. Except for eating and
drinking--in moderation, he has never done anything real from the day
he was born.
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