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Show "I Resolved That I Would Devote My Life to the Prevention of War" By LORD THOMSON, British Air Minister. I joined the Fabian society and the Labor party because I attended the Versailles conference a brigadier general of the British army and saw face to face the utter incapacity, folly and dishonesty of the politicians poli-ticians assembled there to dispose of the destinies of the world. I had been in the army twenty-six years, but I had never seen anything like the thick-headedness of the Versailles statesmen. I came away with the conviction that this sort of thing must not happen again. I resolved that I would devote my life to the prevention of war. This, not in spite of my being a soldier rather because I am a soldier. sol-dier. Soldiers hate war. The best anti-militarists in the world today are to be found among the officers who fought in the late war. But war cannot be prevented by setting up mere agreements or institutions, insti-tutions, by organizing an international debating society at Geneva or anywhere any-where else. What we need most of all is not new treaties, but a change of the international mind. Man fights because he wants to. It is this will to fight that we have to combat above all, and we have to do it through education through what I might call Fabianizing the world. It is the futility of war even more than its immorality and wickedness wicked-ness that we must bring home to the masses so that they can bring it home to their rulers. |