THE WAR AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2344, 29 December 1914, Page 6

THE WAR AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

Viscount Bryoe presided at a meeting of the Sociological Society, held in London on November 10, when a paper on "The Social Problem and the Present War" was read by Professor C. A. Ellwood, of the University of Missouri. Lord Bryco eaid in the entirely unprecedented conditions in which the world found itself there was great need for hard thinking. They were full of pride and sorrow for those.who. fell and of admiration for those who gave themselves like heroes to what they and wo believed to be a. worthy cause. But besides all that there was a great deal to be thought about. No conditions like these had ever emerged before in the history of the world, and they welcomed gladly any, light that might come to them from any quarter, especially such ligjht as came from a great people largeminded enough to be able to rise in the clear atmosphere of pure thought and consider what these things meant for the world, and whether there was any escape from the calamities or recurrence of such calamities as those they 6aw to-day.

Professor Ellwood said the war was not an acoident; it had merely exposed the rottenness of some of the foundations of Western civilisation. They had thought that somehow out of a programme of self-interest, material satisfactions, and brute force a settled and harmonious order would result. Tho war called for a reconstruction of our social philosophy. In Germany practical ethics had become based upon a crude revolutionary naturalism, developing into the Worship of power, a materialism expressing itself, in doctrines not favourable to human solidarity. Germany, however, only illustrated the reversion towards barbarism in Western civilisation generally, and this reversion as manifested in tho hatred of the contending nations must be regarded as one of the chief causes of the war. It was difficult to see how world peace was to issue from an atmosphero of envenomed hate. But in all this there would seem to be notfiing necessary or inevitable; lack of right ideals and of sympathetic understanding would explain most of the conflict. Hence there was a good scientific basis for a meliorist attitude to-day. The situation called not for pessimism, hut for alertness and intelligence. Western civilisation needed a great social and spiritual awakening.