The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1915. PACIFIST MORALITY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIII, Issue 66, 17 November 1915, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1915. PACIFIST MORALITY.

Pacifist morality is discussed by the Christchureh Press in outspoken terms. The statement is made that the vast majority of men know that the pacifist is a mischievous person, hut instead of saying so very plainly most people usually accompany their censure with an admission that, though misguided and mistaken, the pacifist is animated by the highest and purest motives. The first resounding blow at the habit—very often there is hypocrisy in the habit—of treating the pacifist as a fine-hearted idealist (the Press continues) as noble as lie is mistaken, has been delivered by Mr Roosevelt in the ".Metropolitan Magazine." He sees pacifism in America as simply an evil thing, and the pacifist gospellers as wicked men teaching others to commit "the oldest sins the newestkind of ways." The pacifist policy which has received such an impetus under the Wilson Administration has, he insists, represented more deterioration in character" than all the crookedness in politics and business. Pacifism is "non-resistance to "wrong" ; Mr .Roosevelt can make a long list of tlie actual proofs of this proposition which the war lias furnished. We may quote other of his dicta: "The deification of peace without regard to whether it is either wise or righteous does not represent virtue. It represents a peculiarly base and ignoble form of evil." "Every League that calls itself a Peace League is championing ' immorality, unless it clearly and explicitly recognises the duty of putting righteousness before peace." "They (the pacifists), consent to a hell upon earth, and, because they have kept out of the war, call it the triumph of human progress." Mr Roosevelt declares that the American pacifists who are paltering with unrighteousness are doing so mainly because they are cowards. "The people who say of the present Administration that 'at any rate, it lias kept us out of trouble with Mexico or Germany' ; the people who say we ought not to act about the Lusitania ; the people who say we ought not to have acted on behalf of Belgium, include in their ranks very many of the persons who are cowed by Germany, who are afraid of what Cermany would do if we stood up for our own rights, or for the rights of other and weaker peoples." Nor is Mr Roosevelt the only prominent American writer who sees the essential evil of pacifism in its mature development as they have it in the United States. Air Owen Wister, in a new book, says, "The maxims of a low prudence, mas-

' querading as Christianity, daily coun- ! sel us to keep our arm feeble." The 1 Press concludes its article by sayingti j "Before the war is ended we believei that pacifism and tlie pacifists will be recognised for what they are, and that nobody, in condemning them, will feel himself required to admit that there can be anything good in things so plainly evil."