332 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE BIOLOGY OF PEACE 333 me Trotter has to do either of two things with his book: cut out his falsely derived arguments about England and Germany and others, and leave his more scientific findings, or else give the whole story about each type of nation.
Socialists as was said have another way to explain a lupine type like Germany. The masses are not this, as the methods of the military clique to make them fight prove. The masses always fought for the abstract ideal painted by the Parasite as a camouflage of their own motives.
Trotter gives to the ruling classes some hints which he got from his patient psychologic studies. He noticed the English worker somehow did not take to the war. And he blames the Parasites for not granting him something to make him feel an interest in the war. Notice the following (146. italics mine. very small amount of conscious, authoritative direction at that (beginning of the war) time, a very little actual sacrifice of privilege at that psychologic moment, a series of small, carefully selected concessions, none of which need have been actually subversive of prescriptive right, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine would have given the needed readjustment out of which a true national homogeneity would necessarily have grown.
Fools that they were, now as a consequence of this psychologic neglect (148. We are already faced with the possibility of having to make profound changes in the social system to convince the workingman effectually that his interests and ours in this war are one.
Quite right, very small would be the concessions needed, and right again that now there is a possibility of serious consequences from this lack of foresight! What these small things were Trotter does not fail to tell us. He advises to spread the idea of equality (151. but he hastens to add, not material equality between the defunct nobility and other Parasites of England and the workers. He admits it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence as a man with thirty thousand a year (151. But he joyously tells us. It seems certain that it would still be possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.
Trotter admits something that is hopeful. He tells us (197) that the individual is gregarious by instinct. But the specific kind of gregariousness, whether lupine or defensive or socialized, is not inherited. That is a matter of social choice.
Exactly. That type is foisted on the inherently social masses It is against the Parasites who did the foisting, that we must turn the cannon still hot from the slaughter of innocents, not against the wicked impulses within the breasts of the masses. And we must do this internationally, Mr. Trotter.
In conclusion, though we have handled the author not very delicately, still he has his very fine points. He shows the fallacy of the biological necessity of war idea, he shows the logic and biologic necessity of the pacifist type, etc. On the whole he has tried to be fair. He but demonstrates his own thesis that when reason is opposed by hard feeling the latter stands the chance of the proverbial snowball in extraearthly regions. The war has warped his judgment, made him indulge in unscientific reasoning by analogy. Had he the international viewpoint things would have fared better. His catering to the Parasites of his own social gregarious polity makes imperative, as said at the outset, that Socialists accept the challenge of the pseudo social psychologists and fight them on their own ground in the interest of internationalism.