The Psychology of War-Mongering

God," said Voltaire's Quaker, "God, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers, cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two feet high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass's skin extended." The ass's skin has largely given place to the broadcast bray and the journalistic bellow; the effect remains the same. And the central problem for the psychologist is surely this: that while war is all but universally agreed to be an unacceptable form of human activity (and the waverers now have China to help to convince them), nevertheless we are faced with the daily possibility of an outburst, and with the certainty that at a word from their politicians the people will flock to the standards and prepare to do themselves what they are now execrating the Japanese for doing. How does this come about? How is it that the politicians, on the one hand, find themselves apparently impotent to prevent war? Is it sheer malevolence and guile; is it due simply to a peculiarly low grade of general intelligence; or is it a case of psychological maladjustment, a distressing complaint, but curable? On the other hand, is the consent of the populace to be attributed simply to the wiles of press and political propaganda, or is is due to psychological factors in the subjects themselves

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