Survey of International Affairs 1928

Survey of International Affairs 1928

Arnold J. Toynbee

Oxford University

On the principle that every organism has its vspccific diseases, and every soul its besetting sins, a historian might judge that the institution of War was the deadly disease and the sin against the Holy Ghost of human societies in process of civilization. By the year 1928, such experimental societies had been trying and failing to pass the level of Primitive Man, rising a little and then falling back again, coming into existence and passing away, for something like six thousand years ; and it would a])pear from the records of the past that almost every defeat of these Sisyphean labours was traceable to the institution of War as its ultimate cause.

Why had this profoundly important fact attracted relatively little attention and stimulated relatively little effort to eradicate the fatal institution from the life of Mankind? In the first ...