ABSTRACT
Uniformity between classes or between nations is not favourable to peace, except as it destroys units capable of action. There must be organic units at some level or there would be no potential moral agents or combatants; but similarity in these units, if they live in the same habitat, renders them rivals and therefore, in spite of their brotherly likeness to one another, involves them in war. The traveller passing from Northern France or Belgium into Germany, or from there into industrial England, sees absolutely the same type of animal, the same state of civilisation. Those frontiers are accidental and arbitrary; those recent and terrible battles seem unintelligible. If one of these industrial towns can be at peace with its next neighbour, within the political frontier, why should it go to war with an exactly similar town, only a little beyond? Ah, beyond, perhaps, these indistinguishable creatures speak a different language: which signifies that they are affiliated to a different government, and enlisted in different armies. Therefore they can go to war. Each town would go to war with its next neighbour also, upon occasion, if a common government did not suck up the fighting energies of both towns and enforce peace between them. And just as the similarity of those governments and of those nations, making them rivals, makes them enemies at heart, so the similarity of those twin towns would do, if each were an organic whole, capable of action and war. But the old independent boroughs have become administrative centres, ruled by prefects named by the government, and by laws passed by a parliament sitting at the capital; they must endure the tides of enterprise and population passively, without a thought of resistance, since they have no organ with which to resist. Remove those industrial regions from the domination of their respective governments, and place them under the irresistible police of some single power, and they would all prosper or wither together, like spears of wheat in the same field.
