Faith War and Polic Author:Gilbert Murray General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1917 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: HOW CAN WAR EVER BE RIGHT? (September, 1914) I Have all my life been an advocate of Peace. I hate war, not merely for its own cruelty and folly, but because it is the enemy of all the causes that I care for most, of social progress and good government and all friendliness and gentleness of life, as well as of art and learning and literature. I have spoken and presided at more meetings than I can remember for peace and arbitration and the promotion of international friendship. I opposed the policy of war in South Africa with all my energies, and have been either outspokenly hostile or inwardly unsympathetic towards almost every war that Great Britain has waged in my lifetime. If I may speak more personally, there is none of my own work into which I have put more intense feeling than into my translation of Euripides' "Trojan Women," the first great denunciation of war in European literature. I do not regret any word that I have spoken or written in the cause of Peace, nor have I changed, so far as I know, any opinion that I have previously held on this subject. Yet I believe firmly that we were right to declare war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and that to have remained neutral in that crisis would have been a failure in public duty. A heavy responsibility -- there is no doubt of it -- lies upon Great Britain. Our allies, France and Russia, Belgium and Serbia, had no choice; the war was, in various degrees, forced on all of them. We only, after deliberately 'surveying the situation, when Germany would have preferred for the moment not to fight us, of our free will declared war. And we were right....« less