by Reginald Reynolds

Editor’s Preface: Reginald Reynolds (1905-1958) was a British journalist and general secretary of the London based No More War Movement (1933-37). He was a friend and supporter of Gandhi, and a staunch critic of British imperialism in India, which he articulated in his controversial The White Sahibs in India [1937], and also in Why India [1942]. During WWII he was a conscientious objector, and served in a mobile hospital unit. Reynolds was a great admirer of the American Quaker preacher, John Woolman, whose works he edited for a new English edition, and whom he cites below. See the notes at the end for archival references, and further information. This is the unpublished text of a speech delivered by Reynolds at the seventh triennial WRI conference, Braunschweig, Germany, in July of 1951. JG

Reginald Reynolds c. 1930; courtesy swarthmore.edu

“There is no way to peace, peace is the way.” These words, which were first brought to my attention in a letter received recently, and which I have since seen in an article, have been ringing in my mind ever since I arrived at this conference, and frankly what I am going to say to you now is merely the possibly confused reflections which have been going on in my mind since I read these words.

To me they express, in the most terse and epigrammatic manner, a philosophy, which I have been evolving myself over a period of years. “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”, and I believe that pacifism, as I understand the word, is an attempt to realize, in terms of life, the meaning of that simple epigram.

We are asked continually by non-pacifists, whether we hope, by our methods and by our movement, to prevent war. I don’t know what answer you give – I always say “of course we hope, but we do not expect.” And we do not base our belief in nonviolence on any calculation regarding the possibility of stopping war by a method of war resistance.

If I believed in war, and if in good faith I joined up in any army, what would anybody think of me if before I put on that uniform, before I gave my allegiance to a military force, I asked whether it was going to succeed, whether anybody could guarantee that my army would win, and incidentally that I personally would not be hurt? If I were worth calling a man, the one and only question that would matter would be the question of loyalty.

We stand here, I hope, as a testimony to a spiritual loyalty, not, as I believe, saying “We shall succeed” but saying “whether we succeed or fail, this is the way we shall take”. I am not a great admirer of Martin Luther, but there are words of his, which I shall always remember. As I have them in English, they were, “Here I stand; I can do no other”.

“I can do no other” is the expression of my pacifist faith, and I think the sooner pacifists get it quite clear in their own minds that pacifism is a faith, and not a series of elaborate calculations and promises which we are incapable of guaranteeing, the better and healthier for our pacifism.

We are in some sense making history this morning in our International by having with us the press, and I think it is just as well that the press should know our weakness, as well as what we hope is our strength. Let them know that our weakness is to pander to other peoples’ standards, to accept their valuation of the pacifist movement, and to try to meet their arguments with the kind of arguments. which we think will hold them. That is not consistent, as I understand it, with a pacifist faith which is not concerned with the kind of questions which we are generally asked.

With that saying which I gave you at the beginning I couple in my own mind another saying, one of Gandhi’s, which I never heard from his lips but after his death. When some of us, 18 months ago or more, visited India to attend the World Pacifist Conference, we were told certain sayings of Gandhi by intimate followers of his, and one that stuck in my mind more than any other was this: “The greatest evil is not violence, it is fear”. And again, speaking both to pacifists and non-pacifists, I would beg them to consider the importance of that statement. There is the violence for which I personally have not only a predilection or a natural tendency, which I try hard to curb, but in certain circumstances a sympathy. If evil ever approaches to good, it is when men, stung to indignation, not by their own wrongs but by the wrongs of other people, act and speak violently. I do not say that it is right, I say that it is understandable, I say it is better than apathy, that by comparison with those who condone the evil in this world the indignation, however violent, of the reformer, is something which arouses my imagination, partly because something of it stirs in my own heart.

The fear that keeps men silent when there is wrong, fear that creates panic – even, I find, sometimes in our own ranks – so that people cannot see the big thing, the ultimate ideal, the spiritual thing for which we stand, because this overhanging danger of war obsesses their minds, that is the bad thing, and if we were to look into the roots of violence we should find that nine times out of ten violence itself was merely a product of fear.

We have in the world today a situation in which, out of sheer fear, the world is apparently rushing towards the catastrophe which it dreads, because nobody has the courage so far to say “Well, we are prepared to take the risk, whatever that risk may be, of being completely unarmed”. And so it is because people are afraid that they move on to catastrophe.

I am a Christian of a sort. Like St. Francis I can say, but with much better reason, that I am unworthy to be called one, but I use the word in the sense that I think most of you understand it. I am a member of the Society of Friends, trying to live a Christian life, and I believe quite simply in the words that perfect love casts out fear.

I believe that the one answer to the world’s fear, to the world’s panic, is to be found in something positive, and here I want to say a word about the apparently negative position of pacifism in the world today. There are those in countries where there is no provision for conscientious objectors, where they are not recognized, where to refuse military service is an act of supreme courage, and for whom this position is no negative one. No one can say of those, in such countries as Italy, who refuse military service and take the consequence, that they are taking up a purely negative position. The young man faced by the alternatives which confront him in such countries as those requires a faith, a positive belief, a love of humanity which is impossible to describe, but which is easy to imagine, if he must and will accept what lies before him when he refuses military service.

Now take by contrast those of us who live in countries where the position is relatively easy, where there is no conscription or where, as in England, the provisions are comparatively liberal. Or again take the position of those who by reason of age or sex are not immediately concerned with conscription.

Here I am tempted to give you the parallel of the history of the Society of Friends. In its inception, in the 17^th century, the Society faced great persecution. At no period since then has the spirit of that Society, its courage, its quality, been higher. In the 18^th century persecution had practically ended – entirely indeed in most countries – and for one reason and another the Quakers had become a wealthy and prosperous community. At no point in the history of the Society was its spiritual level lower. One or two people stand out as startling exceptions, people who did pull the Society together, but that is the general picture one gets in a study of the history of the Society of Friends.

What is the connection between that and what I was just saying about the conditions under which some of us live? Precisely this, that the great danger to any ideal, and to those who profess that ideal, is not persecution, it is security. Those who are faced with persecution are on their mettle the whole time, they work under conditions which make it impossible for them to continue for one moment unless their spiritual quality is absolutely tip-top.

Those who are not facing persecution, without that hammering of danger, of difficulty, of persecution upon their doors, they are the people who are in real danger, and instead of saying “them” I should say “we”, because I happen to come from one of the countries where things are relatively easy – where in my own case I have, so far is I know, passed the age where I am likely to be bothered by the conscription authorities again. And it is the danger of the people who are not being keyed up by active persecution, not seeing what is their positive duty, that concerns me more than anything else.

In my studies of the life of John Woolman, the finest flower of Quakerism, and in my personal opportunities of studying the life and works of Mahatma Gandhi – both men of peace who contributed enormously to our knowledge of the way of peace, what struck me about both was that they were not people who had to wait until persecution hammered on their doors, they were not people who had to be kept alive by being faced with external crises, they were people who went out and looked for the dragon and slew it – if I may use such a military metaphor – they were men who knew that peace is something to be lived, and the way to live peace is in seeking out the many evils of this world and finding ways of peaceful solution by peaceful resistance, by persuasion, by all the methods that are open to those who follow the way of nonviolence and truth to put right a world that has gone wrong

The world today is now worse, on the whole, than it was in Woolman’s days or Gandhi’s, but the principles that men like these showed us (and they are only two out of many) remain with us.

The thought that I want to leave you with this morning is that we are primarily not a body of war-resisters, or objectors; we call ourselves war-resisters, the name does not matter, though I do think it is important that we ourselves at least should have some idea what we mean by names, and should not be misled by them. We are not primarily a body of people who object to something. As I understand it, our objection is incidental to the things that we affirm. If you affirm the brotherhood of man, it stands as an inevitable rider of that proposition that you reject war. If you affirm the wholeness of humanity, it follows that you reject all that divides man form man in strife and in anger, but the affirmation comes first, and I believe that our job – particularly those who are not faced with the challenge of conscription, those many of us to whom it does not come at this moment as a personal challenge – is to be found in the personal ways, in the ways of building a Society, beginning with ourselves, which fulfils the principles of nonviolence and truth. Peace is the way.

Reference: IISG/WRI Archive Box 5: Folder 2, Subfolder 2.

EDITOR’S NOTE: With thanks to and courtesy of WRI/London and especially to their director Christine Schweitzer.