So long as we go on cursing War, we shall go on encouraging War. It is a perfectly simple and even self-evident truth, though some would still treat it as a paradox. The only possible way of discouraging war is to curse the man who makes it. The fact would be quite obvious even where the case is less clear--as in calamities that can sometimes be accidents. It would be obvious if men confined themselves to denouncing fire, when they ought to be denouncing arson. If one man burned down another man's house in broad daylight, it would be a plain and positive advantage to the incendiary that we should confine ourselves to abusing the conflagration. He would be delighted if the neighbours would only stand in a ring round the burning house, and bellow and wail in a sort of chorus, "O Fire, atrocious Fire, cruel and devouring element, what graceful architecture and valuable furniture are you not ruthlessly consuming; how many harmless human lives have you not destroyed; how many women have been burnt in you as witches; how many saints and philosophers have been slain by you as heretics; how ruinous you are when you race over a prairie, and how fatal and indiscriminate when you attack the crowds in a theatre! Diabolical and abominable Fire, we curse the name of Prometheus, who brought thee not from heaven but rather from hell! Let us pass a unanimous resolution abolishing Fire." That is precisely the way in which some people think about War; but it is obvious that if they talked like that about fire, there would be more fires and not fewer. While the chorus was being chanted and the resolution passed, the practical professor of arson would make his escape and begin to set fire to another house. There would be nothing to stop him from reducing all civilisation to a field of ashes.

There are some things more important than peace, and one of them is the dignity of human nature. It is a humiliation of humanity that humanity should ever give up war solely through fear, especially through fear of the mere machines that humanity itself has made. We all see the absurdity of modern armaments. It is a grotesque end for the great European story that each of us should keep on stuffing pistols into his pockets until he falls down with the weight of them. But it is still worse that we should only be friends because we are too nervous to stand the noise of a pistol. Let the man stop the pistol by all means. But do not let the pistol stop the man. Civilised man has created a cruel machinery which he now, it may be, finds bad for his soul. Then let civilised man save his soul and abandon his machinery. But the Bloch theory does not really abandon the machinery at all. It hangs the machinery in terrorem over the head of all humanity to frighten them from going to war for any cause, just or unjust. Man is cowed into submission by his own clockwork. I would sooner be ruled by cats and dogs. They, at any rate, are our fellow-creatures, not merely our creatures. I would have any war, however long and horrible, sooner than such a horrible peace. I would run any risk rather than submit to such a spiritual indignity as that man dare not, for the most crying justice or the most urgent chivalry, turn one of his own handles. War is an absolute calamity; so be it. Then let man silence his guns; but, in the name of human honour, do not let his guns silence him.

But Chesterton was no pacifist. He was the champion of a people's right to live free under the government of their choosing. So when World War I broke out, he became on of England's strongest critics of German militarism. He warned, with chilling accuracy, that if Germany did not suffer a telling defeat in this war, it would launch another aggressive war within two or three decades. In 1932 he would go further, predicting that the next war would break out precisely as it did, over a border dispute between Germany and Poland.

Chesterton was also a harsh critic of another once popular idea, Teutonism, a belief that the races of Northern Europe, particularly the Germanic races were particularly talented at building civilization. That, he said, was nonsense. Chesterton's open hostile to then fashionable ideas about race and eugenics make him one of Nazism's earliest foes.