INDIVIDUAL WORK FOR REFORM
difficult at other times. It is so difficult as to be practically
impossible except for those who have undergone systematic
training for that very purpose. It takes three to four
years of training to make a good soldier. It probably
takes at least as long to make a good non-violent resister,
capable of putting his principles into practice in any
circumstances, however horrible. The question of group
training has been fully discussed by Richard Gregg in his
Power of Non-Violence^ and it is therefore unnecessary for
me to repeat the discussion in this place. The psycho-
logical techniques for affecting the sources of the individual
will—techniques developed by the devotees of every
religion—are dealt with in a later chapter.
Trained individuals would perform two main functions.
First, it would be their business to keep the life of the
association at a higher level than the life of the surrounding
society, and in this way to hold up to that society a working
model of a superior type of social organization. Second,
they would have to 'go out into the world/ where their
trained capacities would be useful in allaying violence once
it had broken out and in organizing non-violent resistance
to domestic oppression and the preparation for and waging
of international war.
Groups of individuals pledged to take no part in any
future war already exist (e.g. The War Resisters* Inter-
national, The Peace Pledge Union); but their organization
is too loose and their membership too large and too widely
scattered for them to be considered as associations, in the
sense in which I have been using the word above. None
the less they can and do render very important services
to the cause for which all the reformers have always fought.
They are propagandists, first of all. In private conver-
sations, in speeches at public meetings, in pamphlets and
newspaper articles, their members preach the gospel of
non-violence, thus continuing and extending into non-
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