SOCIAL REFORM AND VIOLENCE
such totally dissimilar results as social justice and peace
between nations.
Violence cannot lead to real progress unless, by way
of compensation and reparation, it is followed by non-
violence, by acts of justice and good will. In such cases,
however, it is the compensatory behaviour that achieves
the progress, not the violence which that behaviour was
intended to compensate. For example, in so far as the
Roman conquest of Gaul and the British conquest of
India resulted in progress (and it is hard to say whether
they did, and quite impossible to guess whether an equal
advance might not have been achieved without those
conquests), that progress was entirely due to the com-
pensatory behaviour of Roman and British administrators
after the violence was over. Where compensatory good
behaviour does not follow the original act of violence, as
was the case in the countries conquered by the Turks,
no real progress is achieved. (In cases where violence is
pushed to its limits and the victims are totally exterminated,
the slate is wiped clean and the perpetrators of violence
are free to begin afresh on their own account. This was
the way in which, rejecting Perm's humaher alternative,
the English setders in North America solved the Red
Indian problem. Abominable in itself, this policy is
practicable only in underpopulated countries.)
The longer violence has been used, the more difficult
do the users find it to perform compensatory acts of non-
violence. A tradition of violence is formed; men come
to accept a scale of values according to which acts of
violence are reckoned heroic and virtuous. When this
happens, as it happened, for example, with the Vikings
and the Tartars, as the dictators seem at present to be
trying to make it happen with the Germans, Italians and
Russians, there is small prospect that the effects of violence
will be made good by subsequent acts of justice and kindness.