ENDS AND MEANS
for peace.* The truth is, of course, that one can never
have something for nothing. The voters in every country
desire peace. But hardly any of them are prepared to pay
the price of peace. In the modern world the * things that
make for peace' are disarmament, unilateral if necessary;
renunciation of exclusive empires; abandonment of the
policy of economic nationalism; determination in all
circumstances to use the methods of non-violence; system-
atic training in such methods. How many of the so-called
peace-lovers of the world love these indispensable con-
ditions of peace? Few indeed. The business of private
individuals is to persuade their fellows that the things that
make for peace are not merely useful as means to certain
political ends, but are also valuable as methods for training
individuals in the supreme art of non-attachment.
Individuals can work either alone or in association with
other like-minded individuals. The work of the solitary
individual is mainly preliminary to the work of the indi-
viduals in association. The solitary individual can under-
take one or both* of two important tasks: the task of
intellectual clarification; the task of dissemination. He
can be a theorist, a sifter of ideas, a builder of systems;
or he can be a propagandist either of his own or others'
ideas. To put it crudely, he can be either a writer or a
public speaker. Both these tasks are useful and even
indispensable, but both, I repeat, are preliminary to the
greater and more difficult task which must be accomplished
by individuals in association. Their task is to act upon
the ideas of the solitary writer or speaker, to make practical
applications of what were merely theories, to construct
here and now small working-models of the better society
imagined by the prophets; to educate themselves here and
now into specimens of those ideal individuals described by
the founders of religions. Success in such a venture is
doubly valuable. If the success is on a large scale, the
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