John Cowper Powys, The War and Culture (1914)

There is industrial immorality, and there is military immorality, just as there is industrial heroism and military heroism. Human nature remains human nature - that strange agglomeration of devotion and depravity, of animal lusts and saintly ascetism - and it seems as though it were destined to retain this paradoxical character to the end of its history. But meanwhile the conditions under which the inevitable "struggle for existence" rages are bound materially to change. Perfect human felicity is doubtless a pathetic illusion, but there is no reason why certain obvious abuses, certain obvious results of insane mismanagement, should not be removed. This is not idealism. It is common sense. War under modern conditions is such an abuse, such a piece of pure insanity; and to put an end to war were not to outrage the laws of nature by a stroke of monstrous ideality, it were simply to give a new direction to these laws by the use of common intelligence.