For a time during the early settlement of this country peace and goodwill prevailed, only to be followed later by violent and relentless warfare.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.
It is to be observed that every case of war averted is a gain in general, for it helps to form a habit of peace, and community habits long continued become standards of conduct.
This bloody past suggests to us that enemies cease hostilities only when they are battered enough to acknowledge that there is no hope in victory - and thus that further resistance means only useless sacrifice.
Peace can be promoted by the limitation of arms and by the creation of the instrumentality for peaceful settlement of controversies. But it will become a reality only through self-restraint and active effort in friendliness and helpfulness.
The limitation upon this mode of promoting peace lies in the fact that it consists in an appeal to the civilized side of man, while war is the product of forces proceeding from man's original savage nature.
Understandably, no peace can sustained when people continue to suffer from hunger, lack of jobs, lack of basic public services - and most of all - lack of opportunity or hope.
Peace, so elusive in the past many decades, now finally prevails all over the country.
Moreover, if the territorial state is to continue as the last word in the development of society, then war is inevitable.
This is an era of violent peace.