To Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Oxford, England. December 17, 1917
As for deaths and loss of capital, I don’t much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible? I am willing, almost glad, that the world should be poorer: I only wish the population too could become more sparse; and I am perfectly willing to live on a bread-ticket and a lodging-ticket and be known only by a number instead of a baptismal name, provided all this made an end of living on lies, and really cleared the political air. But I am afraid the catastrophe won’t be great enough for that, and that some false arrangement will be patched up—in spite of Lenin—so that we shall be very much as we were before. People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago. How else could I have lived for forty years in America?
All this won’t interest you, but since it is written I will let it go.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.