when the conquering warrior returned to his home, with victims chained
to his chariot wheels, and braying trumpets.

When property became an appreciable factor in life, warfare took on a
new significance. What was at first mere destruction, in the effort to
defend or obtain some hunting ground or pasture; and, always, to secure
the female; now coalesced with the acquisitive instinct, and the long
black ages of predatory warfare closed in upon the world.

Where the earliest form exterminated, the later enslaved, and took
tribute; and for century upon century the "gentleman adventurer," i.e.,
the primitive male, greatly preferred to acquire wealth by the simple
old process of taking it, to any form of productive industry.

We have been much misled as to warfare by our androcentric literature.
With a history which recorded nothing else; a literature which praised
and an art which exalted it; a religion which called its central power
"the God of Battles"--never the God of Workshops, mind you!--with
a whole complex social structure man-prejudiced from center to
circumference, and giving highest praise and honor to the Soldier; it is
still hard for its to see what warfare really is in human life.

Someday we shall have new histories written, histories of world
progress, showing the slow uprising, the development, the interservice
of the nations; showing the faint beautiful dawn of the larger spirit of
world-consciousness, and all its benefitting growth.

We shall see people softening, learning, rising; see life lengthen with
the possession of herds, and widen in rich prosperity with agriculture.
Then industry, blossoming, fruiting, spreading wide; art, giving
light and joy; the intellect developing with companionship and human
intercourse; the whole spreading tree of social progress, the trunk of
which is specialized industry, and the branches of which comprise every
least and greatest line of human activity and enjoyment. This growing
tree, springing up wherever conditions of peace and prosperity gave it a
chance, we shall see continually hewed down to the very root by war.

To the later historian will appear throughout the ages, like some
Hideous Fate, some Curse, some predetermined check, to drag down all our
hope and joy and set life forever at its first steps over again, this
Red Plague of War.

The instinct of combat, between males, worked advantageously so long
as it did not injure the female or the young. It i