man a peaceful animal any more than we can hope to breed setters
from South African wild dogs. But the conditions of life are gradually
changing, and the very madness which has made Europe into a huge barrack
may work its own cure. The burden will probably grow so intolerable that
the most embruted of citizens will ask themselves why they bear it, and
a rapid revolution may undo the growth of centuries. The scientific men
point to the huge warfare that goes on from the summit of the Himalayas
to the depths of the ocean slime, and they ask how men can be exempt
from the universal struggle for existence. But it is by no means certain
that the pressure of population in the case of man will always force on
struggles--at any rate, struggles that can be decided only by death and
agony. Little by little we are learning something of the laws that
govern our hitherto mysterious existence, and we have good hopes that by
and by our race may learn to be mutually helpful, so that our span of
life may be passed with as much happiness as possible. Men will strive
against each other, but the striving will not be carried on to an
accompaniment of slaughter and torture. There are keen forms of
competition which, so far from being painful, give positive pleasure to
those who engage in them; there are triumphs which satisfy the victor
without mortifying the vanquished; and, in spite of the indiscreet
writers who have called forth this Essay, I hold that such harmless
forms of competition will take the place of the brutal strife that adds
senselessly to the sum of human woe. Our race has outgrown so many forms
of brutality, so many deliberate changes have taken place in the course
of even two thousand years, that the final change which shall abolish
war is almost certain to come. We find that about one thousand nine
hundred years ago a polished gentleman like Julius Caesar gravely
congratulates himself on the fact that his troops destroyed in cold
blood forty thousand people--men, women, and children. No man in the
civilized world dare do such a deed now, even if he had the mind for the
carnage. The feeling with which we read Caesar's frigid recital measures
the arc of improvement through which we have passed. May the improvement
go on! We can continue to progress only through knowledge; if our
people--our women especially--are wantonly warlike, then our action will
be wantonly warlike; knowledge alone can save us from the guilt of
blood, an