he dull and violent that war "braces"
comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler
tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It
is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be
resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the
world.

This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military
type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In
England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than
among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising
and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the
professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of
German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in
Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect
specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon
Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this
hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.

Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in
studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their
circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive
and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the
levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious
thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer,
spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would
probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional
militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of
both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the
vituperation of the Hebrew prophets--those models for infinite mischief.

The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees.
We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance,
and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must
prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange
people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our
own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see
objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real
strength in our occasional complicities.

The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of
English and French