be the
very last. The final war will be the greatest and the most terrible of
all, just as the last of the great saurians was the most gigantic. Our
technique has swelled war to its extremest limits, and will then slay
war.[55]

* * * * *

At bottom, behind its fearsome exterior, the war monster lacks
confidence, and feels that its life is threatened. Never before have
warmongers appealed, as they appeal to-day, to such a compost of
arguments, mystico-scientifico-politico-murderous, to justify the
existence of war. No one would dream of such arguments were it not that
the days of war are numbered, were it not that the most enthusiastic
disciples of war are shaken in their faith. But Nicolai is ruthless in
attack, and part of his book is a pitiless satire upon all the sophisms
wherewith in our folly we attempt to justify war--the executioner's axe
poised over our heads. These sophisms are: the sophism that war is a
biological means for ensuring the survival of the fittest; the sophism
of defensive war; the sophism of the humanisation of war; the sophism of
the alleged solidarity created by war, the so-called party truce; the
sophism of the fatherland--for the fatherland, in practical application,
becomes the narrowly conceived and artificially constructed political
state; the sophism of race; and so on.

I should have been glad to quote numerous extracts from these ironical
and severely critical passages. Of exceptional interest are the
paragraphs in which he castigates the most impudent and the most
flourishing of current sophisms, the sophism of race, for whose sake
thousands of poor simpletons of all nations are slaughtering one
another. He writes as follows:

"The race problem is one of the most melancholy chapters in the history
of human thought. Nowhere else has knowledge, supposedly impartial,
consciously or unconsciously placed itself so unscrupulously at the
service of ambitious and self-seeking politicians. Indeed, it might
almost be said that the various theories of race have never been put
forward save with the object of advancing some claim or other. The
writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Anglo-German, afford perhaps
the most repulsive example. As we all know, this author has endeavoured
to claim as German everyone of outstanding importance in the history of
the world, Christ and Dante not excepted. It would be strange if this
demagogic example found so [many] im