ary
affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil
conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the
progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house
appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty
years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly
heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house
of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory
places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle
or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to
those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a
use now for such superannuated things.

3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.

What is the meaning of war in life?

War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with
the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between
animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized
in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also
a co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and
development within the war-making group.

War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as
between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing
social group. Through war and military organization, and through war and
military organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.

This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal
development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable
condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more
vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and
make the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker
individual must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That
means in practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the
latter until some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that
killing is invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the
beasts for food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue
of its replacement by new forms of competition. With the development
of primitive war we have such a replacement. The competition becomes
a competition to serve and rule in the group, the stronger take the
leadership and the larger share of li