Kellogg and Starr Jordan in America. The case is indeed
overwhelming. The lives destroyed in war are nearly all males, thus
disturbing the sex equilibrium of the population; they are in the prime
of life, at the age of greatest fecundity; and they are picked from a
list out of which from 20 to 30 per cent. have been rejected for
physical unfitness. It seems to be proved that the children born in
France during the Napoleonic wars were poor and undersized--30
millimetres below the normal height. War combined with religious
celibacy to ruin Spain. 'Castile makes men and wastes them,' said a
Spanish writer. 'This sublime and terrible phrase sums up the whole of
Spanish history.' Schiller was right; 'Immer der Krieg verschlingt die
besten.' We in England have suffered from this drain in the past; we
shall suffer much more in the next generation.

We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.

We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full.

Aggressive patriotism is thus condemned by common sense and the verdict
of history no less than by morality. We are entitled to say to the
militarists what Socrates said to Polus:

This doctrine of yours has now been examined and found
wanting. And this doctrine alone has stood the test--that we
ought to be more afraid of doing than of suffering wrong;
and that the prime business of every man [and nation] is not
to seem good, but to be good, in all private and public
dealings.

If the nations would render something more than lip-service to this
principle, the abolition of war would be within sight; for, as Ruskin
says, echoing the judgment of the Epistle of St. James, 'The first
reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that
the majority of persons, high and low, in all European countries, are
thieves.' But it must be remembered that, in spite of the proverb, it
takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep
to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains
of a different opinion.

Our own conversion to pacificism, though sincere, is somewhat recent.
Our literature does not reflect it. Bacon is frankly militarist:

Above all, for emp