lians, New Zealanders, Canadians and
Indians in the present campaign, I should reply that they are actuated
by devotion not to the Empire but to England, not to the Company but to
the Chairman of the Company. This may be a quibble, but I think the
distinction is real. Anyhow, I leave it at that, as the point has no
primary relevance.]

[Footnote 15: See below, Chapter IV, Sec. 5.]

[Footnote 16: The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W.
N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control,
has explained that the report which we published of his speech is
unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith.
This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated
the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the
danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing
'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure
which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think
that Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the
country?"--_The Evening Standard_, July 26, 1915.]

Sec. 4

The "Moral Test"

The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which
character is proved--_ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum_--is that
generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without
disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique
reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something
fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some
psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform
advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin
were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a
militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in _Kim_, in _Puck of
Pook's Hill_ and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his
short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic;
and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a
disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists.
In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian,
finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or
the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to
its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the
existence of evil and pain. It is certai