the most ideal part of what we now own
together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood
poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in
cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar
possession, and not one man or women would vote for the proposition.
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged
solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one,
only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now
thought permissible.

It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men,
and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and
possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most
exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected,
and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to
mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to
plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the
love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror
is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is
the _strong_ life; it is life _in extremis_; war-taxes are the only
ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how
Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector _killed_. No detail of the
wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story.
Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism--war for war's
sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, because
of the irrationality of it all--save for the purpose of making
"history"--and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization
in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.

Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves,
excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war for
example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where
the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their
lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in
full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied
Matthew Arnold. "The powerful exact what they can," said the
Athenians, "and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say
t