hat sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians
reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of
their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made
by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but
inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong
as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you
why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you." Well,
the Meleans still refused, and their town was taken. "The Athenians,"
Thucydides quietly says, "thereupon put to death all who were of
military age and made slaves of the women and children. They then
colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their
own."

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of
power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There
was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his generals
and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times is
incredible. When Rome finally conquered Greece, Paulus Aemilius, was
told by the Roman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by
"giving" them the old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy cities
and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves.
How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the
senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was "the noblest
Roman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of
Philippi he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and
Thessalonica to ravage, if they win the fight.

Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. We
inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism
that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.
Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than
this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity
into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed
it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of
wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no
ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with
bluff but could n't stay there, the military tension was too much for
them. In 1898 our people had read the word "war" in letters three
inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politic