ed, if we think how many things beside the
frontiers of states the wars of history have decided, we must feel some
respectful awe, in spite of all the horrors. Our actual civilization,
good and bad alike, has had past wars for its determining condition.
Great mindedness among the tribes of men has always meant the will
to prevail, and all the more, so if prevailing included slaughtering
and being slaughtered. Rome, Paris, England, Brandenburg,
Piedmont,--possibly soon Japan,--along with their arms have their
traits of character and habits of thought prevail among their conquered
neighbors. The blessings we actually enjoy, such as they are, have
grown up in the shadow of the wars of antiquity. The various ideals
were backed by fighting wills, and when neither would give way, the God
of battles had to be the arbiter. A shallow view this, truly; for who
can say what might have prevailed if man had ever been a reasoning and
not a fighting animal? Like dead men, dead causes tell no tales, and
the ideals that went under in the past, along with all the tribes that
represented them, find to-day no recorder, no explainer, no defender.

But apart from theoretic defenders, and apart from every soldierly
individual straining at the leash and clamoring for opportunity, war
has an omnipotent support in the form of our imagination. Man lives
_by_ habits indeed, but what he lives _for_ is thrills and excitements.
The only relief from habit's tediousness is periodical excitement.
From time immemorial wars have been, especially for non-combatants, the
supremely thrilling excitement. Heavy and dragging at its end, at its
outset every war means an explosion of imaginative energy. The dams of
routine burst, and boundless prospects open. The remotest spectators
share the fascination of that awful struggle now in process on the
confines of the world. There is not a man in this room, I suppose, who
doesn't buy both an evening and a morning paper, and first of all
pounce on the war column.

A deadly listlessness would come over most men's imagination of the
future if they could seriously be brought to believe that never again
in _soecula soeculorum_ would a war trouble human history. In such a
stagnant summer afternoon of a world, where would be the zest or
interest?

This is the constitution of human nature which we have to work against.
The plain truth is that people _want_ war. They want it anyhow; for
itself, and apart from