each and every possible consequence. It is the
final bouquet of life's fireworks. The born soldiers want it hot and
actual. The non-combatants want it in the background, and always as an
open possibility, to feed imagination on and keep excitement going.
Its clerical and historical defenders fool themselves when they talk as
they do about it. What moves them is not the blessings it has won for
us, but a vague religious exaltation. War is human nature at its
uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament.
Society would rot without the mystical blood-payment.

We do ill, I think, therefore, to talk much of universal peace or of a
general disarmament. We must go in for preventive medicine, not for
radical cure. We must cheat our foe, circumvent him in detail, not try
to change his nature. In one respect war is like love, though in no
other. Both leave us intervals of rest; and in the intervals life goes
on perfectly well without them, though the imagination still dallies
with their possibility. Equally insane when once aroused and under
headway, whether they shall be aroused or not depends on accidental
circumstances. How are old maids and old bachelors made? Not by
deliberate vows of celibacy, but by sliding on from year to year with
no sufficient matrimonial provocation. So of the nations with their
wars. Let the general possibility of war be left open, in Heaven's
name, for the imagination to dally with. Let the soldiers dream of
killing, as the old maids dream of marrying.

But organize in every conceivable way the practical machinery for
making each successive chance of war abortive. Put peace men in power;
educate the editors and statesmen to responsibility. How beautifully
did their trained responsibility in England make the Venezuela incident
abortive! Seize every pretext, however small, for arbitration methods,
and multiply the precedents; foster rival excitements, and invent new
outlets for heroic energy; and from one generation to another the
chances are that irritation will grow less acute and states of strain
less dangerous among the nations. Armies and navies will continue, of
course, and fire the minds of populations with their potentialities of
greatness. But their officers will find that somehow or other, with no
deliberate intention on any one's part, each successive "incident" has
managed to evaporate and to lead nowhere, and that the thought of what
might have been