pulse. He knows that
it is expensive to fight, that it is dangerous, and that it is wrong;
but when he is provoked, he fights. The characteristics of the average
man are the characteristics of society. We have not yet outgrown the
mob.

Interwoven with this impulsive temperament and associated with some of
the most cherished affections of the human heart is the spirit of war,
developed by thousands of generations of ancestral conflict and passed
on to us as a heritage to be rooted out of our nature before we shall
realize in its fullness the ideal for which we strive. Mortal conflict
sanctified by religion, devastation idealized by literature, pillage
justified by patriotism, fellow-destruction ennobled by
self-sacrifice--these form a complex of contradictory emotions from
which men are as yet unable to unravel the one essential
characteristic of war; namely, the attempt to dispense justice in a
trial by battle, and make it stand out in its revealed inconsistency,
dissociated from its traditional concomitants of which it is neither
part nor parcel. The romance of knighthood and chivalry still appeals
to the human heart, notwithstanding the fact that war, love, and
religion, the knight's creed, are an inconsistent combination. Most
men can be made to see this in their minds, but cannot be made to feel
it in their souls. Many old Civil War veterans, who would not consent
for their sons to volunteer in the Spanish-American War, would have
gone themselves had they been able. Some did go. To men so disposed it
is useless to talk of the horrors of war. Give us a just grievance;
let some competent enthusiast inflame this passion with a war cry like
"Remember the Maine," "Fifty-four forty or fight," "Liberty or death,"
and, reenforced by the animal inherent in man, it will arouse popular
demonstrations devoid of all reason, creating a force that cannot be
controlled by a cold, calculating intellect. Can you listen to a bugle
call on a clear, still night without a quickening of the pulse as
there flashes through your soul a suggestion of all past history with
its marshaling hosts and heroic deeds? Can you see a military parade
without a suggestion of "Dixie" and the Star Spangled Banner, or
feeling your bosom swell with patriotic pride? This association may
be, and doubtless is, a delusion, but it is a delusion developed and
fortified by thousands of years of custom and precedent and it would
be contrary to the history of human