ike for heart and strike for brain,
And sweep the _beast_ away.

And let no feeble pity
Your sacred arms restrain;
This is God's mighty moment
To make an end of Spain!

It is our purpose to endeavour to make an end of the immoral
inspiration behind this profane piffle by speaking out our mind on the
subject of war as viewed from the standpoint of ethics.

By war we understand the appeal to _might_ to decide a question of
_right_ between two or more civilised peoples, and of war thus defined
I say that it is the great surviving infamy[1] of our unmoral past, the
persistence in us of animal instincts, of the ape and tiger which
should long since have died out. That man, in the childhood of the
world, should have decided questions of justice by an appeal to brute
force is only what we should expect. The laws of life, which are laws
of development, necessarily presuppose the imperfect before the
perfect, the animal as a preparation for the human. As Immanuel Kant
puts it in a sentence which flashes the light over the whole panorama
of existence, "the _cosmic_ evolution of Nature is continued in the
_historic_ development of humanity and completed in the _moral_
perfection of the individual". This is the synthesis of the greatest
of the masters of modern philosophy. The non-moral cosmos makes way
for a process of moral human development, which is consummated in the
perfection of each individual man. Here is the _Alpha_ and _Omega_ of
all existence.

Now, warfare, or the invocation of might to settle right, was as
natural an accompaniment of earlier conditions as theft or cannibalism.
But is it not obvious that with the disappearance of other unmoral
ideals of the past, we have a right to expect, and to demand, that the
last and crowning infamy of wholesale and systematised manslaughter,
called war, should cease also? The humanity which has got rid of
slavery in all civilised countries, which has now through England's
instrumentality succeeded in destroying its last strongholds on the
Upper Nile, will also ultimately get rid of war. The manhood of the
race, which in this country has long since put down the immorality of
duelling as a means of settling private differences, will indubitably
assert itself elsewhere to the final overthrow of warfare as a means of
deciding public disputes. The great reform is in the air. It is
everywhere except in the pulpits of Christendom and the "yellow
press"