ile the danger of death, to a brave man, is rather a spur
and a pleasing excitement than a terror. A military class is therefore
always recalling, foretelling, and meditating war; it fosters artificial
and senseless jealousies toward other governments that possess armies;
and finally, as often as not, it precipitates disaster by bringing about
the objectless struggle on which it has set its heart.

[Sidenote: Pugnacity human.]

These natural phenomena, unintelligently regarded as anomalies and
abuses, are the appanage of war in its pristine and proper form. To
fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they
will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because
they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in
opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked
at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for a
reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior
despises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonable
conflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and
consequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and
for victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor. If
fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct
could never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few men
can live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beasts
of prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there are
diligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no good
fruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes does
so is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.

[Sidenote: Barrack-room philosophy.]

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. There
are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race
decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this
shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its
industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be
governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to
breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought
about the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered;
it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being
descended