ficult wisdom is made easier by
training in an army, because the great forces of habit, example and
social suasion, are there enlisted in its service. But these natural
aids make it lose its conscious rationality, so that it ceases to be a
virtue except potentially; for to resist an impulse by force of habit or
external command may or may not be to follow the better course.

Besides fostering these rudimentary virtues the army gives the nation's
soul its most festive and flaunting embodiment. Popular heroes, stirring
episodes, obvious turning-points in history, commonly belong to military
life.

[Sidenote: They are splendid vices.]

Nevertheless the panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level on
which a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want of
refined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all
blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative
instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in
another's evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world
is the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is a
willing accomplice of that perversity in things who delights in
another's discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension of
plunging into danger without reason, or the idiot's pleasure in facing a
pure chance. To find joy in another's trouble is, as man is constituted,
not unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one's own
trouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man. These are
the chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has to
grow.

[Sidenote: Absolute value in strife.]

If war could be abolished and the defence of all interests intrusted to
courts of law, there would remain unsatisfied a primary and therefore
ineradicable instinct--a love of conflict, of rivalry, and of victory.
If we desire to abolish war because it tries to do good by doing harm,
we must not ourselves do an injury to human nature while trying to
smooth it out. Now the test and limit of all necessary reform is vital
harmony. No impulse can be condemned arbitrarily or because some other
impulse or group of interests is, in a Platonic way, out of sympathy
with it. An instinct can be condemned only if it prevents the
realisation of other instincts, and only in so far as it does so. War,
which has instinctive warrant, must therefore be transformed only in so
far as it does harm to other in