terests. The evils of war are obvious
enough; could not the virtues of war, animal courage, discipline, and
self-knowledge, together with gaiety and enthusiasm, find some harmless
occasion for their development?

[Sidenote: Sport a civilised way of preserving it.]

Such a harmless simulacrum of war is seen in sport. The arduous and
competitive element in sport is not harmful, if the discipline involved
brings no loss of faculty or of right sensitiveness, and the rivalry no
rancour. In war states wish to be efficient in order to conquer, but in
sport men wish to prove their excellence because they wish to have it.
If this excellence does not exist, the aim is missed, and to discover
that failure is no new misfortune. To have failed unwittingly would have
been worse; and to recognise superiority in another is consistent with a
relatively good and honourable performance, so that even nominal failure
may be a substantial success. And merit in a rival should bring a
friendly delight even to the vanquished if they are true lovers of sport
and of excellence. Sport is a liberal form of war stripped of its
compulsions and malignity; a rational art and the expression of a
civilised instinct.

[Sidenote: Who shall found the universal commonwealth?]

The abolition of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by a
new collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest of
piratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for military
sanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by some
imperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romans
approached this ideal because their vast military power stood behind
their governors and praetors. Science and commerce might conceivably
resume that lost imperial function. If at the present day two or three
powerful governments could so far forget their irrational origin as to
renounce the right to occasional piracy and could unite in enforcing the
decisions of some international tribunal, they would thereby constitute
that tribunal the organ of a universal government and render war
impossible between responsible states. But on account of their
irrational basis all governments largely misrepresent the true interests
of those who live under them. They pursue conventional and captious ends
to which alone public energies can as yet be efficiently directed.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

[Sidenote: Eminence, once existing, gr