cause dangers to other states. The greatest ambition of a modern emperor is still to be commemorated as a 'Mehrer des Reichs.' Capitalism, by separating the idea of property from any necessary connexion with landed estate, and democracy, by denying the whole theory on which dynastic wars of conquest are based, have both contributed powerfully to check this, perhaps the worst kind of war. It would, however, be a great error to suppose that the instinct of acquisitiveness, in its old and barbarous form, has lost its hold upon even the most civilised nations. When an old-fashioned brigand appears, and puts himself at the head of his nation, he becomes at once a popular hero. By any rational standard of morality, few greater scoundrels have lived than Frederick the Great and Napoleon I. But they are still names to conjure with. Both were men of singularly lucid intellect and entirely medieval ambitions. Their great achievement was to show how under modern conditions aggressive war may be carried on without much loss (except in human life) to the aggressor. They tore up all the conventions which regulated the conduct of warfare, and reduced it to sheer brigandage and terrorism. And now after a hundred years we see these methods deliberately revived by the greatest military power in the world, and applied with the same ruthlessness and with an added pedantry which makes them more inhuman. The perpetrators of the crime calculated quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse. It must, indeed, be a bad cause that cannot count on the support of the large majority of the people at the beginning of a war. Pugnacity, greed, mere excitement, the contagion of a crowd, will fill the streets of almost any capital with a shouting and jubilant mob on the day after a war has been declared. And yet the motives which we have enumerated are plainly atavistic and pathological. They belong to a mental condition which would conduct an individual to the prison or the gallows. We do not argue seriously whether the career of the highwayman or burglar is legitimate and desirable; and it is impossible to maintain that what is disgraceful for the individual is creditable for the state. And apart from the consideration that predatory patriotism deforms its own idol and makes it hateful in the eyes of the world, subsequent history has fully confirmed the moral instinct of the ancient Greeks, that national insolence or injustice (üßpic) brings its own severe punishment. The imaginary dialogue which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian and Melian envoys, and the debate in the Athenian Assembly about the punishment of revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same writer describes the break-up of all social morality during the civil war in words which seem to herald the destruction not only of Athens but of Greek freedom. Machiavelli's 'Prince' shows how history can repeat itself, reiterating its lesson that a nation which gives itself to immoral intellectualism is far on the road to disintegration. Seneca's rebuke to his slave-holding countrymen, 'Can you complain that you have been robbed of the liberty which you have yourselves abolished in your own homes?' applies equally to nations which have enslaved or exploited the inhabitants of subject lands. If the Roman Empire had a long and glorious life, it was because its methods were liberal, by the standard of ancient times. In so far as Rome abused her power, she suffered the doom of all tyrants. There are no more Romans now; but the Jews, the victims of Vespasian and Titus, we have always with us. The illusions of imperialism have been made clearer than ever by the course of modern history. Attempts to destroy a nationality by overthrowing its government, proscribing its language, and maltreating its citizens, are never successful. The experiment has been tried with great thoroughness in Poland; and the Poles are now more of a nation than they were under the oppressive feudal system which existed before the partitions. Our own empire would be a ludicrous failure if it were any part of our ambition to Anglicise other races. The only English parts of the empire were waste lands which we have peopled with our own emigrants. We hauled down the French flag in Canada, with the result that Eastern Canada is now the only flourishing French colony, and the only part of the world where the French race increases rapidly. We have helped the Dutch to multiply with almost equal rapidity in South Africa. We have added several millions to the native population of Egypt, and over a hundred millions to the population of India. Similarly, the Americans have made Cuba for the first time a really Spanish island, by driving out its incompetent Spanish governors and so attracting immigrants from Spain. On the whole, in imperialism nothing fails like success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats them well, and 'governs them for their good,' they will multiply faster than their rulers, till they claim their independence. The Englishman now says, 'I am quite content to have it so'; but that is not the old imperialism. The notion that frequent war is a healthy tonic for a nation is scarcely tenable. Its dysgenic effect, by eliminating the strongest and healthiest of the population, while leaving the weaklings at home to be the fathers of the next generation, is no new discovery. It has been supported by a succession of men, such as Tenon, Dufau, Foissac, de Lapouge, and Richet in France; Tiedemann and Seeck in Germany; Guerrini in Italy; Kellogg and Starr Jordan in America. The case is indeed overwhelming. The lives destroyed in war are nearly all males, thus disturbing the sex equilibrium of the population; they are in the prime of life, at the age of greatest fecundity; and they are picked from a list out of which from 30 to 40 per cent. have been rejected for physical unfitness. It seems to be proved that the children born in France during the Napoleonic wars were poor and undersized-30 millimetres below the normal height. War combined with religious celibacy to ruin Spain. Castile makes men and wastes them,' said a Spanish writer. This sublime and terrible phrase sums up the whole of Spanish history.' Schiller was right: 'Immer der Krieg verschlingt die besten.' We in England have suffered from this drain in the past; we shall suffer much more in the next generation. 'We have fed our sea for a thousand years, And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest, To the shark and the sheering gull, Lord God, we ha' paid in full.' Aggressive patriotism is thus condemned by common sense and the verdict of history no less than by morality. We are entitled to say to the militarists what Socrates said to Polus: "This doctrine of yours has now been examined and found wanting. And this doctrine alone has stood the test-that we ought to be more afraid of doing than of suffering wrong; and that the prime business of every man [and nation] is not to seem good but to be good, in all private and public dealings.' If the nations would render something more than lipservice to this principle, the abolition of war would be within sight; for, as Ruskin says, echoing the judgment of the Epistle of St James, 'The first reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European countries, are thieves.' But it must be remembered that, in spite of the proverb, it takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. Our own conversion to pacificism, though sincere, is somewhat recent. Our literature does not reflect it, and we must wince slightly at Mark Twain's good-natured gibe about us. The English are mentioned in the Bible. The meek-spirited shall possess the earth.' Bacon is frankly militarist: 'Above all, for empire and greatness, it importeth most, that a nation do profess arms, as their principal honour, study, and occupation. For the things which we formerly have spoken of are but habilitations towards arms; and what is habilitation without intention and act?... It is so plain that a man profiteth in that he most intendeth, that it needeth not to be stood upon. It is enough to point at it; that no nation, which doth not directly profess arms, may look to have greatness fall into their mouths.' A state, therefore, ought to have those laws or customs, which may reach forth unto them just occasions of war.' Shakespeare's 'Henry V' has been not unreasonably recommended by the Germans as 'good war-reading.' It would be easy to compile a catena of bellicose maxims from our literature, reaching down to the end of the 19th century. The change is perhaps due less to progress in morality than to that political good sense which has again and again steered our ship through dangerous rocks. But there has been some real advance, in all civilised countries. We do not find that men talked about the bankruptcy of Christianity' during the Napoleonic campaigns. Even the Germans think it necessary to tell each other that it was Belgium who began this war. But, though pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with these primitive instincts. It is the subtle blend of noble and ignoble sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the moralist. The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes, that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands for something intrinsically great and valuable. Where this conviction is absent, as in the case of the Huns, we cannot speak of patriotism, but only of the cohesion of a wolf-pack. The Greeks, who at last perished because they could not combine, the victims of a disintegrating intellectualism, had nevertheless a consciousness that they were the trustees of civilisation against barbarism; and in their day of triumph over the Persians they were filled, for a time, with an almost Jewish awe in presence of the righteous judgment of God. The Perse' of Eschylus is one of the noblest of patriotic poems. The Romans, a harder and coarser race, had their ideal of virtus and gravitas, which included simplicity of life, dignity and self-restraint, honesty and industry, and devotion to the state. They rightly felt that these qualities constituted a vocation to empire. There was much harshness and injustice in Roman imperialism; but what nobler epitaph could even the British empire desire than the tribute of Claudian, when the weary Titan was at last stricken and dying: 'Hæc est, in gremium victos quæ sola recepit, |