PART II

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

LECTURE IV

THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]

Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth

across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now

control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher

conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,

and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest

confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and

sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,

arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears

which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the

deed--how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to

truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate

the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?

Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this

aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of

the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,

politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom

or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the

resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,

alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous

surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not

this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries

hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired

to see or imagined they saw.

But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the

purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's

sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it

is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_. What is its

historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the

presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?

Sec. I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative

or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at

Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not

exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the

world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with

the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of

the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the

life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is

pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.

It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever

glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at

issue in the present war?

The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first

event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies

in this force named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous

expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action,

which now as always implies heroic suffering. No other war in our

history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so

exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. Whatever may have been

the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the

motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal

by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has

been prescribed and controlled. But the present war is not merely a

war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.

Thiers' refrain, _digue de l'attention des hommes_; but, like the wars

of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war

between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the

life-history of modern States.

In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom

was arrayed against the principle of authority. The conflict rolled

hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour

and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur,

sublime devotion, or moving pity. So in the war of the French

Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the

principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the

combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia,

Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most

precious memories of mankind.

In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is

between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted. But

in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the

conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often

equally lofty, equally impressive.

Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic

in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the

sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.

There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at

strife--the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which,

for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.

These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile

veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose _denouement_--who dare

foretell? What distant generation shall behold _that_ curtain?

Sec. 2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM

In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as

in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now

name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The empire which

has ceased to advance has begun to recede. Motion is the law of its

being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a

race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is,

Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of

evolution it attains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State

passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or

swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No

great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The

patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the

actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died

for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would

have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he

would have added his great name to imperialism.

The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial

State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has

no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.

The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in

literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century

belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in

Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,

above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four

centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In

the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were

inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the

rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy

into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics

of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these

ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.

Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents

itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,

and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of

1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to

Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.

Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was

a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely

from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great

figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]

The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German

publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of

history that the great _role_ which it has played is transient and

accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards

which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur

of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that

it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.

Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to

trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's

life more auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be

ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State

system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,

not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the

distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the

bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,

made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the

cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of

municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew

the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age. For this,

Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the

stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the

political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,

shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not

from papal, but from imperial Rome.

The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,

of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle

of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as

humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.

Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but

recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other

continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,

and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the

side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.

Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality

and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against

each other. Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,

of which the Nation is the constituent unit. Ancient Hellas presents a

similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but

the City. There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a

conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a

conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic

imperialism. And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert

hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war. The issue

is known.

The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her

empire, was a disaster to humanity. The spring of Athenian energy was

broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of

government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a

ruin. Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the

lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.

A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as

this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.

For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of

Athens or the Rome of the Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the

testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her

confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity. "The earth

is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's

secret, her empire is the highway of nations. That province, that

territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby

redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.

This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between

the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality--in the

Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality--and the vital

principle of the future.

Sec. 3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY

But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less

significant. It is the first great war waged by the completely

constituted democracy of 1884. In the third Reform Bill, as we have

seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their

realization. The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the

fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,

Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,

attain in this Act their consummation and their end. The wars waged by

the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their

constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig

or Tory oligarchies of last century. But in the present conflict a

democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated

by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.

Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared

together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles

and the Islam of Omar.[4]

Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted

purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the

ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.

It was not Clive merely who gained India for England. French

incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought

on our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are those bulletins of

his! After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,

assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"

and so on till Waterloo. His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power

of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but

not for ever. The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the

French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation. The sarcasm,

which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its

edge--"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I

opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is

nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of

unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,

and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. The

march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its

primitive instincts. The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the

visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel

of a cannon on board the _Muiron_.[5] Napoleon was fighting for a dead

ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal--how

should he prosper? Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine

frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon

policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to

Ste Helene. Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made

the return of mediaeval despotism impossible. Dying, he bequeaths

imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of

Faust and Helena. How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism

Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.

The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a

capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism. The "Serrar

del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic

States.

The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to

offer a closer parallel to this of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism,

religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the

Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. Spain fought with grandeur,

heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the

suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour

frustrate and her devotion vain. She warred against the light, and the

enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races

and generations unborn. What criterion of truth, what principle even

of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to

assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting

as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our

fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of

Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods

the methods of Spain. The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for

the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the

triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria? But, it is

urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same

stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In the sense that they are

Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the

characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,

and the Norseman. The best blood of the Teutonic race for six

centuries went to the making of England. At the period when the

Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the

English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the

empire of the future. As for the former clause of the assertion, it is

accurate of no race, no nation. The history of the United Provinces

does not close with John de Witt and William III. Can those critics of

the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,

and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland

in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,

the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and

in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to

Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested

by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of

Amsterdam to Brunswick?

The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and

literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race

to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.

In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious

oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius

in Macedon or in modern France. When that force is withdrawn, there is

an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an

Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies

also. In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have

never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic

self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.

From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh

ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations

of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and

Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.

But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to

the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an

impressive and even tragic significance. For though the stage on which

Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is

not less elevated and serene. A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as

living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the

warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then

through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing

within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the

bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.

But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a

dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad

succeed.

And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and

exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam

of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to

every student of speculative politics at the present hour is--Whither

will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards

some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,

sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically

inexhaustible forces to waste unused?

The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every

region of that empire and from every section of that society of

nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race

towards the present war, are not without deep significance. Now at

last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with

the English race. The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social

environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions,

are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not.

Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the

place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within

his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon--"Our

life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time."

Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast

bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one

hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy,

is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and

of the course which this people will pursue?

Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word

English People has undergone. When Froissart, for instance, in the

fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him

the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black

Prince or de Bohun. The work of the archers at Crecy and Poitiers

extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the

spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included

under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.

Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as

late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks

which it covered in the sixteenth century. Thus when Chatham or Burke

speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like

Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view. And

Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame

Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo. The

Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its

responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the

whole race, is intelligible enough. But in this point the admirers of

the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers

of Pitt than the followers of Chatham. The hazard of enfranchising the

millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British

blood, was a great, a breathless hazard. Might not a mob arise like

that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage

added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making

the guillotine a welcome release?

But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it

is a winning hazard. To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the

Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,

from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in

its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on

fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of

Sidney and Wolfe. Has not the present war given a harvest of

instances? The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death

threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell

message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of

Abraham--"Have we won?" Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,

dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me

aside, men, and go on!" Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and

summoned at great odds to surrender. "Never!" was the brief imperative

response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot

through the heart, he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks,

this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the

enfranchised masses.

Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular

nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,

exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the

self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war

by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their

blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had

sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it

with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!

Sec. 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM

Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within

the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race

are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts

of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved

purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,

disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom,

that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the

past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not

less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic. Such

manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its

extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some

earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising

like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.

But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with

Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now

what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it

is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races.

It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy. It is

the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its

stead. Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6] It is the passion

of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a

Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of

humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning. But

between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm,

a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born

of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is

realized, the gulf is wide. Napoleon knew this. Nothing in history is

more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from

the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated

sovereign, Francis II. All his victories could not purchase him _that_!

Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand

sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the

government, the army, the empire? Or would they have it like the Roman

mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire,

battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and

a circus ticket? Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob

and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space;

but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is

but an ignorant or a transient frenzy. In religion itself have we not

similar variety of expression? Those faces gathered under the trees or

in a public thoroughfare--the expression of emotion there is not that

which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light

falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St.

Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers--but dare

we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?

Sec. 5. MILITARISM

And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite

from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there

is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments

start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil

which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and

more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most

reluctant. Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the

spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for

all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of

a misunderstanding or envious antagonism. Whither is this impulse to

be directed? What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility

of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this

people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes? How shall its

bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from

coalesced foes?

Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole

standpoint from which I have the right--to use a current phrase--to

speak as an expert. First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim

which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen,

the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate

any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history. It

has no foundation in history at all. Nothing in the past justifies the

ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people. Of an

ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not

disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless--who shall assign bounds to its

devotion or determine the limits of its endurance? I go further, I

affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which

England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later

times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at

this crisis--this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think

no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since

the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens--the ministry or cabinet

which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find

that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but

the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of

its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has

marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I maintain,

is the verdict of history upon the matter.

There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an

argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations. Men

point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over

civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from

conscription!" Such arguments have precisely the same value as the

arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the

terror of Jacobinism. We might as well condemn all free institutions

because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its

abuses in other countries. And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or

to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an

appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell. Nor is

there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,

between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of

Sophocles, a military State, attests.

All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into

being. And this ideal of Imperial Britain--to bring to the peoples of

the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher

justice--the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that

for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.

Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage

from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the

just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of

our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have

brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise

which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial

Parliament is to the parliaments of the world--a paragon and an example.

With us the decision rests. If we should decide wrongly--it is not the

loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is

the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the

inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes

of the unborn. Who can confront this unappalled?

[1] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira,

A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina. The

victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed

himself in his divine mission. Mohammed refers to this triumph in

surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of

Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.

[2] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, _Fragmente aus der neuesten

Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa_, Dresden, 1806,

is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the

classic on this subject. It gained him the friendship of Metternich,

and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent

exponent of Austrian principles. But he was sincere. To the charge of

being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with

Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought. The friendship of Rahel and

Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion. Nor is his undying

hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he

translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he

not unsuccessfully imitated. Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at

Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just

long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X.

But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the

strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear. So that

as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task. Napoleon

slept at St. Helena, his child, _le fils de l'homme_, was in a

seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and

Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; _quotusquisque

reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset_? who was there any longer to

remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schoenbrunn? And yet

exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last,

the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833,

announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that

of 1789.

[3] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious

but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when

designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution

of 1789. It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688

possible. The true comparison--if any comparison be possible between

revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though

following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and

character--would be between the Puritan struggle and the first

revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of

James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X. Both Guizot, whose

memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master

Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison--the

latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the

imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the

nation.

[4] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present

work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years

between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.

632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,

A.D. 661. Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality

of Omar made themselves distinctly felt. During the caliphate of Abu

Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the

two pontificates which immediately precede his own. Omar's is the

determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates

of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its

distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of

Islam. The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind

mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of

Sulla or the Athens of Pericles. From the Arab historians a portrait

that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise

with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he

undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his

appearance and manners which tradition has preserved--"He that is

weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have

made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal

with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."

[5] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and

Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same

visionary but mighty designs. In Napoleon's career the voyage on the

frigate _Muiron_ marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from

Gaul, January, 49 B.C. But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the

head of fifty thousand men. Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone. The

best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, the "Roland"

of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessieres, Marmont, Lavalette, but

to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of

Kleber and the army of the Pyramids. The adventure appears more

desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited

Napoleon at Paris. Moreau was no Pompey. The sequence of dates is

interesting. On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on

board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he

reached Ajaccio; on October 9th he lands at Frejus, on the 16th he is

at Paris, and resumes his residence in rue de la Victoire. Three weeks

later, on November 9th, occurs the incident known to history as 18th

Brumaire.

[6] The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even the

antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism. Rome, Hellas,

Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern to a _more

excellent_ degree than other States--Imperialism is the realization of

this power. Cosmopolitanism's _laissez-faire_ is anarchism or it is

the betrayal of humanity.

LECTURE V

WHAT IS WAR?

[_Tuesday, June_ 12_th_, 1900]

Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the

political development of the national as of the civic State, and that

to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the

future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be

described as democratic displays itself--a mode which in human history

is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with

consequences memorable to all time--the problem meets us, will this

form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war

not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a

State? Even a partial solution of this problem requires a

consideration of the question "What is War?"

Sec. 1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY

The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as

the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or

from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the

tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of

Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the

limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as

just or unjust. But another aspect of the question concerns us

here--What is War in itself and by itself? And what is its place in

the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity,

distinct from the unities which compose it? Is war a fixed or a

transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent,

does its relation to the world-force admit of description and

definition?

If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive

at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part

which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical

enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives,

impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history,

the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which

humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another

shape--whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a

State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to

the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the

Highest Good?

Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the

conflict of two ideals. The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a

cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a

profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of

Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the

ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which

Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest

trilogies.[1] The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent

gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and

ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage

to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least

details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that

of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and

Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records

were to perish. _Qui habet tenam habet bellum_ is but a half-truth.

No war was ever waged for material ends only. Territory is a trophy of

battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political

genius, the imagination of the race. One of the profoundest of modern

investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the

attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by

which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2]

The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops

the latent qualities of a race. The restless and melancholy surge, the

wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of

the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab. Not the cry of

"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by

the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,

spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the

marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary

homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of

Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming. To

the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the

transforming power of a new ideal. The cry "_Deus vult!_" at Clermont

marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of

Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and

Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the

war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the

troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the

crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or

of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.

The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as

an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and

results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that

indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus

affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour--"Subit quippe etiam

ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."

The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,

reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the

consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic

kindred, amongst the nations of the earth. If ever there were a race

which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the

Hebrew. They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than

Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their

retreat by day and by night ceaselessly. Every battle is a Lake

Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that

nerves the right arm of his faithful. The forms of Gideon and Joshua,

though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of

their race--Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna.

The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant

for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of

unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas

Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the

"Marseillaise," appear of no account--the _Al Naharoth Babel_--"Let my

sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"--passing from the

mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a

rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when

baulked of their God-appointed fate. Yet on the shores of the Western

Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they

found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and

Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.

Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but

even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of

thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the

character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which

marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the

certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he

has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua

of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in

no lust for territory that these wars originate.

In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war

occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies

in the Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the

pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit

of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics,

regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against

the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is

divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the

life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness

in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which

cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.

"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State

which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave." Aristotle

does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the

sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is

incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to

freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that

belongs to peace can never come. Courage, Plato defines as "the

knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not

fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the

unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that

end is manifest. This ideal element, this formative principle,

underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from

its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean

League--from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as

the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos

by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last

bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus. It requires a

steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of

Greeks against Greeks--Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and

Macedon--and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this

consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to

resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous

fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of

Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.

Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's

nature it is superfluous to speak. As in statesmanship, so in war, he

who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and

thinks that all is said. The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as

an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the

race that bore it to victory and world-dominion. History by fate or

chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius. The

silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of

the _Labarum_ by Constantine heralded its decline. With the emblem of

humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the

centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its

ancient valour--as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and

Zimisces[4]--bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman

legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the

ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the

Bosphorus.

Sec. 2. DEFINITION OF WAR

To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without

deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element

in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the

present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment

of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny

and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the

immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the

destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing

relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly

reveals itself.

War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the

State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus,

the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment.

Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life,

whether of the conquering or of the conquered State. War is thus a

manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and

awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man. It is an action

radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies,

+agoniai+, conflicts, of all life. "In this theatre of a world," as

Calderon avers, "all are actors, _todos son representantes_." There

too the State enacts its tragedy. Nation, city, or empire, it too is a

_representante_. Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the

Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the

stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal. A

war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State

analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's

phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of

the Summoner. The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is

content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny,

and swerve not from its being's law. Not to be envied is that man who,

in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an

organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God! God is the God of

all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the

forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk. A mockery? That

cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which

is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in

the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even

through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through

the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher

freedom!"--is this a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War

so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,

regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or

human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living

and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide

earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which

they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come

after them. They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of

achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown. Fortunate!

And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject

unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so

glorious a shape!"

Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in

poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human

heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony

to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence

for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.

Sec. 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR

Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,

to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their

condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.

Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern

mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth

century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of

Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in

the great days of Louis XV. In the gray and neutral region where the

spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as

soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke

the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to

Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined

limits of Greater Britain. Of no other living writer can this be said.

Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so

instantly a universal hearing.

How then does Tolstoi regard War? For on this high matter the judgment

of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his

writings, even from _The Cossacks_, through such a masterpiece as _War

and Peace_, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his

latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his

thought reveals itself--gradually increasing vehemence in the

expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of

oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by

God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence

turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision. This general

impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and

characters. Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say

the Borodino, to describe? That which rivets his attention, absorbs

his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even

of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle

itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such

spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched

countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their

own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the

hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated

limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death. Has he the

enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I? In Napoleon, who in the

sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere

of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbe de

Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without

greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace,

shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming

myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning

of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with

which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat. And the

campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola,

Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig,

Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of

happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark,

unthinking force resident in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's

conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the

Semitic--its crowning glory in war.

Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a

visionary, not less great than Tolstoi--Carlyle. Like Tolstoi, Carlyle

is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew

prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast

between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's

decrees, it is meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?

His work is the witness. After the brief period of Goethe-worship,

from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not

monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his

work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,

and the mystery of war. One flame-picture after another sets this

principle forth. What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of

Tolstoi! Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of

the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes. These represent

Carlyle in the flush of manhood. His fiftieth year ushers in the

battle-pictures of the Civil War--Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,

when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation. The greatest

epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of _Frederick_, is

also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings. And

finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the

last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness

of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,

Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king. In the last sea-fight of Olaf

there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the

same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when

he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since the heroic age there are no such

battle-pictures as these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs

within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of _Beowulf_ and

the _Song of Roland_, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a

sun. The breath that blows through the _Iliad_ stirs the pages of

_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick_; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,

Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of

modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the

combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.

Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not

less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the

Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes

this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the

circumstance of war? To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as

to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme

expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic

hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such. To Carlyle

war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence

in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is

that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above--a

race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon

the fortunes of the stricken field! Carlyle, as his writings, as his

recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the

pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but

are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled

limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day

after Borodino? The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the

battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker

which discovers the united agony. It was a profounder vision, a wider

outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to

that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi--the

pathological. And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been

loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as

his fathers before him have done. Tolstoi has no system to crown, like

Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of

universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content. Whither then

shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?

Sec. 4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS

Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a

characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays

itself. The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a

native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every

epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan

of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider

than Voltaire's--Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval

Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of

France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr.

Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a _Catiline_, and in later life

seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the _Emperor and

Galilean_, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi

begins, and in Russia he ends. As volume after volume proceeds from

his prolific pen--essays, treatises theological or social, tales,

novels, diaries, or confessions--all alike are Russian in scenery,

Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their

aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs. Nowhere is there a trace

of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured

Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour. In this he but resembles the Russian

writers from Krilov to the present day. It is equally true of Gogol,

of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.

If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at

Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene

Pavlovna unfolds itself. Thus confined in his range, and in his

inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker,

springs straight from the heart of the race itself. When therefore

Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the

judgment of the race. In his conception of war the force of the

Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius. Capacity

in a race for war is distinct from valour. Amongst the Aryan peoples,

the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life

unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war

sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the

other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for

the realization of a great political ideal. Thus the history of the

two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads

like the history of Ireland. It is studded with combats, but there is

no war. The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the

Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis. And three

centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the

charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius.

Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and

has no intelligible end. And the noblest figure in Czech history,

George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[7] has etched with

laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a

warrior.

Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic

resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs. His sombre

courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace. Eyiau and

Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of

his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,

illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in

defence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an

instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal. War has

served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the

aspirations of his race. Conceived as the effort within the life of

the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.

He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or

for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive

ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never

used it. Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the

Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan

IV, and his successors, attests this. The Don Cossacks destroy the

last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from

the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of

Ginghis. The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of

Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable

conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.

The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics

which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting. Indeed

the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,

derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable

languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political

indifferentism. Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,

is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked

the Slav throughout history. Catherine the Great felt this. Its

spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that

now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the

fanaticism of the Moslem." The impressive designs of Nicholas I left

the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which

has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a

pseudo-Machiavellianism. It does not originate, like the policy which

a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described

or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all

must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the

_camerilla_ which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind

it. Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the

race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and

false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of

_Valerie_, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the

noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[8]

Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history

throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war. The government

perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who,

unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance

not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual

or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic

people. Therefore he will not die in exile. The bigotry of a priest

may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government,

instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III,

will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan

Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.

Sec. 5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR

There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the

writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to

which I must allude briefly. There are many men within these islands,

if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England

in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague

consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi

declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ.

This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence,

more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may

have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have

now to offer.

First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the

past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most

religious amongst the divisions of those races--the Hebrews, the

Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii--have been the most

warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends. This fact

is significant, because war, like religion and like language,

represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.

In a work of art, the _Phaedrus_ of Plato or the _Bacchus and Ariadne_

of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,

sovereign and despotic. But as a language represents the happy moments

of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit

sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and

to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of

desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion

the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of

generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity

in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the

action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race. Religion

incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,

the _will_, of a race. Reflecting then on the part which war has

played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those

States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient

features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as

opposed to religion in general?

Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is

remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the

faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled _My Religion_ has

thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as

distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have

perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual

utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one

syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State

and State. The _locus classicus_, "All that take the sword," etc., is

aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost

range against civic revolt. It is only by wrenching the words from

their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to

the relations of one State to another. The organic unity, named a

State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a

mere aggregate of those units. If there is a lesson which history

enforces it is this lesson. And upon the laws which regulate those

unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word. The violence of

faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his

utterances. Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning

rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the

_Internationale_, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to

Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in

His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their

fantasies. But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the

politics of State and State. Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in

His utterances, but not politics. His solitary reference to war as

such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it

into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war. And the peace upon

which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity

of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing. It is the peace on

which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises

within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,

of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the

battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep

and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert

beneath the midnight stars. Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his

extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the

same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who

compose the State. And of such a war as this in which Britain is now

engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which

in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger

freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but

the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being

without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen

the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State--who

shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is

contrary to the teachings of Galilee?

Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of

religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other

means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the

establishment of the empire of perpetual peace. The advent of this new

era, it is announced, is at hand.

Sec. 6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

Now the origins of this ideal are clear. It is ancient as life, and

before man was, it was. It is the transference to the sphere of States

of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the

soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal

leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in

death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the _theoria_ of

eternity. The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and

Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation

of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in

the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.

Will War then never cease? Will universal peace be for ever but a

dream? Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the

forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the

crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages

the imagination of a race, is instructive.

In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in

the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster.

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth

good tidings, that publisheth peace!" In this and in other splendid

pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal

in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested!

In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted! But

it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of

yet. It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and

beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being,

inviolate of Time. Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the

world, centres in Judaea--in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the

overthrow of all its adversaries.

Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if

peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the

fountain from which it must flow. It is an imperial peace bounded by

Hellenic civilization, culture, laws. It is a peace forged upon war.

Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.

Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces. For my

brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within

thee.'" Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a

Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her

dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the

dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the

world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the

revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of

those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause

is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her

history is its great comment.

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not

less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither

Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,

stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than

the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the

Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and

then only shall the Holy War end.

The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity

of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending. And

Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all

his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of

an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims

fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen

music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things

human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian

age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but

the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the

proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's

respite to a war-fatigued world.

Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the

Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval

Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_. This "Truce of God" was a

decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain

sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against

another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval

equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of

Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support

than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,

giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever

received. And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace

is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[9] This is

conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three

centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the

desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.

This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona,

where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that

never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to

bear the crusaders to Palestine--yet there were neither armies nor

ships, it was but the fever of his dream.

During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded. The

wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds. "I am

not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." Luther, for instance,

declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the

ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the

Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it

became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish

Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes. As

Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the

Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the

position of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, _De Jure

Belli ac Pacis_, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is

altogether set aside. War is accepted as existent between nation and

nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate

it. Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of

Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its

conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions

which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost

observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated. But the

treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the

method of his contemporary, Verulam--the method of the science of the

future.

In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable

enthusiast, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression

upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.

Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the

same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.

It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the

Encyclopedie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording

the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless

paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history

arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's

History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed

the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his

impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory

of France.[11]

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over

the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.

This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"

This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of

Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking

out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest

yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our

race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years

ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once

more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till

six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent

conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of

the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth

century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of

comment.

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of

Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all

in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or

Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still

in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil

strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments

of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in

Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the

wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugene, and of

Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,

the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the

leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the

other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great

thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely

the phantom of their logic, an _eidolon specus_ created by their

system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or

desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all

life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.

Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life

is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal

Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a

manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as

such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great

wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the

Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are

ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life

realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of

Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic

nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,

the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic

of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something

of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,

mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across

the abysses and orbits of the worlds.

What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and

the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born

from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded

struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of

transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple,

the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,

the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,

is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment

of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a

loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the

idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this

_agonia_ increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest

peace dwells.

The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region

of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.

Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_,

are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?

And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is

one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by

conflict? In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed

of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each

penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent

_nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic

all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as

it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and

have an end! War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,

there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler

causes--but cease? How shall it cease?

Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a

dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has

crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,

start from their orbits.

Sec. 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR

If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be

asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this

of Imperial Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, be

somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and exalt the character of

war. Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of

the present lie deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State the

ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to

the life of the present. From the earliest tribal forays, slowly

broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to

the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle

links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of

empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this

ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity

of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,

manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the

'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes

of a Cerdic or an Uffa. For the State which by conquest or submission

is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law

of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in

the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now

forms a constituent and organic part. And looming already on the

horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to

purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have

greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal

kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.

Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the

action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the

attributes at once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when M. Bloch and

similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its

pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting

from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of

death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what

end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past? For the

sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless

powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These

are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the

sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all

untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at

Eyiau or at Gravelotte? Let but the cause be high, and men will find

means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no

other! And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its

inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced. The battlefield

is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can

contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent. "The

drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it

deadens thought." But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.

Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in

upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly. Fighting for

ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,

knowing in his heart that they may never be at all. Courage and

self-renunciation have attained their height.

Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare

turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and

self-directing energy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer

that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever

did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois. Another genius and

another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to

celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism

less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.

Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death

and the hour of his birth. Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.

In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?

That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the

stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present

onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he

has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the

nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. Made

strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full

splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the

battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering

the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and

various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to

nature's day. And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have

been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the

least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread

pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks

by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of

the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry

"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is

lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the

poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes

approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.