But let me explain myself:  this is a novel view to you, and you are perhaps unable to conceive how or why war was so fatal to the old world, because you see how little harmful it is to the new.  If you collected in a promiscuous way a few millions of modern Englishmen and slew them all simultaneously, what, think you, would be the effect from the point of view of the State?  The effect, I conceive, would be indefinitely small, wonderfully transitory; there would, of course, be a momentary lacuna in the boiling surge:  yet the womb of humanity is full of sap, and uberant; Ocean-tide, wooed of that Ilithyia whose breasts are many, would flow on, and the void would soon be filled.  But the effect would only be thus insignificant, if, as I said, your millions were taken promiscuously (as in the modern army), not if they were picked men——­in that case the loss (or gain) would be excessive, and permanent for all time.  Now, the war-hosts of the ancient commonwealths—­not dependent on the mechanical contrivances of the modern army—­were necessarily composed of the very best men:  the strong-boned, the heart-stout, the sound in wind and limb.  Under these conditions the State shuddered through all her frame, thrilled adown every filament, at the death of a single one of her sons in the field.  As only the feeble, the aged, bided at home, their number after each battle became larger in proportion to the whole than before.  Thus the nation, more and more, with ever-increasing rapidity, declined in bodily, and of course spiritual, quality, until the end was reached, and Nature swallowed up the weaklings whole; and thus war, which to the modern state is at worst the blockhead and indecent affaires d’honneur of persons in office—­and which, surely, before you and I die will cease altogether—­was to the ancient a genuine and remorselessly fatal scourge.

’And now let me apply these facts to the Europe of our own time.  We no longer have world-serious war—­but in its place we have a scourge, the effect of which on the modern state is precisely the same as the effect of war on the ancient, only,—­in the end,—­far more destructive, far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting.  The name of this pestilence is Medical Science.  Yes, it is most true, shudder —­shudder—­as you will!  Man’s best friend turns to an asp in his bosom to sting him to the basest of deaths.  The devastating growth of medical, and especially surgical, science—­that, if you like, for us all, is “the question of the hour!” And what a question! of what surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other “questions” whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality.  For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children.  The net result is in each case the same—­the altered ratio of the total amount