souls, and the arrogant social legislation of a secret and self-appointed Cabal or Cabinet, which refuses even to consult the wishes of that half of the population which social restrictions touch most nearly.  If general military service would tend to increase respect and obedience to external authority of this kind, it might be too big a price to pay for all its other advantages.  And I do think it would tend to increase that abhorrent virtue of indiscriminate obedience.  Put a man in uniform, and ten to one he will shoot his mother, if you order him.  Yet the shame of our present enlistment by hunger is so overwhelming that I confess I still hesitate between the two systems, if we must assume that the continuance of war is inevitable, or to be desired.

Is it inevitable?  Is it to be desired?  If it were dying out in the world, should we make efforts to preserve war artificially, as we preserve sport, which would die out unless we maintained it at great expense?  The sportsman is an amateur butcher—­a butcher for love.  Ought we to maintain soldiers for love—­for fear of losing the advantages of war?  Those advantages are thought considerable.  War has inspired much art and much literature.  It is the background or foreground in nearly all history; it sheds a gleam of uniforms and romance upon a drab world; it delivers us from the horrors of peace—­the softness, the monotony, the sensual corruption, the enfeebling relaxation.  No one desires a population slack of nerve, soft of body, cruel through fear of pain, and incapable of endurance or high endeavour.

“It is a calumny on men,” said Carlyle, “to say they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense in this world or the next.  Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man."[21]

At times war appears as a kind of Last Judgment, sentencing folly and sensuality to hell.  The shame of France was consumed by the fire of 1870, and her true genius was restored.  Abominable as the Boer War was, the mind of England was less pestilential after it than before.  Passion purifies, and surely there can be no passion stronger than one which drives you to kill or die.

The trouble is that, in modern wars, passion does not drive you, but you drive someone else, who probably feels no passion at all.  It is thought a reproach against an unwarlike soldier that “he has never seen a shot fired in anger.”  But in these days he might have been through many battles without seeing a shot fired in anger.  Except in the Balkans, few fire in anger now.  What passion can an unemployed workman feel when he is firing at an invisible unemployed workman or semi-savage in the interest of a mining concession?  Nor is it true that war in these days encourages eugenics by promoting the survival of the fittest.  On the contrary, the fittest, the bravest, and the biggest are the most likely to be killed.  The smallest,