But the Bellicist says that discussions of this sort, these attempts to find out the truth, are but the encouragement of pernicious theories:  there is, according to him, but one way—­better rapiers, more and better racks, more and better inquisitions.

Mr. Bonar Law, in one of the very wisest phrases ever pronounced by a statesman, has declared that “war is the failure of human wisdom.”

That is the whole case of Pacifism:  we shall not improve except at the price of using our reason in these matters; of understanding them better.  Surely it is a truism that that is the price of all progress; saner conceptions—­man’s recognition of his mistakes, whether those mistakes take the form of cannibalism, slavery, torture, superstition, tyranny, false laws, or what you will.  The veriest savage, or for that matter the ape, can blindly fight, but whether the animal develops into a man, or the savage into civilized man, depends upon whether the element of reason enters in an increasing degree into the solution of his problems.

The Militarist argues otherwise.  He admits the difficulty comes from man’s small disposition to think; therefore don’t think—­fight.  We fight, he says, because we have insufficient wisdom in these matters; therefore do not let us trouble to get more wisdom or understanding; all we need do is to get better weapons.  I am not misrepresenting him; that is quite fairly the popular line:  it is no use talking about these things or trying to explain them, all that is logic and theories; what you want to do is to get a bigger army or more battleships.  And, of course, the Bellicist on the other side of the frontier says exactly the same thing, and I am still waiting to have explained to me how, therefore, if this matter depends upon understanding, we can ever solve it by neglecting understanding, which the Militarist urges us to do.  Not only does he admit, but pleads, that these things are complex, and supposes that that is an argument why they should not be studied.

And a third distinction will, I think, make the difference between us still clearer.  Like the Bellicist, I am in favour of defence.  If in a duelling society a duellist attacked me, or, as a Huguenot in the Paris of the sixteenth century a Catholic had attacked me, I should certainly have defended myself, and if needs be have killed my aggressor.  But that attitude would not have prevented my doing my small part in the creation of a public opinion which should make duelling or such things as the massacre of St. Bartholomew impossible by showing how unsatisfactory and futile they were; and I should know perfectly well that neither would stop until public opinion had, as the result of education of one kind or another, realised their futility.  But it is as certain as anything can be that the Churchills of that society or of that day would have been vociferous in declaring (as in the case of the duel they still to-day declare in Prussia) that this attempt to prove the futility of duelling was not only a bad and pernicious campaign, but was in reality a subtle attempt to get people killed in the street by bullies, and that those who valued their security would do their best to discredit all anti-duelling propaganda—­by misrepresentation, if needs be.