You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that war “ennobles,” and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—­such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure.  In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life “degenerate.”  But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living.

The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did not understand.  The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa.  The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist “culture” over civilization.  This easy belief of the dull and violent that war “braces” comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace.  This type of person will keep on with war if it can.  It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the world.

This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military type is by no means confined to it.  More or less it is in all of us.  In England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than among sedentary learned men.  In Germany, too, the more uncompromising and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the professors.  Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable.  To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.

Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological.  Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid’s melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life.  And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts.  A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional militarists.  Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of both Froude and Carlyle.  It would probably have saved the world from the vituperation of the Hebrew prophets—­those models for infinite mischief.