But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my object.  I will not dwell any longer—­though perhaps I may return to them one day—­upon the lessons which we might derive from that Peloponnesian War, in which the position of Athens towards Lacedaemon provides more than one point of comparison with that of France towards Germany.  True, we do not there see, as in our own case, civilized nations fighting a morally barbarian people:  it was a contest between Greeks and Greeks, displaying however in the same physical race two different and incompatible spirits.  Athens stood for human life in its happiest development, gracious, cheerful and peaceful.  She took no serious interest except in the happiness, the imponderous riches, the innocent and perfect beauties, the sweet leisures, the glories and the arts of peace.  When she went to war, it was as though in play, with the smile still on her face, looking upon it as a more violent pleasure than the rest, or as a duty joyfully accepted.  She bound herself down to no discipline, she was never ready, she improvised everything at the last moment, having, as Pericles said, “with habits not of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature, the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardship in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them."[5]

For Sparta, on the other hand, life was nothing but endless work, an incessant strain, having no other objective than war.  She was gloomy, austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that excuses man’s presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters, incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees, a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty, if it can be man’s ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of unrelenting discipline.  On the other hand, she differed entirely from those whom we are now fighting in that she was generally honest, loyal and upright and showed a certain respect for the gods and their temples, for treaties and for international law.  It is none the less true that, if she had from the beginning reigned alone or without encountering a long resistance, Hellas would never have been the Hellas that we know.  She would have left in history but a precarious trace of useless warlike virtues and of minor combats without glory; and mankind would not have possessed that centre of light towards which it turns to this day.

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