"Tolstoy, as well as Shaw, wants to reform the abuses of civilisation. In order to do so they combat with all their might the most powerful purifier and reformer of men,—War. Can anything be more ludicrous, and unscientific?
"Who gave the modern Germans that incomparable dash and élan, thanks to which they have in one generation quadrupled their commerce, doubled their population, quintupled their wealth, and ensured their supremacy on the Continent?
"Was it done by their thinkers and scholars? The greatest of these died before 1870.
"Was it done by getting into possession of the mouth of the Rhine, or of the access to the Danish Sounds, which formerly debarred them from the sea? They do not possess the mouth of the Rhine, nor Denmark to the present day.
"Nothing has changed in the material or intellectual world making the Germany of to-day more advantageous for commerce or power than it had been formerly.
"Except the victorious wars of 1866 and of 1870.
"Can such an evident connection of fact be overlooked? And would Russia have introduced the Duma without the battle of Mukden? It is waste of time even for the immortals to press this point much longer.
"As in this case, so in nearly all the other cases, Cynics revile abuses the sole remedies for which they violently combat. In their negative attacks they brandish the keenest edges of the swords, daggers and pins of Logic; in their positive advices they browbeat every person in the household of logical thought.
"Yet, worthless, or very nearly so, as they may be as teachers of truth, they are powerful as writers of pamphlets. For this is what their literature comes to. They do not write dramas, nor novels. They can do neither the one, nor the other. But they write effective pamphlets in the apparent form of dramas and novels.
"They are pamphleteers, and not men of letters.