“Politics are quite simple if one studies the newspapers. I know all the politics of Italy, of France, Germany, England, Argentina, Russia. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Yes, I read the papers, but I do not find our English papers—”
“Perhaps they are not so well edited as ours?”
“That may be the explanation,” I agreed. “They certainly do not state things so clearly and simply as you do.”
“Surely,” he continued, “you do not approve of war?”
I replied that war was a “terrible scourge.”
“It is worse,” said Ivanhoe. “It is a survival of barbarism that men should make a living out of killing each other. War must be abolished.”
“Will not that be rather difficult?” I objected.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Soldiers are the instruments of war. If there were no soldiers there would be no war; just as if there were no mandolines there would be no music. And the money we now pay to the soldiers could then be distributed among the poor—an act pleasing to God and the saints.”
But this did not suit the corporal who, being a coastguard, had no sympathy with cutting down the pay of the army.