[93] I mean by credit all the mechanism of exchange which replaces the actual use or metal, or notes representing it.
[94] Lecky ("Rationalism in Europe," p. 76) says: "Protestantism could not possibly have existed without a general diffusion of the Bible, and that diffusion was impossible until after the two inventions of paper and printing.... Before those inventions, pictures and material images were the chief means of religious instruction." And thus religious belief became necessarily material, crude, anthropomorphic.
[95] "Battles are no longer the spectacular heroics of the past. The army of to-day and to-morrow is a sombre gigantic machine devoid of melodramatic heroics ... a machine that it requires years to form in separate parts, years to assemble them together, and other years to make them work smoothly and irresistibly" (Homer Lea in "The Valor of Ignorance," p. 49).
[96] General von Bernhardi, in his work on cavalry, deals with this very question of the bad influence on tactics of the "pomp of war," which he admits must disappear, adding very wisely: "The spirit of tradition consists not in the retention of antiquated forms, but in acting in that spirit which in the past led to such glorious success." The plea for the retention of the soldier because of his "spirit" could not be more neatly disposed of. See p. 111 of the English edition of Bernhardi's work (Hugh Rees, London).
[97] See quotations, pp. 161-166.
[98] The following letter to the Manchester Guardian, which appeared at the time of the Boer War, is worth reproduction in this connection:
"Sir,—I see that 'The Church's Duty in regard to War' is to be discussed at the Church Congress. This is right. For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character; that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts; makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one Bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'—almost a form of worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words. This one must not, surely cannot, so straight is the way to the goal. It has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for war in our time, and to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer-Book by which even the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it. Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone; nor do I say with some that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' or to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for war—remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan."
[99] Captain March Phillips, "With Remington." Methuen. See pp. 259-60 for Mr. Blatchford's confirmation of this verdict.
[100] And here as to the officers—again not from me but from a very Imperialist and militarist quarter—the London Spectator (November 25, 1911), says: "Soldiers might be supposed to be free from pettiness because they are men of action. But we all know that there is no profession in which the leaders are more depreciated by one another than in the profession of arms."
[101] Professor William James says: "Greek history is a panorama of war for war's sake ... of the utter ruin of a civilization which in intellectual respects was perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen. The wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement were their only motives."—McClure's Magazine, August, 1910.